The Search for the Free Use of One’s Own
§42. Hesitant awe before the transition onto “slow footbridges”
To be able to make free use of one’s ownmost, to first of all be capable of learning the free use of one’s own, admittedly requires a confrontation with the foreign. Spirit must therefore venture into the foreign, not to get lost there and fail to attain what belongs to the fatherland, but presumably to make itself ready and strong in the foreign for what is its own, for this will not let itself be appropriated by a sudden assault upon what is supposedly one’s own. One’s own does not let itself be attained by a violent and at the same time compulsive commandeering of one’s own kind, as though the latter could be identified like some scientifically ascertainable fact. One’s own does not let itself be proclaimed like a dogma whose stipulations can be enacted in accordance with some prescription. One’s own is what is most difficult to find, and therefore easiest to miss. This happened even to the Greeks (IV, 264):
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.
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.
That which is most difficult to find, as is one’s own and nearest, must be sought for the longest time, and so long as it is being sought, it is never lost. All rushed and overhasty seeking is not seeking, but rather only a confused and errant wandering from one thing to another. To seeking there belongs the steadfast pause for reflection. Reflection is like awe’s catching its breath before an anticipated miracle. Genuine seeking is a steadfast hesitating. Not the hesitation of one who is merely clueless and indecisive, but rather the hesitation of one who tarries long, who looks back and looks ahead, because he is seeking and tarries within the transition. The finding and appropriation of one’s own is one with the hesitancy of transition.
Named together with one’s own, with the “lulling breezes heavy with golden dreams,” are the “slow footbridges.” Footbridges are the inconspicuous bridges; so inconspicuous because they belong to that between which they are a transition. The footbridge is almost as though it has originated together with moss and reeds, with alders and birch trees, with brook and rocks. Footbridges, in their inconspicuousness and origination, are at the same time narrow bridges, only ever for the few individuals who have come to be at home amid the inconspicuous and that which emerges in an inceptual manner. The slow footbridges and the lulling breezes are not two separate things within some random landscape. The breezes draw over across slow footbridges, and the footbridges form the transition simply and decisively in the drawing of the breezes.
The span of these bridges appears to be lacking, since, after all, they lead straight and level from one bank to another. Yet their span is not lacking. It is merely concealed and higher than the span of any broad and sweeping bridge that anyone and all the masses can hasten over. The height of the footbridges’ span is determined in terms of the height of the drawing breezes, in terms of the essentialness of the golden freight that they carry.
Hesitant awe is proper to the holidays that precede the festival. Hesitation and awe are necessary for every festival and in every transition.[13]
In the consummation of the greeting there stands the word concerning the “slow footbridges,” not only because the festival that was once in the land of Greece is being greeted, but also because this greeting itself is intrinsically transition. The poet’s own saying, his poetizing and being a poet, must go over a footbridge; indeed, it is itself only a slow footbridge. “Only”—that does not mean limitation, but rather the fullness of the singular and simple that can be none other than beyng itself, which here in the poetizing unveils its truth as it conceals it.
We experience something of this footbridge if, in the poem “Remembrance,” we accomplish the transition from the first two strophes, which have now been elucidated, to the third and following strophes.
Pindar’s word concerning the human being, found in one of his late odes, was meant to prod us in the direction in which we must think the essence of the dream and the dreamlike. In doing so, we leave aside all psychological and physiological explanations, for these necessarily grope in the dark if the kind of being pertaining to what is dreamt and dreamlike has not been clarified beforehand. This can happen, however, only by our contrasting the kind of being pertaining to the dreamlike with those beings that are more familiar to us. Keeping with the manner of thinking belonging to modernity, we call these familiar beings the real. Measured by them, the dreamlike is what is merely unreal and null.
If, however, we think through in a Greek manner Pindar’s word concerning the human being, that, as a creature of the everyday, he is 
, a shadow’s dream, then we come to recognize that what is dreamlike is also a way of presencing, that is, of being, one that is proper to it—namely, the presencing of absencing, of shadow, which for its part already rests in an absencing of that which illuminates. Even that which is absent, more clearly, that which prevails as away, comes forth into presence. What is dreamlike, therefore, because it comes to presence, is not straightforwardly the unreal as opposed to the real.
Conversely, however, it is also the case that that which presences prevails as away, and so what is real juts into the unreal. If the real and actual is that which has been effected by an effecting, and effecting is a coming to be, then this entails an away-from-something in moving-toward-something. There is no such thing at all as something merely real and actual taken by itself. Everything actual juts into the possible, whether this now signifies the not yet actual or the no longer actual. Such jutting into the possible belongs to actuality itself and is not, for instance, some addition that is added on to what is otherwise already actual. Precisely this “otherwise already actual” does not exist. What emerges from this is the following: even if we measure the dreamlike according to the actual, this can take place only in such a way that we think the actual in its full actuality, and thus take into account its essential character of possibility. But if the dreamlike is something unreal, nonactual, what then—does it not then belong to the actual? Is not what emerges from this the directive to think the dreamlike in terms of the unreal or nonactual in its relation to the “real” or “actual”? In the fragment of Hölderlin’s treatise “Becoming in Dissolution,” we come upon connections that shed light on the essence of the dreamlike, insofar as it is thought as unreal, and that means, as something possible:
[in] the state between beyng and nonbeyng [i.e., in the transition, therefore], however, the possible everywhere becomes real, and the actual ideal, and this, in the free imitation of art, is a terrifying, yet divine dream.
Here the dream is named in connection with a depiction of what is essential regarding history, and that is its transitions. The possible is here thought in its actualization, namely, in such a way that what was hitherto actual becomes ideal and presences in recollection. The dream and dreams are something that comes, and not just any random coming thing, but that which deactualizes what was hitherto actual. What thus essentially comes toward the human being is the dreamlike aspect of a dreaming that does not lose itself in the indeterminate randomness of the unreal. The dreaming of what is thus dreamlike must look ahead toward the possible in its becoming real and must say this as such in advance, and thus also tell it beforehand (πρόφημι, προφητ∊ύ∊ιν).
Plato, in his dialogue concerning the beautiful (the Phaedrus), speaks of the μανία προφητ∊ύουσα—of the rapture that tells in advance of that which is not yet fully present. In Hölderlin’s late poem “Ripe, bathed in fire . . .” we read (IV, 71):
Reif sind, in Feuer getaucht, gekochet
Die Frücht und auf der Erde geprüfet und ein Gesez ist
Dass alles hineingeht, Schlangen gleich,
Prophetisch, träumend auf
Den Hügeln des Himmels.
Ripe, bathed in fire, cooked
The fruits and tested on Earth and it is a law
That everything goes in, like serpents,
Prophetically, dreaming upon
The hills of the heavens.
Even if we do not yet understand the slightest thing about these lines, the inner connection between dreaming and the prophetic, between that which is dreamlike and that which is coming, is nevertheless unequivocal. What is thus dreamlike, however, is more real than the commonplace real of everyday use and employment by creatures of the day.
These dreams are therefore called golden, that is, rich, heavy, and replete with “beings” to come, and, because they are coming, illuminating and noble in their radiant glow, that is, essencing within themselves and not requiring what is commonplace.
That which essentially comes and comes toward us can never be reached in a so-called intervention. In the realm of what is essential concerning history, that is, concerning transitions, every “intervention” is a failed intervention, because it destroys what is coming in its coming and drags the possible into something presumedly and contingently actual and real. In the realm of the essential, the human being can never “make” history, no more than can the God. Each of them only ever make their contrivances and their attendant contrivers. To the latter belong in the first instance the intriguers of an ecclesiastical order, because they exploit what is purportedly holy in the service of their own aspirations of power.
The transition accomplishes itself here only in the slowness of hesitant awe in the face of what cannot be made. In the blowing of the breezes heavy with golden dreams, the slow footbridges are the inconspicuous, narrow bridges, originally grown and yet reserved only for a few individuals. These bridges, the footbridges, indeed seem to lack span, since they lead straight and level from one bank to another. Yet their span is not lacking. It is merely concealed to the habitual eye and foot. It is higher than the span of any broad, sweeping bridge can ever be that anyone can hurry over at any time in whatever kind of haste. The height of the footbridges’ span is determined in terms of the height and supreme height of the breezes drawing over them, and that is, at the same time, in terms of the gold of the dreams.
The poet’s greeting, which is consummated with the end of the second strophe, itself belongs to a transition. The footbridge goes from the end of the second strophe to the beginning of the third strophe.
The transition between strophes indeed seems merely to keep to the externalities of poetic form. In the interim, however, we intimate something of what is poetized in the first two strophes. The southern land and the native homeland of the poet, Greece and Germania, reveal their hidden relation. This relation is not exhausted by relations of a spiritual history of the two “cultures” that can be historiographically narrated. The relation itself grounds itself in the word of a poetic founding. The “fire of the south” and the “barren north” (from the elegy “The Wanderer”) do not here designate “types” of lands and peoples that lie present before us, and that can simply be played off against one another in comparative historiographical perspectives. Greece and Germania name the banks and sides of a transition. Because the transition shelters within it the becoming real of the one as the becoming ideal of the other, the transitional telling must also therefore correspond to that which is to be told here. Insofar as the becoming ideal of what was previously actual, and the latter as what once was, must be said in the intimacy of its essence, this telling can only be a greeting.
From where does the poet greet? From his native homeland. Its essence is called “Germania.” Here is the other side, to which the poet has already transitioned. Here, everything is different. One’s own is something other than that of the Greeks. The foreign, too, is something other; the manner of learning to freely use what is one’s own is likewise other. Here, what is most difficult is other, and it can neither be alleviated nor indeed removed through any kind of rebirth of antiquity, through any “Renaissances”; it cannot be found historiographically at all. The essential historical decision in relation to the land of Greece, that is, with regard to its festivals, has been made. The poet has clearly announced it in the hymn “Germania,” which was composed three years before “Remembrance.” Almost abruptly and free of any concern with escapes or middle courses, decided with respect to need and to bearing the need, the hymn “Germania” begins (IV, 181):
Nicht sie, die Seeligen, die erschienen sind,
Die Götterbilder in dem alten Lande,
Sie darf ich ja nicht rufen mehr, . . .
Not those, the blessed ones who once appeared,
Divine images in the land of old,
Those, indeed, I may call no longer, . . .
The poet presumably still greets those who once have been, but he is no longer permitted to call them, and that means, to await them as those who are to come to the festival and can play a role in determining the festival. Yet by the very fact of the poet’s saying that he is no longer permitted to call those who once appeared, who once have been, he indeed says precisely that he is a caller. He speaks out of an awaiting, even if this awaiting is as yet without fulfillment, and indeed even without immediate prospect of any fulfillment, and is more a being deprived, a being abandoned and in need. Yet even if it is plaint and mourning, a joy speaks within it, and from the unity of both, the fundamental attunement for the festival, the awaiting of the festive, and that is, of the holy. The guardian and custodian of the fundamental attunement, the heart, is “the holy mourning one.” This is why, at the beginning of the hymn “Germania,” the poet continues:
wenn aber
Ihr heimatlichen Wasser! jezt mit euch
Des Herzens Liebe klagt, was will es anders
Das Heiligtrauernde?
yet if
You waters of the homeland! now with you
The heart’s love has plaint, what else does it want,
The holy mourning one?
What else does it want but to name the holy, yet the holy in its own fatherland, in which the poet now remains behind, enduring the northeasterly and the sharpness of its cool clarity? Now he must give up the attempt to seek the gods directly, there where they formerly played a role in determining a day of festival. To want such a thing would, after all, mean to directly retrieve what was inherited by the human beings of the land of Greece as their own, what lay in their cradle, to which they were always returned once more and cradled within it, that by which they were directly attuned through and through. What was their own, and essential to the birthland of the Greeks, is the heavenly fire, glowingly enchanting and delighting as it clears: the radiant gleam of golden dreams. To authentically appropriate this, which was their own, was what was most difficult for the Greeks. What was their own and their manner of appropriating it cannot be that own which “the German poet” must find in his native homeland. This finding demands its own seeking, and this seeking, its own learning. A humankind’s freedom in relation to itself consists in finding, appropriating, and being able to use what is one’s own. It is in this that the historicality of the history of a people resides. It is not by chance that Hölderlin twice enunciates this essential aspect of all history within the same letter to Böhlendorff (December 4, 1801). First as follows (V, 319):
We learn nothing with greater difficulty than to freely use the national. And as I believe, precisely the clarity of presentation is originally as natural to us, as the fire from the heavens was to the Greeks.
To this hour, we do not yet grasp the truth expressed in the knowledge underlying these sentences. In part, this is due to the fact that we have little experience of what knowledge means, and expect knowledge to come from “science.” This is also why our thinking of history is confused and clueless when faced with the insights that Hölderlin expresses, even if we are familiar with these insights and ponder thoughtfully what is thus familiar. Here, we can point out these confused views only to the extent allowed by the task of this interpretation.
For the Greeks, their own is the “fire from the heavens,” for the Germans, their own is “the clarity of presentation.” Each time, one’s own is most readily missed, misconstrued, and lost, because it counts as something self-evident and is therefore either missed, or else taken up in a crude or hasty manner. To find and learn to use one’s own is what is most difficult. The fire from the heavens demands appropriation, that is, presentation. The clarity of presentation demands that which is to be presented, the fire from the heavens. One’s own does not, therefore, consist in an insulated predisposition sealed within itself that could simply be cultivated. Precisely one’s own is in each case related to something else, the fire to presentation, presentation to the fire.
One’s own cannot be identified by exploring predispositions, as though these were qualities simply cropping up somewhere, relating to nothing or to any random thing. One’s own can never be ascertained through cranial measurements or through the description of excavated spears and bracelets, aside from the fact that such results already presuppose what is to count as one’s own. Nor are tradition and custom that which is one’s own itself; they are rather modes of conduct that have evolved and are a cultivation of one’s own that ground themselves in one’s own. Such conduct and cultivation can, then, if one’s own has already been decided, also be conceived as the “expression” of one’s own.
Even the “deeds” of the world are only “signs,” and even this only if they are correctly interpreted. Yet how are we to interpret historiographically the immense amount of material that has been historically inherited if we fail to grasp the essence of history to begin with and do not even know the sole domain of reflection within which that essence can and must be asked about? What history is can never be discovered by a historian. Neither the study of folklore [Volkskunde], nor geography, nor the discoveries by art history of the so-called German line, nor even historiography find what is one’s own; they bring only an accumulation of “manifestations” of that which—no one knows how or from where—they take to be one’s own. No science of nature or history ever finds one’s own. It never finds it because it is not seeking it, and it is not seeking it because, in accordance with its essence as science, it is not able to seek such a thing. One’s own is discovered only by those whose task is to found it, by the poets.
We heard already Hölderlin’s words from the dedication in his Sophocles translations: “Otherwise . . . if there is time, . . . I want to sing the angels of the holy fatherland.” He wants to say the holy, wherein the fatherland has its essence, and those by whom that essence is protected: the angels.
This holy, however, is not simply the divine of some “religion” likewise at hand, here, the Christian one. The holy cannot be ascertained “theologically” at all, for all “theology” already presupposes the Θ∊ός, the god, and this is so emphatically the case that wherever theology arises, the god has already begun his flight.
The Greeks, in the great and authentic period of their history, were without “theology.” Neither the theologians of the “German Christians,” nor those of the Confessional Front, nor the Catholic theologians can find the holy of the fatherland. They are in the same trap as the biologists, the prehistorians, and the art historians; claiming to be close to reality, they engage in a kind of “intellectualism,” one not even attained by the greatly maligned nineteenth century that they blindly continue. One’s own is not to be procured so cheaply in an era when the world is threatening to get out of joint. Whoever thinks that it can be, is denigrating the concealed dignity of the ownmost essence of the fatherland, and, if he is thinking at all, is in any case not thinking in a German manner.
This confusion in knowing and in being able to know first attains its pinnacle, however, where one is of the view that the rejection of these mistaken intentions—namely, to want to ascertain the essential scientifically, that is, today always in a rational-organizational-technical manner—that this rejection is equivalent to the denial of one’s own and of what is German. The opposite is true. With this, however, we must also ponder the fact that rejecting the “rational” may not be equated with the equally cheap appeal to the “irrational”; for the latter is only the milk brother of the “rational” and is groundless in the same way as the “rational,” and, moreover, is in every case still dependent on how the “rational” that is being negated has been determined beforehand.
Yet if the poet is to find his own and the holy of the fatherland, then he is not allowed to appeal to a resourcefulness or cunning that he himself has contrived, or to any kind of astuteness. The historical, that is, festive essence of his own fatherland is something that the poet must seek. Already in the first fragment of Hyperion we find Hölderlin’s obscure word (II, 81): “We are nothing; what we seek is everything.” Yet this early word then changes its meaning, even though the “holy mourning heart,” the seeking, remains the fundamental attunement of the poet.
Only in seeking is that which is sought close to us. What is being sought is the enchanting figure of what is found by the seeking. Only in that which is sought does what is found come to shine. Where that which is found has become a mere find, it is already fit for the museum and donated to the museum and thus lost—an object for Americans. (The surrender of the German essence to Americanism, to its own detriment, on occasion goes so far that Germans are ashamed of the fact that their people was once called “the people of poets and thinkers.”)
Poetizing and thinking is authentic seeking. Such seeking is questioning. The poet is not able to ascertain the holy like a bone; he must question the holy itself. This means: the poet must ask the one who has safeguarded for him that which is to be said, the holy: the Muse. The mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne, in German: Andenken, remembrance. From Hölderlin’s hymnal period one fragment has been preserved that says everything. The fragment reads (IV, 249):
Einst hab ich die Muse gefragt, und sie
Antwortete mir
Am Ende wirst du es finden.
Vom Höchsten will ich schweigen.
Verbotene Frucht, wie der Lorbeer, ist aber
Am meisten das Vaterland. Die aber kost’
Ein jeder zulezt.
Once I asked the Muse, and she
Answered me
In the end you will find it.
Concerning what is highest, I will be silent.
Forbidden fruit, like the laurel, is, however,
Above all the fatherland. Such, however, each
Shall taste last.
What is ownmost, the fatherland, is the highest, yet for that reason, it is what is most forbidden. This is why it is found only at the end, after long searching, after many sacrifices and hard service. Each may taste this fruit only last, only when each is prepared, when nothing forced continues to dissemble a free view of the highest, when nothing importunate confuses or scares off that which is forbidden. That which belongs to the fatherland will be found only when the highest is sought. To seek the highest means to be silent concerning it. Yet this keeping silent does not pass over the highest but rather preserves it. This preserving is necessary, for only from the highest can we attain what is high. We never reach what is high from below, only ever from above.
Yet how is it with keeping silent that which is highest? Only someone who, from time to time, truly says something can truly keep silent. Mere not saying is not yet a keeping silent. For the sake of this keeping silent, the word must, therefore, be taken up and said. For only he who says what is right can, in such saying, keep silent what is highest. This saying, however, and it first and foremost, must be found beforehand. The free use of one’s own word concerning one’s own is what is most difficult. What is one’s own and native, the Earth of the homeland, the Mother, is most difficult to attain. This is why Hölderlin, entirely in keeping with the sense of the letter to his friend, says in the hymn “The Journey” (IV, 170):
Unfreundlich ist, und schwer zu gewinnen,
Die Verschlossene, der ich entkommen, die Mutter.
Unfriendly, and difficult to attain, is
The Closed One from which I have come, the Mother.
Do we now intimate the difficulty that lies in the fact that the poet remains behind in his native homeland? Are we able to fathom the kind of waiting from which the greeting stems of that land in which the poet is no longer allowed to remain? Can we thoughtfully ponder how someone must be, in order to be able to truly greet, and to greet in the manner that the poet does in the first two strophes of “Remembrance”? Do we intimate what this means: to remain behind in the homeland and to seek here one’s own? Do we have the slightest intimation of the forbearance [Langmut] belonging to seeking thus in the homeland? Yet do we also intimate the magnanimity [Großmut] that must be proper to such forbearance, so that each who seeks his own and the fatherland can bring more freely into a free realm the free use of his own? Are we now still surprised when Hölderlin himself, in the poem “Ripe, bathed in fire . . .” composed shortly after “Remembrance” (in 1805), says the following (IV, 71):
. . . . . . . . . . Und vieles
Wie auf den Schultern eine
Last von Scheitern ist
Zu behalten.
. . . . . . . . . . And much
As on one’s shoulders a
Burden of logs is
To be retained.
Are we surprised when the poet who knows in this manner asked the Muse, and also understood her in what she herself wants and what, in keeping with this will, she demands of the poet: that he must keep silent concerning the highest? To keep silent here means to say all that is to be said, in such a way that it is intimated as that which is kept silent and, as something intimated, becomes that which pervasively attunes and determines all the long-waiting seeking. Where is this keeping silent in the poem “Remembrance”? In the transition from the second strophe, in whose conclusion the greeting of the other land and festival is consummated, to the third strophe. Between the two is an abyss; steeply dropping and towering like cliffs stand the conclusion of the second strophe, which indeed also embraces the first, and the beginning of the third.
In this abyss lies the keeping silent of that which is to be kept silent and is kept silent.
§45. The transition from the second to the third strophe. Grounding in the homely
The transition from the second to the third strophe goes over a footbridge and contains a decision. The third strophe reads:
Es reiche aber,
Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,
Mir einer den duftenden Becher,
Damit ich ruhen möge; denn süß
Wär’ unter Schatten der Schlummer.
Nicht ist es gut
Seellos von sterblichen
Gedanken zu seyn. Doch gut
Ist ein Gespräch und zu sagen
Des Herzens Meinung, zu hören viel
Von Tagen der Lieb’,
Und Thaten, welche geschehen.
Yet may someone reach me,
Full of dark light,
The fragrant cup,
That I may rest; for sweet
Would be the slumber among shadows.
It is not good
To be soulless of mortal
Thoughts. But good
Is a dialogue and to say
The heart’s opinion, to hear much
Of days of love,
And deeds that occur.
This strophe begins abruptly and disconcertingly, like a capricious leaping over from one idea and image to another. Yet the transition to this strophe becomes clearer to us if we keep in mind what was noted thus far and now, perhaps in a somewhat schematic and forced manner, ponder the first three strophes simply in terms of those lines in which the poet tells of himself, the poet, and expresses his essence.
In the first strophe we find:
Geh aber nun und grüsse
But go now and greet
The poet, in greeting, remains behind in his own land. Yet this remaining behind does not repel that which is greeted. The land of Greece is not forgotten, nor denied, but retained. Thus we may complete the line by saying, “But go now and greet [for me].” Accordingly, the second strophe also begins:
Noch denket das mir wohl . . .
Still it thinks its way to me . . .
The one who remains behind is himself remembered together with that which he greets, that is, a gift is bestowed upon him in a peculiar way. The one who greets experiences himself being greeted. The festival that once was recalls the intimate, which as the holy is that which properly greets. That which properly greets beckons the one who remains behind to call upon the holy of the fatherland from his locale and to be at home within the protection of this, the highest. Remaining behind in his own, yet still unappropriated fatherland does not, therefore, happen against his will, but out of the assent on the part of the greeting poet to that which, in greeting, calls upon him to find what is his own. The poet is neither cut off from what once was, nor left alone in some empty cluelessness. He belongs to that which once was, yet does so from the difficulty of preparing for what is most difficult: to learn the free use of his own, so that in such freedom the free and open realm may form itself in which the holy of his fatherland can appear. Yet because the poet is delivered over to this most difficult task, he must renounce taking immediate refuge in what once was, or merely adopting what once was as passed down. This renouncing is a deprivation and need, yet one that nevertheless does not spring from a mere lack but from his assenting to appropriate what is his own.
In the third strophe we read:
Es reiche aber,
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mir einer den duftenden Becher,
Yet may someone reach me,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The fragrant cup,
The pure granting of the lulling breezes is followed in sharp contrast by the call for something that is first to be reached. The aber [“yet”] in “Es reiche aber” [“Yet may (someone) reach”] only sharpens the contrast, which at first remains in a peculiar indeterminacy by virtue of the Es [“It”] at the start of the line. This peculiar indeterminacy is by no means removed by the einer [“someone”] in the third line of the strophe. The call that arises, as though out of nothing, for a bringing and bestowing, as though greeting and what is greeted had suddenly been swallowed up, has not yet been adequately interpreted with what has been noted. If we allow the lines we have extracted from the first three strophes to directly follow one another:
Geh aber nun und grüsse [mir]
—————————————
Noch denket das mir wohl . . .
—————————————
Es reiche aber,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mir . . .
But go now and greet [for me]
—————————————
Still it thinks its way to me . . .
—————————————
Yet may someone reach me,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The . . .
Then we indeed recognize the abyss between the act of greeting and the call of need, yet we now also are in danger once again of indeed still misinterpreting the essential connections. Thus, it may seem as though the word of need, “Yet may someone reach . . .” is only the consequence of the fact that what is greeted henceforth remains something foreign and something that once was and has nothing more to bestow, so that the greeting too appears almost like an erroneous lapse. In truth, however, everything is already otherwise. The act of greeting springs already, and springs only, from the return to finding one’s own, a return that has already been decided and undertaken. What is their own for the Germans is the clarity of presentation. What is their own for the Greeks is the fire from the heavens—the golden dreams. In Hyperion, the young Greek writes to his friend (II, 92):
Oh, the human being is a god when he dreams,
a beggar when he thinks . . .
The poem “Remembrance” begins: “The northeasterly blows, / Most beloved of the winds / To me.” Now that we know that in “Remembrance” the historicality of the history of the fatherland is being thought, the opening line first unveils its full truth. The wind, which makes the eyes steadfast, guarantees the clear boldness of our looking (setting before us and presenting). The wind in the native homeland is a promise for what is given the poet as his most difficult task. The northeasterly is the most beloved not only because it is suited to carry the greeting off to southern France. It can do that too; it is meant to do this also precisely because the poet is intimately familiar with it as the wind of his native homeland. “The northeasterly blows”—this now says: the task is to hold out in the ether and element of clarity, and to find therein the law of one’s own. It is because the poet has returned to his own and to seeking his own, and is decided, that he is first able to acknowledge the foreign in its essence, from out of such acknowledgment to recognize it in what is its own, and therefore to greet that which thus essentially prevails within itself as what once was. That which once was, the foreign, by contrast, is preserved from out of one’s own and for one’s own. One’s own “is” first proper and authentic only in being appropriated. This, however, cannot happen without the dialogue with the foreign. The land of Greece is not only not thrust away; it has in a new sense become historically necessary.
With this remark, a further misinterpretation of Hölderlin’s poetizing, one that has already become prevalent today, now becomes untenable.
§46. Interim remark concerning three misinterpretations of Hölderlin’s turn to the “fatherland”
It has been known, especially since von Hellingrath’s publication of the hymns, that after 1800 Hölderlin underwent a turn that became clearer from one year to the next, a turn that goes together with a new relationship to the Greek world. And because the fatherland, the German, is sought in this turn, people have spoken of a “turn to the land of evening” on the part of Hölderlin, and in this conceived of the Greek world as the “land of morning,” and of the relationship to it even as a turning away.[14] Yet this was only the prelude for a further intention.
The turn to the land of evening came to be interpreted as a turn toward Christendom. In the period of his hymns, Hölderlin indeed speaks of “Christ” and of the “Madonna.” Yet any careful thought will recognize that this Christian turn of Hölderlin’s that is proclaimed for various reasons is an invention.
By contrast, another turn seems to be clearer and less equivocal: the turn to the fatherland. What is more obvious than to interpret the turn to the fatherland along the lines of a turn to the “political”? However, what Hölderlin names the fatherland is not exhausted by the “political,” no matter how broadly one may conceive the latter.
All three views are erroneous. The new relationship to the Greek world is not a turn away but a more essential turn toward the Greek world, one that presses in the direction of a more original confrontation with it, yet indeed without seeking in it the origin and ground of one’s own. The turn to the fatherland is not a flight to Christendom; to the extent that Christ is spoken of, he is only one among the gods, a way of thinking that cannot in truth be called “Christian.” The turn to the fatherland is not the turn to the political either, however.
Even if one were able to equate the fatherland and the political, we would have to ponder the fact that the fatherland is a fruit that can grow only in the light and ether, in the element of the highest, that is, of the holy. The holy is the ground of the fatherland and of its historical essence. The fatherland is the highest only when, and insofar as, it stems from the highest, from the holy, and this, its ownmost origin, has been found as what is authentically its own, so that each at last shall have his portion of this, which is first. Learning to freely use one’s own is most difficult, for free use alone is the correct manner of preserving one’s own, and is even the sole way of first finding one’s own. This alone sheds light on why the poet around this period, when he has, after all, come home, nevertheless speaks of the heavy burden and lets us know that much still remains to be said.
If the turn to the holy of the fatherland were only a taking refuge in the safe haven of Christian belief or an immersion in the present domain of political activity, then it would not be discernible why these refuges and these immediately satisfying occupations should be a burden and a need that must first be long withstood, given that, to the contrary, they guarantee the security of the soul’s salvation and the satisfaction of direct action and success. Yet in this poetizing there is nothing of security or satisfaction anywhere—everything is a task. This poetizing is not a standpoint but a passage, the passage of learning to appropriate one’s own.
§47. Learning the appropriation of one’s own
Es reiche aber,
Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,
Mir einer den duftenden Becher,
Damit ich ruhen möge;
Yet may someone reach me,
Full of dark light,
The fragrant cup,
That I may rest;
Yet does this sound like setting out on the path to one’s own? Is this how the boldness of attaining one’s own speaks? Is this not, rather, a weary call for help, so as to be able to avoid the passage to one’s own, to withdraw from one’s own and the foreign at the same time, and to be no longer disturbed by anything? Does not Hölderlin say this clearly enough: “That I may rest”? He seeks rest, thus a pause in his path, thus the casting off of his burden, thus surely the opposite of what, according to our previous discussions, is supposed to start with the third strophe.
Yet we would do well to keep in mind the whole of the first part of the third strophe, over and beyond a few words taken out of context. The first part closes only with the words:
denn süß
Wär’ unter Schatten der Schlummer.
for sweet
Would be the slumber among shadows.
It does not read: for sweet “is” the slumber among shadows. Such slumber “would” be sweet only if things were allowed to come to that, which is to say, if rest were here synonymous with sleeping. It indeed appears to be better to sleep and thus to glide off into oblivion. However, this is not the vocation of the poet, and therefore also, if he is indeed to rest, not the manner in which he rests amid shadows and in the night. He must indeed be a wanderer “in holy night,” but for him this means: remaining awake for the holy, which the night prepares for and encloses within it. Let us ponder in this regard the seventh strophe of the elegy “Bread and Wine.” It concludes with a word concerning the poets who are now being called (IV, 124):
Aber sie sind, sagst du, wie des Weingotts heilige Priester,
Welche von Lande zu Land zogen in heiliger Nacht.
Yet they are, you say, like the wine god’s holy priests,
Who journeyed from land to land in holy night.
Twice the holy is named. The poets, however, who now wander through the night as the time-space of the gods that once were and have fled, are brought into a relation to the god of wine, to Bacchus, Dionysus. For this reason, in the manner of the usual historiographical comparing and reckoning together, people have thrown Hölderlin’s distinction between what belongs to the Greeks and to the Germans as their own together with Nietzsche’s distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. One sticks to the mere words that sound the same and fails to consider thoughtfully what the words say. Thus in one book that is widely read today we encounter the horrendous representation of Hölderlin as the “Swabian Nietzsche.” The distinction made by Nietzsche and its role in his metaphysics of the will to power is not Greek but rather rooted in the metaphysics of modernity. Hölderlin’s distinction, by contrast, we must learn to understand as the harbinger of the overcoming of all metaphysics.
The god of wine is a god that once was. There is no “Dionysian in itself.” Presumably, by contrast, wine retains an essential role in determining the future festival and for its preparation by the poet:
Es reiche aber,
Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,
Mir einer den . . . Becher,
. . . . . .
Yet may someone reach me,
Full of dark light,
The . . . cup,
. . . . . .
If wine is being named here, then these words do not call for an opportunity to avoid the passage toward appropriating one’s own. To the contrary, the celebration is to be prepared. Preparation here means “learning the free use of one’s own”; it means holding out in what is most difficult. What is one’s own for the land in which the poet now comes to be at home? It has already been named several times now according to the word of the letter to Böhlendorff: “the clarity of presentation.”
§48. What is their own for the Germans: “the clarity of presentation”
Yet what does this mean: “the clarity of presentation”? We know on the basis of the treatise on the “fatherland in decline” that “presentation” is essential in “dissolution” and “becoming.” If the “clarity of presentation” is natural and proper to the Germans, then precisely this, which is their own, remains at first that which is least of all appropriated. Indeed, it can be that “in the progress of cultivation,” precisely one’s own is increasingly lost, because its free use has not been learned. “Progress” of cultivation is the further cultivation of a present at hand predisposition that has precisely been identified, the fulfilling of tendencies announcing themselves within it, the achievement of whatever these strive for, securing the capacity to achieve them, cultivating the predisposition into a characteristic that is securely controlled.
This use of one’s own, however, which merely exercises and uses one’s own as a predisposition at hand, is not its free use, for here a humankind remains constricted into its predisposition that is simply ascertained and taken up at some point and in some way. The humankind in this way remains the blind servant of a predisposition that is blindly seized upon. How so blind and blindly? Because what is not seen here and cannot be seen here is what first makes every predisposition and characteristic into such—that for which it is a predisposition, or expressed more clearly: that which is to be presented in clear presentation. This does not at all emerge from the mere ability for clear presentation—to the contrary, this ability can bring itself to decide from out of itself what it is that has been presented and is to be presented, and how it is to be presented. The use of one’s own in this manner reflects only on how to exercise the predisposition, which is restricted to itself and its being contingently at hand. The use is then merely self-serving; it is not free, and it is also not the free use of one’s own because how one’s own is determined springs in part from that for which it is determined and by which it is attuned.
For the use of one’s own to become a free use, one’s own must be open for that which is assigned it. The clarity of presentation will never find its way to itself, so long as it merely exercises itself as an empty ability within the indeterminate and arbitrary. What is needed is for one’s own here, the clarity of presentation, to let itself be determined by what such presentation demands. The clarity enters a free realm only when it measures itself, tests and fulfills itself, according to the dark, and thus first becomes mature. The free does not consist in the unhindered arbitrariness of something groundless. Freedom is openness toward what is originary and inceptual. Learning the free use of one’s own, this task that is the most difficult, means learning to open oneself for what is originary, which by contrast with all self-centeredness is that which is other and other in provenance, almost in the manner of something altogether foreign. This learning to open oneself for what is assigned, in whose presentation one’s own first attains freedom, must therefore begin with a readiness for that wherein alone, as in the other, the clarity of presentation can be tested. And what is this: the dark of that which has not yet been presented, that which awaits presentation and being cultivated:
Es reiche aber,
Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,
Mir einer den . . . Becher,
. . . . . .
Yet may someone reach me,
Full of dark light,
The . . . cup,
. . . . . .
However, a reservation announces itself once again.
§49. The drunkenness of higher reflection and soberness of presentation in the word
Learning to use freely the clarity of presentation: does that not, before all else, mean becoming sober? However, does the request “may someone reach” not want instead the numbing and forgetting and intoxicated rapture of one who fails to reflect? Surely, learning the free use of clear presentation by contrast demands before all else self-reflection. Certainly. Yet what does it mean to reflect here? Surely not mere reckoning, calculating how something is to be arranged and contrived from the circumstances? Reflecting must be concerned with something else, with that which is to be presented and which determines the manner of presentation.
What is to be presented is history, becoming in dissolution, the coming of the festival. The festival is the history of the holy. The holy, however, is the highest. For this reason, reflection must be of a higher kind and stem from a thinking whose origin is itself in keeping with the holy that is to come into the word and to presentation. Hölderlin knows of this necessity of such higher reflection and of its origin. In the unfinished elegy “The Walk in the Country” (IV, 112, lines 13ff.), Hölderlin says:
Darum hoff ich sogar, es werde, wenn das Gewünschte
Wir beginnen, und erst unsere Zunge gelöst,
Und gefunden das Wort, und aufgegangen das Herz ist,
Und von trunkener Stirn’ höher Besinnen entspringt,
Mit der unsern zugleich des Himmels Blüthe beginnen,
Und dem offenen Blik offen der Leuchtende seyn.
Thus I even hope that when we begin
What is wished for, and once our tongues are loosened,
And the word found, and our heart has arisen,
And from drunken brow springs higher reflection,
The heaven’s blossom shall begin together with ours,
And open to the open look be the one illuminating.
Higher reflection springs “from drunken brow.” Thus rapture and intoxication are indeed required. Whence, therefore, the request to pass the full cup of wine; thus the demand, after all, for a means of excitation and stimulation. Yet we would go far astray, were we to think in this way.
In the first place, is drunkenness merely intoxication? To begin with, intoxication and intoxication are not always the same thing. Intoxication as mere inebriation is different from the intoxication of enthusiasm. Drunkenness is something different again from both of these. It means a being fulfilled that is neither merely blind frenzy nor unreflective transport. Drunkenness means a being fulfilled that entails a unique gathering and readiness. Drunkenness is that sublimity of attunement that is resolved to the most extreme other of itself; resolved not by virtue of some calculated decision, but resolved, presumably, on the basis of a being borne by that which thoroughly pervades it as an attunement. The “drunken brow” does not confuse and fog our thinking; rather, the sustained sublimity of the attunement transposes it into the height from which reflection can be of a higher kind. It thus remains in proximity to the highest, which Hölderlin names the holy. The request for “the fragrant cup,” “full of dark light,” is not a demand for numbing and intoxication, but for the attunement of the higher reflecting that thinks the holy and is sober as thinking.
This soberness, admittedly, is different from our habitual soberness, which in turn can be of two kinds. There is the sober aspect of that which is unassuming and yet sound and certain of itself. This soberness, as one figure of the simple, does not need to be a shortcoming, unlike that other “soberness” that first presents itself in what is sparse and empty, dry and listless.
The soberness of higher thinking is different. To it there belongs the boldness of tarrying in the heights of the highest. This soberness is also by no means a sobering up from drunkenness, as though the latter were to be kept in check or even eliminated. This soberness is filled with drunkenness, and the latter finds in the former that which corresponds to it, addresses it and raises it into the word, that is, presents it.
From the sphere of the poem “Remembrance,” and published by Hölderlin himself at the same time as that poem, comes the poem entitled “Midpoint of Life.” This poem, too, may in no way be interpreted as “lyrical.” Its truth, deeply veiled in the most beautiful images, stands in an essential relation to the hymnal poetizing and to the transition into the homely and its grounding that is undertaken in that poetizing. The first of the poem’s two strophes reads (IV, 60):
Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.
With yellow pears hangs down
And full of wild roses,
The land into the lake,
You beloved swans,
And drunken with kisses
You dip your crowns
Into the holy-sober water.
The very fact that we are told of the “crowns” of the swans by itself leaves us astonished. The crown is not simply the head; “the crown” recalls the nobility of the brow and the origin of thinking. Yet the brow, too, is here not meant anatomically as the skull bone. How the word is meant, we can scarcely say in the right manner, and yet we know it, as soon as we do not dissect the human form “biologically,” something we still continue to do when we make a hollow sound with the vacuous din of expressions such as “wholeness” and the like.
The crown, the brow, higher reflection have their element in the “holy-sober water.” Dipping into this is not cooling off as relief and overcoming of drunkenness, but the unfolding of drunkenness in the element of the clear.
§50. “Dark light”: that which is to be presented in the free use of one’s own
Es reiche aber,
Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,
Mir einer den duftenden Becher,
. . . . . .
Yet may someone reach me,
Full of dark light,
The fragrant cup,
. . . . . .
This is the call for that which must first be brought to and bestowed upon the ability of clear presentation as that which is to be presented, into whose darkness and hiddenness presentation fits itself, so that it may achieve clarity by way of such correspondence. Now we intimate for the first time why Hölderlin uses for wine that word whose beauty is so uncanny, because it says everything in supreme simplicity.
For our habitual thinking, something like “the dark light” is a blatant contradiction, and therefore the sign of impossibility. A light, if only the faintest, is surely always bright, or at least such that it wards off darkness. Here, by contrast, is an illumination that comes to shine through its darkness, so that here something appears in concealing itself. It refuses manifestness and thus raises presentation into the boldness, not of replacing the dark illumination by an empty brightness, but rather of corresponding to it in the clarity of presentation to be attained. Through such correspondence, presentation enters the free realm of its essence, if freedom indeed consists in letting oneself be originarily and solely determined by what is originary.
The word of the “dark light,” of which the fragrant cup is full, by no means contains only a particularly felicitous, poetical image for the wine, but rather names that which is to be presented, to which the clarity of presentation must fit itself in advance if it is to be capable of learning the free use of itself. Here, learning to freely use one’s own is learning to unfold the excellence of the gift of presentation, and doing so out of a relationship to that which must be presented and is not one’s own that has been imported, but the foreign.
Yet this foreign, too, and the relationship to it, must be learned, and this together with one’s own. For the foreign, and thereby that which is to be offered, can be unfittingly received, so that instead of awakening the appropriation of one’s own, it lets it be forgotten.
§51. The danger of slumber among shadows. “Soulful” reflection upon the holy in the festival
The dark light being offered in the fragrant cup can thus indeed lead astray into tasting the sweetness of slumber in mere unrestrained enjoyment, thus avoiding the light and seeking the security of the shade:
denn süss
Wär’ unter Schatten der Schlummer.
for sweet
Would be the slumber among shadows.
However, the poet who has traversed the footbridge and thus come home is decided in his knowledge of that which alone can be the highest for him; certainly, he also knows, as the letter to Böhlendorff says that deals with the learning of one’s own and the foreign, “that it is godless and crazy to seek a path that would be secure from all attack . . .” (V, 321). Yet the same resolve that in the poem calls “May someone reach . . . ,” when faced with the danger of becoming submerged in what is offered gives the clear announcement:
Nicht ist es gut
Seellos von sterblichen
Gedanken zu seyn.
It is not good
To be soulless
Of mortal thoughts.
Like a sharp cut, the holy resolve to learn one’s own intervenes between the concluding word of the previous lines, which speak of sweet slumber, and that which follows. “It is not good . . .”—even the favored “But” that might suggest itself here is lacking; this “not . . .” follows abruptly and disconnected.
Simply to become submerged in the sweetness of slumber under the protection of shade would mean “to be soulless of mortal thoughts.” What does this mean: “mortal thoughts”? That “thoughts” are transitory; that transitoriness affects precisely “thoughts,” which anyhow as “mere thoughts” remain already unreal and without subsistence, as distinct from what is real and effective in our endeavors and action?
“Mortal thoughts” here means those thoughts that are proper to mortals. The mortals are the human beings, and Hölderlin uses this word for the human essence precisely when he contrasts the sons of the Earth and human beings to the gods, that is, when he is thinking of the encountering of humans and gods. This encountering, however, transpires as the event of the festival. “Human thinking” is here not simply thinking carried out by humans but that thinking which constitutes the ground of the human essence and attunes it to its vocation. This thinking is that reflecting which reflects upon the holy that happens in the event of the festival. Thinking in terms of the holiday opens itself to the holy; to think thus is the calling of those whose word names the holy. This is why “now,” after the transition has occurred, there is “A fire ignited in the souls of the poets” (“As when on a holiday . . .”). Without that thinking which thinks “humanly” in the direction of what is essential in the human, the poet would be “soulless”—he would be without “soul” and therefore would also be unable to be “the besouler.” What do “soul” and “besouling,” and accordingly the “soulless,” signify here? Words and concepts like “soul,” “spirit,” “thoughts,” “thinking” have long since become ambiguous for us by virtue of a complex tradition and have therefore become confused and thus given over to arbitrary usage.
In such situations we like to take refuge in historiographical overviews. A catalog of the various stages in the history of the concept of soul can indeed instruct us about many things. Yet from such instruction we learn nothing, unless we open ourselves to reflection. We ourselves, we of today, must gain a relationship to what Hölderlin means when he says “soul.”
This demand for a vital appreciation of what pertains to the soul has indeed been accommodated for several decades by the metaphysics of Nietzsche and the manner in which it is interpreted. One restores priority to the soul over the spirit. In this, it is taken for granted, of course, that the traditional tripartite division of body, soul, and spirit names the components from which the human essence is constructed. “Soul” is then conceived, in a certain borrowing of Aristotle’s thought, as the “principle” of life; the soul besouls, or animates, the body. The soul is essential because it animates the body, and because the body, as it bodies forth and lives, is for Nietzsche identified as the guiding thread for interpreting the world in general. In a note from the year 1885, Nietzsche says: “Essential: proceed from the body and use it as the guiding thread. It is the far richer phenomenon, which admits of clearer observation. Belief in the body is better established than belief in the spirit.”1
In the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the section “Of the Despisers of the Body,” Nietzsche says: “But the awakened one, the knower, says: I am body through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is just a word for something about the body.” In Nietzsche’s sense, “animation,” or “besouling,” means permeating and liberating the body in its impulses and drives. What pertains to the “soul” as that which bodies forth in the body has priority over the “spirit,” which one equates with the “intellect.” What pertains to the soul has priority, not because the soul is meant in the Christian sense and thought as “immortal” by contrast with the transitoriness of the body, but the reverse: because the impulsive driving of the body is regarded as “the eternal” and “soul” is the name for that which drives in this driving, for that which is active in its activity. Spirit, understood as “intellect,” by contrast inhibits and weakens the drives, and is therefore branded as “the adversary of the soul.”2 Insofar as these views and this talk about spirit and soul remains vague, it even seems clear to everyone that this order of ranking soul and spirit has hit upon what is “correct”; for who does not know that a human being can be very “full of spirit” and yet “soulless.”
However, does soul here mean so straightforwardly the same thing as in the aforementioned interpretation? No—soul now means what we also call the Gemüt.[15] Admittedly, this name has lost the authentic force of its naming for us. We need only trace the directions of meaning discernible in the words gemütlich [comfortable, cozy], gemütvoll [sentimental], gemütskrank [emotionally disturbed]. The Gemüt is, then, something tender, if not indeed susceptible and yielding; in any case, something sensitive, “sentimental,” “unheroic.” However, the word Gemüt has yet another, hidden resonance that we shall one day hear once more: Gemut, the source and site of muot—of Mut [cheer, courage] in the original sense that Mut is the origin and intimacy of Gleichmut [equanimity] and Armut [poverty], of Sanftmut [gentleness] and Edelmut [generosity], of Anmut [gracefulness] and Opfermut [self-sacrifice], of Großmut [magnanimity] and Langmut [forbearance]. The Gemüt, experienced in this way, and “thought” neither psychologically nor biologically, is what Hölderlin names with the word “soul.”
Thoughts and thinking do not let the human being be “soulless,” yet nor do they first equip him with a “soul,” but rather bestow to him the innermost awakening and releasing of the Gemüt to that high Mut [cheer]. The opposite of “soulless” is not simply the “possession of soul,” but the “soulful,” the Hochgemute [cheerfulness], the Mut [cheer] for what is highest.
In the letter to Böhlendorff that we have now mentioned often, Hölderlin, in connection with the discussion concerning the appropriation of one’s own and the foreign, says of Homer that “this extraordinary human being was soulful enough to capture Occidental, Junonian sobriety for his Apollonian kingdom, and thus to truly appropriate the foreign” (V, 319). “Apollo” is for Hölderlin the name for what is light and fiery and glowing—for that which Nietzsche thinks as the Dionysian and contrasts with the Apollonian.
Spirit, in the thinking of its thoughts, is neither “the adversary of the soul” nor the soul’s mere servant:
Nicht ist es gut
Seellos von sterblichen
Gedanken zu seyn.
It is not good
To be soulless
Of mortal thoughts.
Thoughts are the thinking of spirit. Spirit is the consummation, which is to say, the originary fulfillment and fullness of the soul. From out of spirit, the human being is first “soulful.” In inspiration prevails the original Mut of the Gemüt. To be without that which pervasively attunes the Gemüt and grants the full “essence” of the soul, to be without thinking in accordance with the manner of mortals, that is not good.
Nicht ist es gut
It is not good
This is said outright, as though a “sentence,” a general “wisdom of life” and rule were to be expressed. However, this “It is not good” is spoken here in the poem by the poet to the poet, and indeed to that poet who has accomplished the transition to the homely and who must now preserve the peace in which there is borne, in a gathered manner, that which is to prepare itself with the offering of the dark light. Such are the holidays of Germania, the days before its festival. The task is to wait out in the German night watches for destiny. This is why, before all else, that which is fitting is demanded in preparation for the festival, that which fittingly sends itself into what is essential in the coming history. “It is not good”—here, “good” means nothing other than “fitting,” namely, fitting for the singular and inceptual moment of the other arrival of the gods. That is the while of the equalization of destiny.
1 The Will to Power, §532.
2 Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele [Spirit as Adversary of the Soul], vols. 1–3 (Leipzig, 1929–1933); second improved edition, vols. 1–2 (Leipzig, 1937–1939).