Preparation for Hearing the Word of the Poetizing
The lecture course is only a pointing.
This lecture course would like to draw attention to a few of Hölderlin’s poems. To this end, the following poems have been selected:
Remembrance, IV, 61ff.1
The Ister, IV, 220ff.
The Titans, IV, 208ff. (also 215ff.)
Mnemosyne, IV, 225f.
Ripe, bathed in fire . . . , IV, 71.
A few things ought to be said about the selection of these poems, and likewise concerning that toward which our thinking is to be steered. This calls for preliminary considerations that seemingly already anticipate what is essential. Yet in truth, prefaces readily stray into vacuousness because they have yet to hear the word of the poetizing. Everything hinges on that alone. If at some point we have become hearers, however, then extensive “introductions” easily become a hindrance.
If at some point we have become hearers—getting to that point is admittedly a long path. To follow this path means to leave behind much that is habitual and supposedly obvious; it means to renounce hasty goals and trivial hopes. Yet because we break with what we are accustomed to with the greatest difficulty, seeing that we also accommodate within it what we are unaccustomed to; because, without our knowing it, we everywhere have at the ready what we are most accustomed to as the safety net for everything, we must here first abandon the customary relationship to “works” of poetry. We must forthwith make ourselves ready for another path. For this it is necessary already at the beginning of this path to awaken a disposition toward Hölderlin’s word, one in which we may perhaps one day indeed become hearers of this word. Yet such preparation is of necessity forced to take the often unfruitful form of mere rejection. We thereby state what the lecture course does not intend. Through this, we indirectly make clear a few things concerning that which it does intend.
The lecture course does not intend to compete with “literary-historiographical” research into Hölderlin’s “life and works” in presenting the “correct” or even the “definitive” Hölderlin, as though he were a specimen to be worked on by natural science. The historian indeed likes to persist in the peculiar view that a historical life, a historical process, a historical deed, is “correctly” grasped only if and when the process, the life, or the work is in each case explained in terms of the “conditions of its time period” and placed into that context. To what extent is this illuminating and widely acknowledged ideal of historiographical knowledge peculiar? What is peculiar about this view is that it consists in the belief that the “milieu” of the period presents itself to the historian as it is in itself and of its own accord. He need only place the work to be explained within the relevant “time period” and into the “circumstances” that the period gives rise to so that, on the basis of tracing it back to its conditions, the work would stand there independently and objectively as a historiographical object.
Yet that past era to which the work belongs is, to be sure, just as closed off and just as evident for historiographical apprehension as is the work to be explained. Why should the historical conditions be historiographically more accessible than what is historically conditioned? The appeal to the conditions and facts of the time period that are supposed to explain something is misguided; for these conditions of the time period are just as in need of explanation as what they supposedly situate and condition, such as a work.
Perhaps the interpretation of a work can even say something more readily about the period in which it arose and about the “conditions” of its time than these conditions can say about the work. Yet how, then, should the work be comprehended, assuming that the whole heap of “literary-historiographical facts” surely tells us something only when those “facts” are for their part also already adequately interpreted? Literary-historiographical research, indeed all historiography and every science, stands under conditions that it itself can so little master that it can never grasp, let alone ground, these conditions by means of its own cognitive resources.
Do such considerations invalidate literary-historiographical research? No. Within its limits, such research remains indispensable. Within these limits it secures the reliability and editions of works, and it investigates the life-history of poets and authors.
Yet even this seemingly wholly extraneous and technical activity always already operates on the basis of certain representations concerning “poetry,” poets, works, artworks, art, language, world, history, and so forth. It is for this reason that even the smallest genuine contribution to research––when it keeps its eye on what is essential––is never possible as a merely technical accomplishment. Literary-historiographical research leads itself astray, however, and, like all historiography, falls prey to vanity if it presumes that with its style of research it could ever disclose the truth of history.
History opens itself only to history. Only the poet who himself founds history lets us recognize what poetry is and perhaps must be. Only the thinker who grounds history brings thinkers of the past to speak. Only builders engaged in the work of building history show us its corridors. Historiography, in its limping along behind, only gives rise to the vanity of a prodigious scholarship and contributes at most to confusing our sense for history.
What history is, however, we can perhaps learn to intimate at certain junctures in this lecture course. The lecture course does not pursue any literary-historiographical aims. It therefore also renounces any claim to make us aware of the “historiographically correct” “Hölderlin.” And perhaps this renunciation is indeed not as significant as it may at first appear.
Yet does not this renunciation in fact have troublesome consequences? If we are not aiming to portray the “historiographically correct” Hölderlin, indeed if there may not even “be” such a thing, is not everything then left to whim? Cannot everyone, then, according to taste and mood and need read into and read out of the poet whatever happens to occur to them at the time? Does not the concern to present the objectively real version of Hölderlin’s work in a manner that is correct in terms of literary historiography then have the advantage over the sweeping arbitrariness of even the most inspired interpretation?
Yet this kind of interpretation and that kind of research are not at all opposed to each other. Rather, they correspond to each other. It is only if one knows no alternative to literary-historiographical research that every other kind of undertaking becomes branded as arbitrary interpretation. Only when one becomes fixated on such interpretation does every attempt to make accessible the historical essence of Hölderlin’s poetry get set on equal footing with literary-historiographical objectification and measured according to its standards. Both, literary-historiographical research and gratuitous interpretation, fall equally short in their knowledge of what they do and what they are capable of, and under which laws they stand.
We renounce the claim to uncover the historiographically correct Hölderlin. Yet nor do we assume the right to string together “pieces” and “passages” from Hölderlin’s poetry with whose aid we might, for instance, validate and illuminate the current age and thus make Hölderlin “relevant to today.” The “historiographically factual” and “correct” Hölderlin and the Hölderlin “relevant to today” are both equally objectionable “products” of a manner of proceeding that from the outset simply does not want to hear what the poet says. Instead, one takes present-day historiographical consciousness and present-day “lived experience” to be “what is true” in itself and subjects the poet and his word to this standard, which is supposed to be true simply because it is current.
§2. The attempt to think the word poetized by Hölderlin
The one and only thing that the lecture course attempts is solely to think what Hölderlin has poetized, and in thinking it, to come to know it. That which has been poetized in this poetry, however, resides in something that already is, yet that we in fact never and nowhere encounter so long as we inquire only within our commonplace reality for something correspondingly real.
If, however, we are venturing to think what is poetized in Hölderlin’s word, are we not then subjecting the poetizing to the torture rack of concepts? “Poems,” after all, have to be “experienced,” and to “lived experience” there belongs in the first instance “feeling,” or in zoological terms, “instinct.” We do not propose to disturb anyone here in his or her “lived experience.” But we are going to give “thinking” a try.
Perhaps “thinking” is more closely related to “poetizing” than is our much-vaunted “lived experience.” Admittedly, we remain in the dark concerning the essence of the inner relation between poetizing and thinking. This is why our enterprise is immediately in danger of being misconstrued. The attempt to think the word poetized by Hölderlin appears to diminish Hölderlin’s poetry in another respect. In this case, by reducing it, not to a repository for timely “quotes,” but to an archaeological site from which building blocks are amassed for a self-constructed “system of philosophy.” This latter type of plundering of the poetic work may well be still worse than the former. Yet if our concern is with thinking, that by no means signifies that we are intent upon something like a “system of philosophy” or concerned with “philosophy” at all. Here it is a matter neither of “philosophy” nor of “poesy.”
The sole thing that matters is the attempt to think what is poetized in Hölderlin’s poetry, to think that which is poetized itself and this alone. We are not concerned with Hölderlin, or with Hölderlin’s “work” in the sense of an achievement of this poet, or even with Hölderlin’s work as an “example” of the universal essence of poetry and art. It is solely a matter of that which this work sets to work, and that always means what it conceals and keeps sheltered within itself. Our singular concern is whether that which is called upon and called forth in the poetizing word takes up a relation to us of its own accord and accordingly speaks to us; whether this claim, if it speaks, concerns our essence, and not, for instance, only the “subjective” “lived experience” of a few individuals among us or the “lived experience” of “communities” presently at hand. The issue is whether the essence of the planetary human being, who has become unhistorical, can be made to totter and thereby brought to reflect.
In setting out to think what is poetized in Hölderlin’s poetry, we are not thereby attempting to bring to our intuition what Hölderlin himself envisioned in the first saying of his poetry. This no research can ever discover and no thinking can ever come to discern. Even presupposing that such an impossibility were in fact possible, supposing therefore that we could transpose ourselves precisely back into the erstwhile sphere of Hölderlin’s vision, this in no way guarantees that in so doing we would be thinking what Hölderlin’s word poetizes. For the word of the true poet each time poetizes over and beyond the poet’s own intention and vision.[1]
The poetizing word names something that comes over the poet and transposes him into a belonging that he has not created, one that he himself can only follow. What is named in the poetizing word never stands before the poet like a surveyable object. What is poetized not only takes the poet into a belonging transformative of his essence. What is poetized itself still shelters within it something closed off, something that surpasses the force of the word. The word of the poet and that which is poetized in it poetize over and beyond the poet and his saying. When we assert this about “poetry,” we always mean only essential poetry. It alone poetizes what is inceptual; it alone releases what is original into its own arrival.
Like every activity in which human ability plays a part, poetizing too admittedly also has its derivative and aberrant forms. We should not scoff at these and regard them as altogether superfluous. It may very well happen that at a “poets’ convention” three hundred writers get together, some good and some of lesser prominence, and that not a single poet is among them. This should not surprise us if we consider that it may perhaps take centuries for a single poet to emerge, and that when he does emerge, he may scarcely be recognized immediately even by those capable of judgment.
On our path we are seeking the word of an essential poetizing. The word of the poet is never his own nor his own property. The poet stands astonished and solitary within the mystery of the word, which is only seemingly his own, as does anyone who attempts to approach the realm that the word opens up and at the same time veils. Above all, the poetizing word poetizes over and beyond those who are to hear it.
In attempting to think that which is poetized in Hölderlin’s poetry, we are not, then, pursuing the impossible task of reproducing and reenacting Hölderlin’s erstwhile “inner world” or his frame of mind. In contrast to this, we must seek a path toward intimating that which poetizes over beyond the poet himself, and from this intimating unfold an essential knowing within whose ambit all our other bits of knowledge first take root and find a foothold.
§4. The essential singularity of Hölderlin’s poetizing is not subject to any demand for proof
Yet is not this entire undertaking presumptuous, namely, to think in the direction of that which has poetized over and beyond even the poet? Why is it that latecomers should more readily know a path leading us to whatever came to the poet? From where should those who have not been called more readily have the ability to hold out in that realm from which even this poet himself was taken away into the protection of derangement? Above all, however, until now we have been forgetting this one thing, that with such an intention we are singling out Hölderlin’s poetizing in an unusual way, without offering the slightest proof of the singularity that our thinking is thereby according him. For manifestly it cannot be some kind of “artistic taste” or an intangible “aesthetic” preference that here decides that we want to grant a hearing to the word of precisely this poet and not to the “work” of another poet. How can we prove that Hölderlin’s word poetizes something inceptual?
A sober reconsideration of our intent shows how we are everywhere lining up one audacious claim after another. At most, everything remains only the personal view of a particular individual. It looks as though we are arbitrarily privileging only this one poet from the gallery of poets historiographically arrayed (Klopstock, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist). Perhaps because Hölderlin is now “in fashion,” as it has been said. In accordance with its essence, fashion tends to be eager for novelty and change and limited duration. For us, however, Hölderlin was already “in fashion” before the First World War. Unlike many who carried an edition of Goethe’s Faust, quite a few carried Hölderlin’s poems with them in their packs. This fashion has thus already extended over three decades––a remarkable fashion––which is to say that “fashion” is not in play here. Yet neither is our giving preference to this one poet over others on the basis of some kind of historiographical reckoning.
Nonetheless, the appearance initially persists that our intention arises only from the contingent opinion of someone who ventures one such an attempt to provide a pointer to Hölderlin’s word. What this pointer is able to offer lacks all binding force, therefore, when considered and assessed on its own terms. Such binding force, if it arises, can indeed come only from the poetizing word of Hölderlin’s poetry itself.
We can thus attempt to set out on the path to Hölderlin’s word only with the prospect of going astray. However—it is not just this pointer that remains presumptuous. What remains presumptuous is also the demand for “proofs” that are first meant to assure us beforehand by way of “explanations” that a word is saying something essential here. It indeed appears to be a sign of a well-considered and sober approach when before all else we demand proof that it is an essential poetizing that is speaking here. Yet the demand for advance proofs of what Hölderlin’s word is capable of poetizing is, in truth, a denigration of this word; it is, in truth, the elevation of our own ego to the authoritative tribunal before which this word must first prove itself. Despite a perhaps established “aesthetic” appreciation of its “beauty,” this demand for advance proofs of the essentiality of this poetizing is fundamentally a resistance to the claim of this word. For all its eagerness to become acquainted with it, such a way of approaching the word of this poetizing would seek to place nothing at stake. Thus an indeterminacy lies at the beginning of our path to Hölderlin’s word, because there is no one among us who brings with him proof attesting to the fact that he is the one called upon to be the interpreter.
For this reason, the pointer that we attempt to provide here serves only as an initial encouragement to venture a path to the word of this poet; “a” path, but not “the” path. No one is entitled to think that he or she knows “the” path. Even the particular path that we are trying here must often remain a detour.
The following pointer to some of Hölderlin’s poetizing says certain things that, according to the letter of the word, cannot be found within the “poems,” even things that cannot be claimed to be poetized in the “poems.” Nonetheless, these pointers may assist in making the poetizing word more audible.
It remains proper to the poetizing word that it oscillates within a peculiarly gathered multiplicity of meaning. We say “remains,” for the poetizing word remains most closely faithful to the essence of the word, insofar as every genuine word poetizes. Admittedly, in order to see this, we may not adhere to the conception of language that has long since been provided to us. According to that conception, language is an instrument for reaching agreement, which, in keeping with the increase in traffic, becomes a vehicle for communication and must bring itself into line with this aspect. Such a vehicle demands a use of words that is unambiguous and concise. For example, one no longer says Auswärtige Amt [Foreign Affairs Office], but instead the abbreviation “AA,” and those who speak this way imagine themselves to be especially initiated. However, this modern and American phonetic construction “AA” is already ambiguous. It can also mean Aufklärungs-Abteilung [Instructional Division]; thus, an administrator who is otherwise a professor of German literary history recently informed me that he is busy with the creation of new “AAs.”
One now speaks and writes of the “uni” and means the university. The hideousness of this linguistic construction perhaps corresponds to the degree of understanding one is able to summon for the aforementioned institution.
This Americanization of language and increasing erosion of language to a technical instrument or vehicle of communication does not stem from some casual neglect or superficiality on the part of individuals or entire professions and organizations. This process has metaphysical grounds and for this very reason cannot be “stopped,”[2] which would indeed also only be a technical intervention.
We must reflect upon the event that is transpiring [sich ereignet] in this process: that the contemporary planetary human being no longer has “time” left for the word (that is, for the highest distinction of his essence). All of this has nothing to do with the corruption or purification of language. This process––in which the word is denied time and a phonetic abbreviation is seized upon––extends back into grounds upon which Western history, and thereby European, and thereby modern planetary “history” in general, rests.
To this alienation in relation to the word there corresponds the process through which “poetizing” is transformed into a “politico-cultural” “instrument,” a process whose course displays the same uniformity in Europe, America, East Asia, and Russia. We fail to understand this process when, in response to it, we arrogantly assign it the label “cultural decline.” For us, this planetary alienation in relation to the word is just one of those manifestations that exposes the path leading to the word to peculiar obstacles and misinterpretations.
1. “Thinking” that which is poetized
This lecture course attempts to provide a pointer to a few of Hölderlin’s poems. Those that have been selected are: “Remembrance,” “The Ister,” “The Titans,” “Mnemosyne,” and “Ripe, bathed in fire . . .” For now, we offer no grounds for this selection. Only the inner connection of these poems themselves can make visible the unity that provides a legitimate ground for this selection. Yet only when each one of these poems speaks purely in itself does their connection also come to the fore––that which we superficially enough name a “connection,” yet which in truth is indeed a “unity” of a unique kind.
At the risk of at first still floundering in the indeterminate, we initially said what the lecture course does not intend. The lecture course does not claim to make a contribution to research into the “life and works” of Hölderlin. The lecture course does not at all intend to be historiographical, that is, to explore something from the past by referring it back to something else in the past and explaining it in such terms, an explanation whereby what is past is supposedly clarified and presented as what is correct. The lecture course, therefore, does not aim at the historiographically “correct” Hölderlin either.
Yet just as little is the lecture course concerned with constructing from corresponding quotations a Hölderlin “relevant to the present.” All created works that are ever compelled to become public in some form or other must also put up with being used arbitrarily for altogether alien purposes. Yet here, too, for example, a poem by Hölderlin can bring comfort and consolation to some through earnest engagement. By the same token, however, many are able to discover in Hölderlin’s hymns only an inflated fervor from which they turn away, since such fare is not fitting for a strong race of people. The lecture course does not intend to engage in such “dealing” with Hölderlin’s poetry, which fluctuates from year to year and is often tossed back and forth in crude oppositions, while all the time attempting to remain relevant to the present. What, then, does it intend?
The lecture course attempts to think that which is poetized in Hölderlin’s hymns. Thinking that which is poetized? Would that not mean transforming Hölderlin’s poetry into philosophy or placing it in the service of a particular philosophy? No. To think what is poetized here means to attain a kind of knowing from which we let what is poetized in this poetry be what it, of itself, is and first will be. For us, who are not poets, that which is poetized can be poetic only through our thinking the poetizing word. What “thinking” means here can come to light for us only in carrying it through. The task is to think that which is poetized in Hölderlin’s hymnal poetry.
Yet the poetizing word poetizes over and beyond both itself and the poet––the poetizing word opens up and encloses an abundance of wealth that is inexhaustible because it is inceptual, and that is to say, it belongs to what is simple. If one therefore wanted to attempt to make accessible the poetizing word by endeavoring to trace the inner world of Hölderlin’s erstwhile “lived experience,” transposing oneself back into his state of mind, then that would be to remain in a multiple sense wholly outside the domain that the word opens up in its poetizing. That which is poetized is in no way that which Hölderlin for his part intended in the representation of his inner world but is rather that which intended him when it called him into this vocation of being a poet. Strictly speaking, the poet is himself in the first instance poetized by that which he has to poetize.
Yet where now are rod and staff to be found, with whose aid we might venture into this domain of that which is poetized? Indeed, what we are seeking borders on the impossible. Everything here can miscarry. Every pointer remains a conjecture. Nowhere do we encounter anything binding. Above all, there are no authorities here to whose pronouncements we might submit, just because they presumed to stand over the word of poetizing. Only the latter, however, can alone and on its terms be the word and therefore “have the word.”
2. Hearing that which is poetized is hearkening: waiting for the coming of the inceptual word
If, however, we consider that the word is something said, then we are not left wandering entirely in a void. Yet how should we hear it? What is it that is poetizing in the word? Must we not, after all, venture something for our part, something that concerns the essence of poetizing and determines it in advance? Hearing is, to be sure, not just a receiving of the word. Hearing is first and foremost a hearkening. Hearkening entails putting on hold all other modes of apprehending. To hearken is to be completely alone with that which is coming. Hearkening is being gathered in the direction of a singular and readied reaching out into the domain of an arrival, a domain in which we are not yet at home. Hearers must first be hearkeners, and hearkeners are those who venture and wait at the same time. We have already ventured something when we said that the poetizing word poetizes over beyond itself and the poet. This is for the time being an assertion. It entails the acknowledgment that something inceptual comes to pass [sich ereignet] in the word.
We have ventured something. Are we also those who wait? We have to be if we want to hear the word of the poetizing. For only the poetizing itself can make known to us whether and to what extent it is of such an essence as the assertion claims. In this, both the essence of the word and of language in general must come to light for us. Yet here, too, we, for our part, can in turn contribute a few things, if right at the beginning we attend more precisely to a routine phenomenon of “language” and of the word, namely, the “polysemy” of every word.
Most of the time we regard such multiplicity of meaning as a deficiency, since it readily gives rise to misunderstandings and becomes a means whereby we are led astray. For this reason, we endeavor to eliminate the deficiency that resides within such multiplicity of meaning. What is demanded is lack of ambiguity in discourse and accuracy of the word. When language is made into a vehicle of communication it has to conform to being a means of transportation and conform to traffic regulation. In order to save time and increase the force of its impact, the word is abbreviated and appears as a compressed amalgam of letters. The word becomes a traffic sign like the arrow, the circle with a line through it, or the triangle.
Yet for a long time now, namely, since the very emergence of metaphysics in Plato’s thinking, there has existed a special academic discipline in which one can supposedly learn, among other things, the production of univocal word-meanings and “concepts.” This discipline is still today called “Logic.”
That “Logic” demands univocity from word-meanings, and that likewise the practical, technical, and scientific use of language as a means of transportation drives in quite different ways toward what is unambiguous––all this attests only to how decisively the word and its telling, taken on its own terms, is multiple in meaning. This multiplicity of meaning, and what we name as such, does not originarily rest upon a negligence in the use of words but is rather the already-misconstrued reflection of the word’s essential wealth. As soon as we regard language in terms of “univocity” and “polysemy,” we are already conceiving the word according to the standards of “Logic.”
In truth, however, every genuine word has its concealed and manifold spaces in which it resonates. Essential poetizing attests to itself, first, in that that which it has poetized maintains itself solely within the realm of these spaces resonating over beyond themselves, and in its speaking from out of such spaces. The wealth belonging to every genuine word—which is emphatically never a mere jumble of scattered meanings but rather the simple unity of what is essential––has its ground in the fact that it names something inceptual, and every commencement is at once inexhaustible and singular. For this reason, too, a singular kind of determinacy is proper to poetizing. Because it includes this wealth of meaning, poetizing demands from thinking a higher kind of lawfulness and rigor. The thinking of a concept of mathematics or physics, by contrast, is bound solely to the univocity of the exact. The exact can be determined in its own way only because it is found “wanting,” and this want finds its support in the quantitative. By contrast, the carefulness of that thinking which enters into the poetizing word cannot let itself be satisfied with “definitions,” yet nor can it lose itself in the indeterminacy of vague and haphazard opinion. The wealth of the poetizing word, which resides in the determinacy of that which is poetized, can therefore only be attained, if at all, upon paths that are fundamentally different from the usual understanding of statements and propositions belonging to linguistic communication and presentation.
It may initially appear as sheer caprice when we conceive of the path to that which is poetized in Hölderlin’s poetry as a thinking. Assuming, however, that this path is an appropriate one, then our choice of this path presupposes that Hölderlin’s poetizing is in itself a thinking. If this is the case, then we must before all else endeavor to participate in the accomplishment of this type of thinking. This thinking, however, can become manifest only in the poetizing itself, whether through this thinking being accomplished in an unspoken manner in the poetizing and having entered into the poetizing word, or through the fact that the poetizing itself in addition tells specifically “of” such thinking [Denken]. The latter is in fact the case. Within the sphere of Hölderlin’s hymns there stands a poem that is titled “Remembrance” [“Andenken”].
§7. Remark on the editions of Hölderlin’s works
The texts that form the basis for this lecture course are taken from the edition whose decisive volumes (I, IV, and V) were compiled by Norbert von Hellingrath, who died in battle in 1916 as a twenty-eight-year-old at Verdun. Hölderlin’s hymns can be found in volume IV of von Hellingrath’s edition.2
The Zinkernagel edition (published by Inselverlag) can also be used.3 The poems elucidated in the lecture course are to be found in volumes I and V of that edition.
A very fine and meticulous special edition of the hymns was published several years ago in 1938 by Klostermann in Frankfurt am Main (now out of print).4
Without the repeated attempt to draw near to the word of the poet, your attending this lecture course will lack the requisite foothold.
1 Concerning the Norbert von Hellingrath edition of Hölderlin’s works cited throughout, see pp. 12–13.
2 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Historical-Critical Edition, begun by Norbert von Hellingrath, continued by Friedrich Seebass and Ludwig von Pigenot (Berlin, 1923), volume III (1922); volumes I, II, IV, V, VI (second edition, 1923). Roman numerals designate the volume, Arabic designate the page number.
3 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in fünf Bänden, Critical-Historical Edition by Franz Zinkernagel (Leipzig), volume I (1922); volume II (1914); volume III (1915); volume IV (1921); volume V (1926).
4 Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymnen, ed. Eduard Lachmann (Frankfurt am Main, 1938); second edition (1943).