All that has been said thus far fails to eliminate the suspicion that perhaps a certain non-genuineness remains in play when we accompany the saying of the “Not those . . . ,” the refusal of the gods of old. Come what may, we must transpose ourselves into the position of the poet and proceed as if. . . . We still fail to experience anything coming from ourselves or directly affecting us that compels us to this refusal. Yet—is it indeed a refusal? IV, 181f.:
I |
Nicht sie, die Seeligen, die erschienen sind, |
Die Götterbilder in dem alten Lande,
Sie darf ich ja nicht rufen mehr, wenn aber
Ihr heimatlichen Wasser! jezt mit euch
Des Herzens Liebe klagt, was will es anders
Das Heiligtrauernde? Denn voll Erwartung liegt
Das Land und als in heissen Tagen
Herabgesenkt, umschattet heut
Ihr Sehnenden! uns ahnungsvoll ein Himmel.
10
Voll ist er von Verheissungen und scheint
Mir drohend auch, doch will ich bei ihm bleiben,
Und rükwärts soll die Seele mir nicht fliehn
Zu euch, Vergangene! die zu lieb mir sind.
Denn euer schönes Angesicht zu sehn,
Als wärs, wie sonst, ich fürcht’ es, tödtlich ists
Und kaum erlaubt, Gestorbene zu weken.
Entflohene Götter! auch ihr, ihr gegenwärtigen, damals |
Wahrhaftiger, ihr hattet eure Zeiten!
Nichts läugnen will ich hier und nichts erbitten.
20
Denn wenn es aus ist, und der Tag erloschen,
Wohl trifts den Priester erst, doch liebend folgt
Der Tempel und das Bild ihm auch und seine Sitte
Zum dunkeln Land und keines mag noch scheinen.
Nur als von Grabesflammen, ziehet dann
Ein goldner Rauch, die Sage drob hinüber,
Und dämmert jezt uns Zweifelnden um das Haupt,
Und keiner weiss, wie ihm geschieht. Er fühlt
Die Schatten derer, so gewesen sind,
Die Alten, so die Erde neubesuchen.
30
Denn die da kommen sollen, drängen uns,
Und länger säumt von Göttermenschen
Die heilige Schaar nicht mehr im blauen Himmel.
I |
Not those, the blessed ones who once appeared, |
Divine images in the land of old,
Those, indeed, I may call no longer, 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? For full of expectation lies
The land, and as in sultry days
Bowed down, a heaven casts today
You longing ones! its shadows full of intimation round about us.
10
Full of promises it is, and seems
Threatening to me also, yet I want to stay by it,
And backwards shall my soul not flee
To you, past ones! who are too dear to me.
For to see your beautiful countenance
As once it was, before, this I fear, deadly it is,
And scarcely allowed, to waken the dead.
II |
Gods who have fled! You too, you present ones, once |
More truthful, you had your times!
Nothing do I want to deny here, and ask nothing of you.
20
For when it is out, and the day extinguished,
It affects first the priest, yet lovingly follow
Him temple and image too and his custom
To the land of darkness and none is able still to shine.
Only, as from flames of the grave, there passes
Then overhead a wisp of golden smoke, the legend thereof,
And now it dawns around the heads of us who doubt,
And no one knows what is happening to him. Each feels
The shadows of those who once have been,
Those of old, who visit thus the Earth anew.
30
For those who are to come press upon us,
No longer does the holy host of humans divine
Tarry in the blue of the heavens.
Were we correct in asserting that the beginning of the poem tears us away to a locale starting from which we are supposed to say a ‘No’? Or were we completely mistaken, misreading this beginning because we were still grasping too precipitously after some ascertainable content? Instead of comprehending that the locale and the ‘there’ from which the poet speaks can be experienced only in terms of the whole orientation in which the poetic telling occurs? This is indeed the case. Despite our considerable preparation in many respects, we have yet to ponder the fact that the voice [Stimme] of the telling must be attuned [gestimmt], that the poet speaks from out of an attunement [Stimmung], an attunement that determines and attunes [be-stimmt] the ground and soil and that permeates [durchstimmt] the space upon which and within which the poetic telling founds a way of being. This attunement we name the fundamental attunement of the poetizing. By fundamental attunement, we do not mean some vague emotional state that merely attends the telling. Rather, the fundamental attunement opens up the world that in the poetic telling receives the stamp of beyng. Before we ponder specifically the essence of a fundamental attunement, so as to comprehend thereby something of the essence of human, historical Dasein, we wish to set into relief the fundamental attunement of the poetizing that bears the title “Germania.” With regard to this task, we shall read only up to a particular point: namely, line 38.
The words “Not those . . .” in their abrupt severity awaken the appearance of a rejection, a no longer wanting to know. Yet the beginning of the second strophe, in which the ‘I’ continues to speak, calls out: “Gods who have fled!” This surely tells us that the gods themselves have gone—‘the day is extinguished,’ the people were no longer able to keep them and had to become blind in the night—‘it is out.’ What is the point of a refusal here? That presence of the gods is past. However, when we establish this—say as a historical fact—this tells us nothing whatsoever of the history that is at stake here, just as little as when we give assurances that there still is a Christendom today. When we speak this way, we do so only as those who have no ties, forgetting that a godless time is not nothing, but an uprising of the Earth that can neither be alleviated, nor even recognized, whether by the mere continued existence of various denominations, or by an organizational change in the governance of the church on the part of the state.
The gods of a people cannot be acquired so readily. The flight of the gods must first become an experience, and this experience must first thrust our Dasein into a fundamental attunement in which a historical people in its entirety endures the need of its godlessness and of its fragmentation. It is this fundamental attunement that the poet founds within the historical Dasein of our people. Whether this occurred in the year 1801 or has yet to be apprehended and taken hold of in the year 1934 is unimportant, for numbers of years are indifferent with respect to the time of such decision.
The “Not those . . .” is no refusal, but introduces the words “Those, indeed, I may call no longer” (line 3). The “indeed” [ja] intensifies and lends finality to the ‘not being permitted.’ The abrupt “Not” at the beginning by no means refers to the severity of a rejection, but to the gravity of a necessary renunciation. With what is the renunciation concerned? With the “Divine images in the land of old” (line 2)? No. It concerns the calling of these gods. Someone who has nothing, who can have nothing, and wants to have nothing is also unable to renounce; he cannot even experience the necessity of a renunciation. Yet if the poet speaks from such a necessity, then he indeed wants something. He wants to call—that is, he does not merely wish to do so. Rather, wanting to call means standing firm within this calling. What kind of a calling is this? It is not a calling summoning those who are close and familiar to him, nor is it a calling through which the caller draws attention to himself, but rather that calling in which we await that which is called as such, and through the calling first place that which is awaited at a distance from us, as something yet distant, so as thereby to simultaneously be deprived of its nearness. This calling is the sustaining of a conflict between the opening up of a readiness and the absence of fulfillment. The enduring of such a conflict is pain, a suffering, and the calling is therefore plaintive (lines 3ff.):
. . . wenn aber
Ihr heimatlichen Wasser! jezt mit euch
Des Herzens Liebe klagt,
You waters of the homeland! now with you
The heart’s love has plaint,
This pain of calling, this plaintiveness, springs from and oscillates within a fundamental attunement of mourning.
With regard to this and every fundamental attunement, however, it must be said from the outset that what is at issue here is not some weak resignation that submerges itself in so-called feelings, a kind of sentimentality that merely ‘broods over’ the state of one’s own soul. In particular, this mourning is not some impotent collapse into oneself. Fundamental attunements—to use a customary distinction here—do not concern the soul, but the spirit. Pain and suffering in general are only by virtue of our enduring a conflict. Animals too can indeed endure pain and suffering, but their suffering and being in pain is not sorrow, just as stomach pains are not in themselves sorrow, nor the kind of pain that mourning is. Nor are these merely a ‘higher’ kind of feelings, but rather something essentially different.
Renouncing the calling of the gods of old is the decisiveness of a willingness to be deprived: “Nothing do I want to deny here, and ask nothing of you” (line 19). This decisiveness springs from the intimate superiority of the fundamental attunement of mourning. For this attunement makes all the many insignificant things a matter of indifference and maintains itself within the untouchability of one thing alone. And yet it is not some kind of wounded or disgruntled withdrawal; an empty, despairing rejection; or even obstinacy. Rather, this originary mourning is the lucid superiority of the simple goodness of a grave pain—a fundamental attunement. It opens up beings as a whole differently, and in an essential manner. Here we must pay heed to the following: Attunement, as attunement, lets the manifestness of beings occur.
Yet we must clarify still further the poetic configuration of the fundamental attunement. “The heart’s love has plaint” (line 5). According to ancient wisdom, love is a willing: namely, willing that the beloved, in his or her being, be such as they are, stand firm in their essence. A willing—the heart’s love—“what else does it want / The holy mourning one?” (lines 5f.). The mourning is a holy one, not some arbitrary sadness about some individual thing; rather, the entire fundamental attunement is holy.
To attunement there belongs, on the one hand, that which attunes (cf. below, on the ‘inner ground’ of attunement, p. 78ff.), then that which is attuned in the attunement, and finally the reciprocal inter-relatedness of that which is attuned and that which attunes. Here we must pay heed to the fact that attunement does not start from a subject and an object that lie independently present at hand, such that an attunement would impose itself between the two and go back and forth between subject and object. Rather, the attunement and its arising or receding is what is originary, first drawing the object into the attunement in its own particular way in each instance, and making the subject that which is attuned. Considered more profoundly, however, the subject–object relationship that is commonly represented is here altogether inadequate for comprehending the essence of attunement. That relationship was conceived with respect to the representational relation between subject and object, so that the attunement, conceived as a feeling, is then merely something added on—a coloring.
The entire fundamental attunement as such is holy in the three respects mentioned. Yet what does “holy” mean? Hölderlin often employs this naming, and always does so in an essential manner in terms of the reach of the particular fundamental attunement of his poetizing. To cite just a few instances:
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.
And drunken with kisses
You dip your heads
Into the holy-sobering water.
(“Midpoint of Life,” IV, 60, lines 5ff.)
Denn so wollte die heilge Natur . . .
For thus holy nature willed it . . .
(Fragment 3, IV, 238)
Süss ists zu irren
In heiliger Wildniss,
Sweet it is to wander
In holy wilderness,
(Fragment 18, Tinian, IV, 250)
O nenne Tochter du der heiligen Erd’!
O name you daughter of the holy Earth!
(“Germania,” line 97)
Und was ich sah, das Heilige sei mein Wort.
And what I saw, may the holy be my word.
(“As when on feast day . . . ,” IV, 151, line 20)
Und es wurzelt vielesbereitend heilige Wildniss.
And there is rooted much-readying holy wilderness.
(“The Titans,” IV, 208, line 22)
Hölderlin names the holy something ‘disinterested’ [uneigennützig]. ‘Disinterest’ here refers not merely to a relinquishing of self-interest for the benefit of the common interest, but rather to that disinterestedness that removes all self-interest even from the common interest—that is, removes from it its tendency toward self-limitation. It refers to a disinterestedness that no longer stands at all within the realm of utility—and nor, therefore, within that of what is useless either, since the latter is still evaluated with reference to interest. In what sense can Hölderlin understand the holy as that which is disinterested? Hölderlin clarifies his own understanding of the holy precisely with reference to what we are naming a ‘fundamental attunement,’ which in the language of Hölderlin’s time is called ‘sentiment’ [Empfindung], and which even at that time was subject to manifold interpretations, yet in its metaphysical essence was neither fully experienced, nor for that matter comprehended or grounded. The fact that this has not been accomplished to the present day is no accident, but has its grounds in the unbroken hegemony of the thinking of modernity—not so much in the form in which it was originally coined, but as the commonplace way of thinking and distilled mode of experience that characterize our contemporary everydayness.
We find this elucidation of the holy in a passage from the exceedingly difficult essay that bears the title “On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit” (III, 277ff.). The essay remains incomprehensible without a genuine understanding of the innermost core and of the fundamental questions of the philosophy of Kant and above all of German Idealism. Yet an understanding of this philosophy remains but one precondition among others. One cannot simply ‘trace Hölderlin back’ to that philosophy—in accordance with the usual method—and say, for instance, that he transforms the metaphysics of Schelling or Hegel into poetry. When dealing with these greats, it is always a mistake to try to figure out the details of who said what first and influenced the other; for only one who is himself great and open can truly be influenced. For this reason, genuine influence is extremely rare, whereas ordinary understanding is of course of the opinion that everything is influenced by everything. And this is indeed correct where everything remains merely small and mediocre and excluded from that which is great. It requires a supreme mustering of thoughtful energy and the longest endurance of a dialectical and metaphysical comprehension in order to follow the thinker-poet in his essay. Historically it belongs to the period of his first stay in Homburg following his flight from Frankfurt: the years 1798 to 1800. Toward the end of the essay, we find a concluding passage that tells us about the holy as the disinterested (III, 300ff.):
Thus in an overly subjective state, just as in an overly objective one, the human being seeks in vain to attain his vocation, which consists in this: that he comes to recognize himself as a unity contained within divine, harmonious opposites, just as, conversely, he comes to recognize the divine, united, harmonious opposites as a unity contained within him. For this is possible only in beautiful, holy, divine sentiment, in a sentiment that is beautiful because it is neither merely pleasant and happy, nor merely sublime and powerful, nor merely unified and peaceful, but that is all at once, and can be such only in a sentiment, one that is holy because it is neither disinterestedly given over to its object, nor merely disinterestedly resting on its own inner ground, nor merely disinterestedly hovering between its inner ground and its object, but is all at once, and can be such only in a sentiment, one that is divine because it is neither mere consciousness, mere reflection (subjective or objective) with the loss of inner and outer life, nor mere striving (subjective or objective) with the loss of inner and outer harmony, nor mere harmony, as with intellectual intuition and its mythic image of a subject-object, with the loss of consciousness and of unity, but because it is all this at once, and can be such only in a sentiment, one that is transcendental and can be such only because in its unifying and in the reciprocal interaction of the said qualities it is neither overly pleasant and sensuous, nor overly energetic and wild, nor overly collected [innig] and enthusiastic, neither too disinterestedly given over to its object, i.e., in excessive self-forgetfulness, nor too disinterestedly resting on its inner ground, i.e., in an overly authoritarian manner, nor too disinterestedly hovering between its inner ground and its object, i.e., in an overly indecisive and empty and indeterminate manner, neither overly reflected, overly conscious of itself, excessively discerning and for this very reason not conscious of its inner or outer ground, nor overly animated, too much caught up in its inner and outer grounds, and for this very reason not conscious of the harmony of inner and outer, nor overly harmonious, and for this very reason insufficiently conscious of itself and of its inner and outer grounds, for this very reason too indeterminate and less receptive to, and less capable of enduring, the genuine Infinite, which is determined by it as a determinate, actual infinity, as lying outside.
The holy is a complete disinterestedness—that is, one that is not one-sided. Disinterestedness can become one-sided with respect to those sides belonging to its essential structure. There are three ‘sides’:
1. The inner ground of disinterestedness. This ground belongs to disinterestedness as a kind of resting within itself, a manner of genuine self-steadfastness.
2. Its relationship to the objects as such. It is open to its objects and given over to them, and in this process retracts its own self-interest.
3. The relating as a relating between the inner ground and the object, their between, whereby the inner ground is secured and at the same time the object is promoted, raised up into its own good and its own essence and set free.
Disinterestedness is one-sided in relation to side 1 if it congeals into authoritarianism; one-sided in relation to side 2 if, becoming entirely absorbed in its object, it loses itself; and one-sided in relation to side 3 if it merely hovers between its inner ground and its object and remains empty, neither becoming set on itself, desiring nothing for itself, nor losing itself in the object, failing to take the object into its care.
Where all three of these sides, by contrast, are equiprimordially alive in the free superiority of a devotion fulfilled within a certain attunement, there occurs there pure disinterestedness, the holy.
Mourning, within which the necessary renunciation of the calling of the gods of old resonates, is holy in this manner. Not that mourning ossifies and turns to stone in a despair that pushes everything away; rather, the gods of old remain too dear to it. Mourning does not lose itself in merely abandoning itself, without abode, to those who have fled; it asks for nothing and does not seek to force anything. Mourning does not float off into a vacuum, because, as will become apparent, it precisely founds a new relationship to the divine.
The fundamental attunement is a holy mourning. This adjective ‘holy’ raises the attunement beyond all contingency, but also beyond all indeterminacy. Mourning is neither an isolated pining over some loss or other; yet nor is it that floating, hazy, and yet burdensome sadness about everything and nothing—what we call melancholy—which can in turn be shallow or profound depending on its fundamental differences in depth and extent. Yet even this character of the holy does not exhaust the essence of the fundamental attunement that prevails here. We experience this if we avoid taking the plaint that resonates in mourning as an isolated calling and see it instead as it understands itself: as having plaint ‘with the waters of the homeland’. Plaint, and mourning especially, are a plaint and mourning ‘with’ the homeland. What does this mean? Perhaps that the poet is reading the feelings in his soul into the processes of nature, the flowing of the water, the rustling of the forest, and so on, and is thus symbolizing his non-sensuous, inner lived experiences through something external that can be grasped sensuously? Given all that has been said thus far, we shall hardly be inclined to come to terms with the poetizing in such a facile manner, or to inquire in this direction at all. The ‘I’ that is doing the telling here has plaint with the homeland because this ‘I’ self, as standing within itself, experiences itself precisely as belonging to the homeland. Homeland—not as a mere birth place, nor as a mere landscape familiar to us, but as the power of the Earth upon which the human being “dwells poetically,”1 in each case in accordance with his historical Dasein. This homeland does not at all first require attunements to be transferred into it, because it is precisely that which attunes, and it attunes all the more directly and steadfastly when human beings stand fundamentally open to beings within a fundamental attunement. The way in which mourning stands within itself is a standing open to the prevailing of that which thoroughly attunes and embraces the human being. The land lies full of expectation beneath the stormy heaven that bows down, casting its shadows around nature as a whole in the homeland. In such homeland, the human being first experiences himself as belonging to the Earth, which he does not make empathetically subservient to his attunements. Rather, the reverse is the case: From out of the Earth, it first becomes possible for him to experience the nothingness of his individuated I-ness, which sets out by setting itself over and against everything, only to place it at its mercy as an object and empathize with it in its lived experiences.
Because we have long been misled and regard the human being from the outset as a corporeal thing fitted out with a soul and its processes, and because in addition we take the soul to be an ‘I’ in the first instance, we locate ‘moods’ within this ‘I-subject.’ Since cognition and willing as subjective processes at least always relate to and have to do with objects, yet moods, for the most part, also lack this relation to objects—they are naturally something purely ‘subjective.’ Since these moods or attunements are located within the ‘I,’ they must arise there too; that is, they must be caused in turn by other corporeal and psychological conditions. ‘Moods’ come to be located in the subject, and this subject in turn transfers them into the objects with the aid of so-called empathy. Attunements are then something like gloves: sometimes worn, sometimes set aside somewhere.
In contrast to this view, we have to say: Attunements are not placed into the subject or into objects; rather we, together with beings, are trans-posed into attunements. Attunements are powerful forces that permeate and envelop us; they come over us and things together with one fell swoop. That sounds fantastical. Yet far more fantastical—that is, far more remote from all true reality—is that representation of the human being as a corporeal thing endowed with a soul, a representation that is so commonplace and that leaves us so completely at a loss if our task is indeed to intimate the essence of attunement in the right way, that is, as it concerns the Dasein of the human being. It would be equally erroneous to place attunements in the subject as only ‘subjective appearances’—as appearances arising in the interiority of the subject, like air bubbles in a glass of water—or to seek to explain them in terms of the effects of things acting upon our nerves. Rather the Dasein of the human being is transposed into attunements equiprimordially together with beings as such. The words “with you” (line 4) tell of this equiprimordiality. The holy mourning (plaint) with what belongs to the homeland is no accident and no poetical embellishment. Here, rather, something fundamental and essential is said poetically concerning beyng pure and simple.
Yet why “waters of the homeland” precisely (line 4)? Conventional poets sing of forest and meadow, brook and shrub, mountain and sky. Why precisely “waters” here? And which waters are meant? To the more immediate homeland of the poet belong the Neckar and the upper Danube. Cf. Fragment 27 (IV, 258f.):
Ihr sichergebaueten Alpen!
Die
Und ihr sanftblikenden Berge,
Wo über buschigem Abhang
Und Wohlgerüche die Loke
Der Tannen herabgiesst,
Und der Nekar
und die Donau!
Im Sommer liebend Fieber
Umherwehet der Garten
Und Linden des Dorfs, und wo
Die Pappelweide blühet
Und der Seidenbaum
Auf heiliger Waide,
You solidly built Alps!
That
And their mountains’ serene gaze,
Where over the bushy slope
The Black Forest rustles
And sweet fragrance flows down
From the curls of the fir trees,
And the Neckar
and the Danube!
In summer the garden
Wafts lovingly fever all around
And lindens of the village, and where
The black poplar blossoms
And the silk tree
On sacred pasture,
Here we find a telling of the homeland, yet with mountains and the Alps also named, as well as the Black Forest, a garden, and the linden trees of the village. Why in “Germania” do we find precisely the “waters”? Why are they too addressed as “You longing ones” (lines 8f.)?
. . . umschattet heut
Ihr Sehnenden! uns ahnungsvoll ein Himmel
. . . a heaven casts today
You longing ones! its shadows full of intimation round about us.
The poet speaks of himself and of the “waters of the homeland” in the plural “us.” Compare also lines 35f.:
. . . und Thal und Ströme sind
Weitoffen um prophetische Berge,
. . . and valley and rivers lie
Open wide around prophetic mountains,
And if we look at Hölderlin’s late poetizing in the proximity of “Germania,” we encounter major poems with the titles “At the Source of the Danube” (IV, 158ff.), “The Rhine” (IV, 172ff.), “The Ister” (῎Ιστρος, the Greek name for the Danube: IV, 220ff.), “Peaceful the Branches of the Neckar” (Fragment 12, IV, 246), and “The Fettered River” (IV, 56). Cf. “The Main” (III, 54f.) and “The Neckar” (III, 59f.).
These river poems are not only contemporaneous with “Germania” from a superficial perspective, but are intrinsically connected to it. Our preparatory interpretation of “Germania” is indeed meant to afford us a midpoint from which to comprehend the poetic dimension of these river poems.
In addition, we possess translations and remarks from Hölderlin’s late period concerning fragments of Pindar. One of these fragments bears Hölderlin’s title, “That Which Animates.” In his comments on it, we find a discussion of what the poet means by a river and river spirit (V, 272f.):
That Which Animates.
The power of honey-sweet wine, after
The Centaurs had learned of it,
Vanquishing men, suddenly
Their hands pushed away the white milk and the table too, spontaneously
And drinking from the silver horns
They became enchanted.
The concept of the Centaurs is presumably that of the spirit of a river, insofar as the latter cuts paths and limits, with violence, upon the originarily pathless, upward-flourishing Earth.
Their image is therefore in the place of nature, where the shore is rich in rocks and grottos, especially in places where the river originally had to abandon the chain of mountains and tear out its path at an angle.
Centaurs are therefore also originally teachers of natural science, because nature can best be discerned from that perspective.
In such regions the river originally had to wander around before it tore out a path for itself. Thus there came to be formed—as around ponds—damp meadows and caves in the Earth for mammals, and the Centaur was meanwhile a wild shepherd, akin to the Odyssean Cyclops; the waters longed for and sought out their direction. Yet the more the drier of its two banks formed more firmly and gained direction by its firmly rooted trees and thickets and its vines, the more too the river, receiving its movement from the shape of its bank, had to take on direction until, driven on by its origin, it broke through at a spot where the mountains that contained it were most fragile.
The Centaurs thus learned the power of honey-sweet wine. They took on movement and direction from the securely formed bank, rich in trees, and with their hands threw away the white milk and the table. The wave that had formed suppressed the peace of the pond, and the mode of life of the banks too became altered; the storms and the assured princes of the forest that swept over the woods incited the leisurely life of the moorland; the stagnant water was repelled by the steep bank until it grew arms and thus acting alone, with its own direction, drinking from silver horns, it made a path for itself and gained a determinate orientation.
The songs of Ossian in particular are veritable Centaurs’ songs, sung with the river spirit, and as though from the Greek Chiron, who also taught Achilles to play the lyre.
The river violently creates paths and limits on the originally pathless Earth. (Since the flight of the gods, the Earth has been pathless.) This perspective already illuminates to what extent mourning and plaint are a mourning precisely with the rivers of the Earth of the homeland: because, through the arrival of the new gods, the entire historical, Earthly Dasein of the Germans is to be pointed on a new path and created a new determinacy and orientation. The river spirit is not an opposition of water to land; rather, the waters in their accompanying plaint have a longing for the paths of a land that has become pathless. They tear the entire land toward an encounter with the awaited gods.
From here, a further essential characteristic of the prevailing fundamental attunement becomes clearer. This mourning is not the wandering around, with neither hope nor goal, of some attunement without root. Rather, such being attuned takes root in the land and places the land into an awaiting under the threatening heavens. To such self-composed readiness, with which the land awaits an approaching thunderstorm, there belongs the superior composure of a mournful plaint; whence the words (line 11):
. . . doch will ich bei ihm bleiben,
. . . yet I want to stay by it,
by these heavens, that is, to endure amid the threatening of the land, which lies “full of expectation” (line 6). Mourning is not a hanging on to the past, but a standing firm within oneself and withstanding the ‘there’ [da] and here. The poet knows all too originarily that a mere clinging to others is not love, is not a will that the beloved be. It is because these gods are too dear to him that he lets them be dead, for their flight does not destroy their having been, but rather creates and maintains it. The will to reawaken them, a violently deceptive reaching beyond the limit of death, would only tear them into a non-genuine, non-godlike proximity and bring about, rather than a new life, their death.
For the calculative intellect, renunciation means a relinquishing and a loss. True renunciation—that is, a renouncing that is sustained and brought about by a genuinely expansive fundamental attunement—is creative and productive. In releasing what was previously possessed, it receives, and not as some kind of subsequent reward; rather, a mournful enduring of the necessity of renunciation and of letting go is in itself a receiving.
Only if we fathom the entire expanse of this holy mourning, steadfast within itself and rejecting everything contrived, can we encounter and understand the decisive word of the whole first strophe, and thereby of the entire poem. This word has the linguistic form of a question and reads (line 5):
. . . was will es anders
. . . what else does it want
—it, the holy mourning heart. In our customary way of characterizing forms of speech, we can here find a so-called rhetorical question: a way of saying which, despite its interrogative form, is not a question, but an answering and assuring, a saying of assuredness and decidedness. The holy mourning is resolved to renounce the gods of old, but what does the mourning heart want other than this: in relinquishing the gods to preserve untouched their divinity, and thus to maintain itself precisely in this preserving renunciation of the distant gods in the nearness of their divinity. No longer being allowed to call upon the gods of old, this will to acquiesce in their renunciation, what else is it?—it is nothing else than the sole possible, resolute readiness for awaiting the divine; for the gods as such can be relinquished in such renunciation only if they are retained in their divinity—and the more intimately they are thus retained. Where the most beloved has left, love remains behind, for otherwise the former could not have left at all.
That the gods have fled does not mean that divinity too has vanished from the Dasein of human beings. Here it means that such divinity precisely prevails, yet as something no longer fulfilled, as becoming dark and overcast, yet still powerful. If someone wished to escape from the realm of divinity—granted that such a thing could be possible at all—for such a one there could not even be dead gods. Whoever says in all seriousness ‘God is dead,’ and like Nietzsche devotes his life to this predicament, is no atheist. Such is the opinion only of those who relate to and treat their God in the same way as a pocketknife. When the pocketknife is lost, it is indeed gone. But to lose God means something else, and not only because God and a pocketknife are intrinsically different things. Thus atheism is altogether a strange state of affairs; for many who sit in the cage of a traditional religious belief that has so far failed to astound them, because they are either too cozy or too smart for that, are more atheistic than the great skeptics. The necessity of renouncing the gods of old, the enduring of this renunciation, is the preserving of their divinity.
If the attuning, opening power of the fundamental attunement lies herein, and the fundamental attunement sustains and bestows an attuned determinacy on the course of the poetic telling, then this essential word (line 5) must engender the progression to the second strophe. But first let us read the first strophe once again, this time with a more lucid knowledge (IV, 181):
I |
Nicht sie, die Seeligen, die erschienen sind, |
Die Götterbilder in dem alten Lande,
Sie darf ich ja nicht rufen mehr, wenn aber
Ihr heimatlichen Wasser! jezt mit euch
Des Herzens Liebe klagt, was will es anders
Das Heiligtrauernde? Denn voll Erwartung liegt
Das Land und als in heissen Tagen
Herabgesenkt, umschattet heut
Ihr Sehnenden! uns ahnungsvoll ein Himmel.
10
Voll ist er von Verheissungen und scheint
Mir drohend auch, doch will ich bei ihm bleiben,
Und rükwärts soll die Seele mir nicht fliehn
Zu euch, Vergangene! die zu lieb mir sind.
Denn euer schönes Angesicht zu sehn,
Als wärs, wie sonst, ich fürcht’ es, tödtlich ists
Und kaum erlaubt, Gestorbene zu weken.
I |
Not those, the blessed ones who once appeared, |
Divine images in the land of old,
Those, indeed, I may call no longer, 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? For full of expectation lies
The land, and as in sultry days
Bowed down, a heaven casts today
You longing ones! its shadows full of intimation round about us.
10
Full of promises it is, and seems
Threatening to me also, yet I want to stay by it,
And backwards shall my soul not flee
To you, past ones! who are too dear to me.
For to see your beautiful countenance
As once it was, before, this I fear, deadly it is,
And scarcely allowed, to waken the dead.
We no longer read anything of a refusal. We also have the intimation that what is at stake is not at all the superficial historical comparison between a previous state of the ancient world and way of relating to it and some subsequent, contemporary state—that it is not some question or other of humanism—but that what prevails here is the time of peoples, and what stands in question is a world destiny of the Earth of the homeland.
Yet not only does nothing of a refusal happen in the first strophe. The “Not” with which it begins is fundamentally not at all a denial that stands alone, nor the kind that pertains to renunciation, but finds its full and authentic significance in the phrase “what else does it want” (line 5), speaking of the holy mourning heart. Earlier (p. 74) we already pointed to the opening of the second strophe, and emphasized that the gods themselves have fled, after all, and that there is therefore no need to refuse them. Yet this does not yet lead us to the proper content of the second strophe and its inner connection to the first. Rather, we must hold together in their unity line 5 (first strophe) and line 19 (second strophe): “what else does it want” and “Nothing do I want to deny here, and ask nothing of you.” This word is supreme resolve—namely, in taking over our abandonment by the gods of old. The fundamental attunement of holy mourning thus becomes intensified here into its innermost superiority. Mourning becomes a knowing of the fact that truly taking seriously the gods that have fled, as having fled, is in itself precisely a remaining with the gods, with their divinity as a divinity that is no longer fulfilled. No longer wanting anything or asking anything of the gods does not mean decline into some crude form of godlessness or empty despair; it is not a listless and contrived coming to terms with their death. Rather, this wanting is the wanting of line 5 (“what else does it want”): displacement into and maintaining oneself purely within the space of a possible new encounter with the gods.
The fact that this no longer wanting anything in one respect at the same time and essentially remains and becomes supreme willing in another respect, is told by the second strophe. For this reason, the second strophe brings a further essential unfolding of the fundamental attunement of the poetizing. In both strophes we find a will: the will that what is willed be as it is. Such willing is the essence of that love of which we are told (line 5): it has plaint. At the supreme peak of abandonment that is knowingly taken over, there occurs the sudden, innermost turnaround of this abandonment into a knowing awaiting. Such awaiting displays itself as knowing awaiting in our being told expressly of the occurrence of the flight of the gods, of being abandoned, and of desolation (lines 20ff.):
Denn wenn es aus ist, und der Tag erloschen,
Wohl trifts den Priester erst, doch liebend folgt
Der Tempel und das Bild ihm auch und seine Sitte
Zum dunkeln Land und keines mag noch scheinen.
For when it is out, and the day extinguished,
It affects first the priest, yet lovingly follow
Him temple and image too and his custom
To the land of darkness and none is able still to shine.
First it affects the priest—namely, the flight of the gods; temple and image and custom follow after. Lovingly, being of the same will, and staying close to him, they too fall into abandonment, desolation, and impotence. The poet tells of this in the poem “To Mother Earth” (IV, 156, lines 47ff.):
Die Tempelsäulen stehn
Verlassen in Tagen der Noth,
Wohl tönet des Nordsturms Echo
– – – tief in den Hallen,
Und der Reegen machet sie rein
Und Moos wächst und es kehren die Schwalben,
In Tagen des Frühlings, nahmlos aber ist
In ihnen der Gott, und die Schaale des Danks
Und Opfergefäss und alle Heiligtümer
Begraben dem Feind in verschwiegener Erde.
The pillars of the temple stand
Abandoned in days of need,
The north storm’s echo rings indeed
50
– – – deep within the chambers,
And the rain makes them pure
And moss grows and the swallows return,
In days of spring, yet nameless is
The God within them, and the cup of thanks
And vessel of sacrifice and all holy shrines
Abandoned to the foe in Earth’s silent seclusion.
When the poet in the poem “Germania” speaks of temple, image, and custom following the priest, this does not refer to a one-time historical process, but means the essentially lawful sequence of stages of decline of a historical Dasein as such within the need of the absence of the gods. The poet here tells—that is, he tells it in founding—how beyng happens, formerly and in the future. For this reason, we must elucidate this essential lawfulness for ourselves.
Custom and tradition are found only where temple and image, as the historical Dasein of the gods, tower over and are binding for our everyday activity and living. Image and temple, however, are found only where those great individuals exist who, in knowing and creating, directly endure and bring to resolution in the created work the presence and absence of the gods. Such works are not there in order to further or enrich a so-called ‘culture.’ Culture and the furthering of culture, culture clubs, and even cultural programs exist and make sense only where historical Dasein stands under the domination of what is today called ‘liberalism.’ The Greeks had no time for ‘culture’; such exists in late antiquity. Only insignificant times—eras when our entire Dasein declines into something contrived—foster the true, the good, and the beautiful and then have corresponding ministries in their state. Yet even where temple and image and custom continue to be present and to exist for decades, or even for centuries—and, in so doing, keep alive an effective morality for individuals and for groups—still everything is fundamentally already untethered. Creative forces run riot as the achievements of individuals and acquire their value as contributions to the furthering of culture and progress. Why, really, and to what end, no one knows.
The possibility of a monumental unsettling of the historical Dasein of the people has faded. Temple, image, and custom are not in a position to assume the historical mission of a people as a whole from the ground up and to compel it into a new mandate. The temples, besides edifying individuals and providing for the salvation of individual souls, are limited to the securing of the authoritative powers and spheres of influence of the churches. The churches likewise participate in the gradual decline into culture, in a noncreative way, moreover, and in such a way that they continually and skillfully assimilate themselves to whatever is in each case contemporary. Thus today, for instance, we get to read things concerning church dogmatics that appear almost as though they were written by Nietzsche, which is certainly a rather perverse state of affairs.
Conversely, however, there is also no creation of any decisive relationship of the people to the ground and abyss of its historical Dasein if there is only a fostering of custom, which taken by itself can be edifying, but which becomes a misunderstanding when the opinion arises that the preservation of national tradition [Volkstum] comes about through the increased hiring of professors of indigenous knowledge [Volkskunde] and primal history. All of this remains merely an altered form of the pursuit of culture and can never be what it is meant to be, so long as the gods have fled. Image and temple can never come about through market competition, if the God is dead. There can be no priests if the lightning flashes of the gods fail to strike, and they will never strike unless the Earth of the homeland and its entire people as this people come to stand in the realm of the thunderstorms. Yet the people will never enter this realm of the thunderstorms until, as a whole in its historical Dasein as such, it brings to essential experience and to a long endurance the innermost need of the death of the gods.
Just as, at the beginning of the flight of the gods, it strikes first the priest—this does not, of course, mean the pastors—so too a priest or priestess must once again be struck if there is to be a new arrival of the gods: a priest or priestess who, in a concealed and unrecognized manner, awaits the messenger of the gods, so that temple, image, and custom can lovingly follow them. Unless this happens, the peoples will lurch toward their end without prospect of salvation, in spite of the airplane and radio and conquest of the stratosphere. For things to proceed otherwise, the godlessness of our entire historical Dasein must first be experienced; that is, our Dasein must be open to such experience, and, if it is closed, it must be opened up, and indeed by those who truly endure such fleeing of the gods. They are those who doubt, around whose heads there dawns the legend of what has been, and they are those of whom no one knows what is happening to him, whereas the self-assured and able-bodied know-it-alls always know what is happening to them, since they promptly see to it that nothing whatsoever can happen to them.
The doubt of those who doubt is sustained by a genuine will to know, and stands firm in the face of a true not-knowing. In true doubt there comes to pass [ereignet sich] the collision of knowing and not-knowing, and there is temporalized that originary need that transposes our Dasein into fundamental attunements. Here, accordingly, doubt does not mean a merely corrosive denial, driven on from one reservation to another, nor the blind assertion, weary of all questioning, that after all, we can know nothing. In doubting, the most profound abandonment is endured. And precisely in such abandonment, the individual comes to vanish as an individual with his special and personal needs. The more originarily our Dasein is experienced and told of as worthy of question, the more genuinely this is a telling that stands for everyone. Now, where even the individual in his particular relation to particular gods has been abandoned, where only the preservation of the divinity of the gods that have fled remains—there the ‘I’ recedes and the telling is a word of the ‘we.’
The poet tells of this monumental doubt, which encompasses the entire historical Dasein of the people and transports us toward the mystery, in the poem “To the Germans” (IV, 132f.):
Spottet nimmer des Kinds, wenn noch das alberne
Auf dem Rosse von Holz herrlich und viel sich dünkt,
O ihr Guten! auch wir sind
Thatenarm und gedankenvoll!
Aber kommt, wie der Strahl aus dem Gewölke kommt,
Aus Gedanken vieleicht, geistig und reif die That?
Folgt die Frucht, wie des Haines
Dunklem Blatt, der stillen Schrift?
Und das Schweigen im Volk, ist es die Feier schon
10
Vor dem Feste? die Furcht, welche den Gott ansagt?
O, dann nimmt mich, ihr Lieben!
Dass ich büsse die Lästerung.
Schon zu lange, zu lang irr’ ich, dem Laien gleich,
In des bildenden Geists werdender Werkstatt hier,
Nur was blühet, erkenn ich,
Was er sinnet, erkenn ich nicht.
Und zu ahnen ist süss, aber ein Leiden auch,
Und schon Jahre genug leb’ ich in sterblicher
Unverständiger Liebe
20
Zweifelnd, immer bewegt um ihn,
Der das stetige Werk immer aus liebender
Seele näher dem Sterblichen und lächelnd da,
Wo ich zage, des Lebens
Reine Tiefen zu Reife bringt.
Schöpferischer, o wann, Genius unsers Volks,
Wann erscheinest du ganz, Seele des Vaterlands,
Dass ich tiefer mich beuge,
Dass die leiseste Saite selbst
Mir verstumme vor dir, dass ich beschämt ᴗ –
30
Eine Blume der Nacht, himmlischer Tag, vor dir
Enden möge mit Freuden,
Wenn sie alle, mit denen ich
Vormals trauerte, wenn unsere Städte nun
Hell und offen und wach, reineren Feuers voll
Und die Berge des deutschen
Landes Berge der Musen sind,
Wie die herrlichen einst, Pindos und Helikon
Und Parnassos, und rings unter des Vaterlands
Goldenem Himmel die freie,
40
Klare, geistige Freude glänzt.
Wohl ist enge begränzt unsere Lebenszeit,
Unserer Jahre Zahl sehen und zählen wir,
Doch die Jahre der Völker,
Sah ein sterbliches Auge sie?
Wenn die Seele dir auch über die eigne Zeit
Sich die sehnende schwingt, trauernd verweilst du
Dann am kalten Gestade
Bei den Deinen und kennst sie nie.
Never mock the child, when foolish yet
Magnificent upon his wooden horse he thinks much of himself,
O, you good ones! we too are
Poor in deed and rich in thought!
Yet does perhaps the deed, spirited and mature, emerge from
thoughts,
As the ray of light emerges from the clouds?
Does the fruit ensue from silent script,
As it does from the grove’s dark leaf?
And the silence among the people, is it already the celebration
10
Before the festival? the fear that announces the God?
O, take me then, you beloved ones!
That I may atone for the blasphemy.
Too long, too long already I wander, like the layman,
Here in shaping spirit’s emergent workshop,
I recognize only that which blossoms,
What spirit has in mind, I know not.
And to intimate is sweet, but a suffering too,
And for enough years I have lived already in mortal
Uncomprehending love
20
Doubting, always there moves around him,\
Who brings the steady work, ever from a loving
Soul, nearer to the mortal and smiling there,
Where I waver,
Brings life’s pure depth to fruition.
Creative one, O when, genius of our people,
When will you fully appear, soul of the fatherland,
That I may bow more deeply,
That the gentlest chord itself
Will fall silent for me before you, that I ashamed ᴗ –
30
A flower of the night, heavenly day, before you
Might end with joys,
When all those with whom I
Previously mourned, if our towns now
Bright and open and awake, full of pure fire
And the mountains of the German
Land are mountains of the Muses
Like the once magnificent, Pindos and Helicon
And Parnassus, and round about beneath the fatherland’s
Golden heavens the free,
40
Clear, spiritual joy gleams
Our lifetime indeed is narrowly spanned,
We see and count the numbers of our years,
Did ever a mortal eye see them?
If your soul too beyond your own time
Transports you in its longing, mournfully you tarry
Then on the cold shores
Alongside your own and never know them.
Through everything that we have discussed thus far, the place of this poem within Hölderlin’s later poetizing as a whole has already become clear, and its connection with “Germania” visible. Both poems are the same poetizing, and only together do they testify to the inexhaustible that remains to be said here.
We return to “Germania.” The sudden, inner turnaround from abandonment into awaiting announces itself in the ending of the second strophe through a reversal of temporality: Those who thus have been press upon us, come toward us as already pressing. Strictly speaking, however, the talk of a sudden turnaround from abandonment into expectation is misleading. For the fundamental attunement of abandonment is so little able to vanish and be replaced by an awaiting that, precisely in abandonment, there resonates an awaiting—an awaiting that thus lets the abandonment become distress.
As distress, however—that is, insofar as it stands firm before the pressure of those who press upon us—the distress of holy mourning becomes a readiness. In this way, the fundamental attunement prevailing in this poetizing is first completed into its full essence. Yet insofar as the fundamental attunement prevails throughout and in its attuning permeates the whole of beings, the Earth of the homeland too enters into this attunement. The superiority of holy mourning is sustained by such readiness that withstands the distress, which is why we are also told of this readiness last, as concluding the unfolding of the fundamental attunement, at the beginning of the third strophe (lines 33ff.):
Schon grünet ja, im Vorspiel rauherer Zeit
Für sie erzogen das Feld, bereitet ist die Gaabe
Zum Opfermahl und Thal und Ströme sind
Weitoffen um prophetische Berge,
Already nurtured for them, the field indeed grows verdant,
Prelude to a harsher time, the gift is readied
For the sacrificial meal and valley and rivers lie
Open wide around prophetic mountains,
Once again we find this “indeed” or “yes” [ja], as at the beginning: “Those, indeed, I may call no longer.” In each case the “indeed,” the “yes,” is an unconditional decidedness: at the beginning, in the will to renounce; now, in being ready; each the echo of the other, and both united in telling of the unconditional nature of the attunement, which is why we name this a fundamental attunement. As such, it attunes human being and Earth equiprimordially, indeed—contrary to our received opinion—the Earth even before, for the Earth is ready so “that . . . may look . . . / The man” (lines 37f.). The latter does not empathetically and subsequently import an initially and properly ‘subjective’ attunement into the landscape, but the reverse: The readied Earth is the condition for the man’s being able to look and wanting to look. In the word “may,” there resonates the double meaning of being able and willing.
The poet tells of the field’s growing verdant, of the valley, and of the flowing of the rivers that are open wide around prophetic mountains. This is a strange geography: a description of the Earth that we barely understand at first, assuming that we are concerned with a description at all here. Here the Earth is experienced in advance in the lucidity of a questioning knowing concerning the historical mission of a people. The Earth of the homeland here is not a mere space delimited by external borders, a realm of nature, or a locality constituting a possible arena for this or that event to be played out there. The Earth, as this Earth of the homeland, is nurtured for the gods. Through such nurturing it first becomes homeland, yet as such it can once again fall into decline and sink to the level of a mere place of residence, which accordingly goes hand in hand with the advent of godlessness. The coming to be of homeland does not happen through mere settlement, either, unless it is accompanied by a nurturing of the Earth for the gods, in which the Earth is held open for an encounter with the prevailing of the gods in the course of the changing seasons of the year and their festivals. This occurs in ‘prelude’ to a harsher time, so that the Earth then first comes fully and properly into play, i.e., history and historical time. History is the monumental play that the gods play with the peoples and with a people; for the great times and eras of world time are a play, according to the word of an ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, whom they call the obscure one, and whose most profound thoughts were thought anew precisely by Hölderlin. See Fragment 52:
αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεσσεύων. παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη.
“The time of the world—a child it is, playing, moving the board pieces to and fro, of [such] a child is sovereignty [over being].” In such play of the gods stands the Earth.
In the Earth’s becoming homeland, it opens itself to the power of the gods. The two are the same and include within them a third element: that in the storm of the divine, the Earth itself comes to be torn open in its grounds and abysses. The latter can certainly become covered over, and do so together with the decline of the homeland. The Earth then becomes a mere site of use and exploitation. By contrast, when the Earth manifests herself in the disinterestedness of authentic Dasein, she is holy—holy Earth. The holy one,
Die Mutter ist von allem, und den Abgrund trägt
Who is Mother of all, and carries the abyss
(“Germania,” line 76)
In this abyss, the firmness and individuatedness of all ground retreats and everything yet finds its way to a constantly dawning new becoming. For the human being, who ‘dwells poetically upon this Earth,’ he and he alone belongs to the abyss that the Earth carries. This Earthly dimension of the Earth is unattainable even for the heavenly.
. . . Nicht vermögen
Die Himmlischen alles. Nemlich es reichen
Die Sterblichen eh’ in den Abgrund. Also wendet es sich
Mit diesen.
. . . The heavenly
Are not capable of all. Mortals rather
Reach into the abyss. Thus things turn
With them.
(“Mnemosyne,” IV, 225, lines 14ff.)
The great, pivotal times of the peoples always emerge from the abyss, and, in each case, in accordance with the extent to which a people reaches into it—which is to say, into its Earth—and possesses homeland. For this reason, pivotal times of a people are not experienced, let alone comprehended, on the shallow plain of the platitudes of the day’s gossip and its ever-skewed considerations, or all the contingencies to which it clings, blind with respect to origin and advent of the necessary. The necessary cannot be arrived at by calculations balancing cause and effect, but is a grounding only within the abyss.
. . . Und gewaltig dämmerts
Im ungebundenen Abgrund
Im allesmerkenden auf.
. . . And mightily it dawns
Within the unbound abyss
Within the all-divining.
(“The Titans,” IV, 210, lines 72ff.)
Whoever knows only the day, and indeed the everyday, recognizes nothing and knows nothing, just as he also does not know the night,
. . . wenn alles gemischt
Ist ordnungslos und wiederkehrt
Uralte Verwirrung.
. . . when all is mixed
Disorderdly and there returns
Primordial confusion.
(“The Rhine,” closing lines, IV, 180)
When the poet tells of the Earth and names meadows of the homeland and valley and rivers, this is all far removed from every kind of poetic depiction of nature, whether the latter is sweet and dreamy or rapturous and sublime, or whether it is faithfully preserving and proclaiming mysteries.
The fundamental attunement of a holy mourning in readied distress, out of which it is no longer an ‘I’ who speaks, but a ‘we,’ is thus a truthful preserving of the heavenly that have fled and thereby an awaiting of the newly threatening heavens, precisely because it is ‘Earthly.’ ‘Earthly’ does not mean created by a creator-god, but rather an uncreated abyss within which all emergent happening quivers and remains held.
Already the fact that we cannot and may not directly name the fundamental attunement with a single word points to the fact that the attunement in itself—as both attuning and attuned—is reciprocal and thus a properly primordial movedness. This movedness we wish now to clarify in concluding our interpretation of lines 1 to 38.
The gods of old, as those that have fled, are precisely there in no longer being permitted to call upon them; they are there not as present, but rather, in the renunciative Dasein, they are there as having been, i.e., as still being. In being absent, they come to presence precisely in the absence of that which has been. That which has been, and its having-been, is something fundamentally different in principle from that which is past and its being past. It is true that we do not name either one unequivocally in our language, in part because in our customary referring to time and temporal moments we indeed fail to experience any distinctions. That which has been is for us the past, and vice-versa. However essential language can be in its telling, our immediate word usage is just as often contingent and arbitrary. That is, the use of language is not a matter of official or pedantic ‘terminology,’ and it would run counter to the meaning of language to try to regulate all word usage in a terminological way. If, however, we decide to go with a particular designation in order to name the difference in meaning between having-been and past, we do so out of the necessity of establishing an essential difference within the essence of time. Whether one is named having-been and the other past, or vice-versa, is arbitrary within certain limits and a matter of one’s feel for language. What we want to name that which ‘has been,’ the poet indeed names that which is ‘past’ (lines 12f.):
Und rükwärts soll die Seele mir nicht fliehn
Zu euch, Vergangene!
And backwards shall my soul not flee
To you, past ones!
Yet he understands passing here in a specific sense, as we shall document (p. 110f.).
What is past is unalterably closed off, unable to be brought back; it lies firmly in the past, which, as our language fittingly says, is a space of time—a storeroom, as it were—in which everything that has expired or passed away collects. Even if it were possible for something that is past to recur once more in all its details and circumstances, it would never be the same; that point of time—the previous ‘now’ from which what was passing receded back into the past, taking it itself along with it—is irretrievably gone. What is past lies before the gate to the present and can never again enter back through this gate. That which has been, however, is that which still presences, which we ourselves in a certain way are, insofar as, bringing it before us, preserving it and carrying it forward, or even pushing it away or wanting to forget it, we let it stand forth into our Dasein. The shadows of those who once have been visit us anew, come toward us, are of the future [zu-künftig]. Conversely, however, in withstanding the distress, in the pressure of those who press upon us, we do not experience something altogether other, but divinity and that for which, in the prelude to a harsher time, the Earth already made herself ready before this.
Within this prevailing forward of that which has been into the future—which, directed backward, opens up that which earlier already readied itself as such—there prevails the approach of a coming [das Zu-kommen] and a still-presencing (future and having-been) in one: originary time. The temporalizing of this time is the fundamental occurrence of that attunement in which the poetizing is grounded. This originary time transports our Dasein into future and having-been, or better: makes our being enraptured as such, provided that our being is authentic. Inauthentically, it is always—in contrast to such rapture—merely sitting tight on an ever-changing present-day. I have provided an account of the essential constitution of this originary temporality and its essential possibilities in the treatise Being and Time.1
The poet on a number of occasions names this time the “time that tears,”2 because it is within itself the oscillation that tears us away into the future and casts us back into having-been. Within the rhythm of this being torn back and forth into an ever-new preservation of what has been and an ever-new awaiting of that which is to come, there is temporalized the time of a people. By virtue of this time, a people enters into the standing open of valley and flowing rivers for that which is told from the mountains concerning what is to come, from those peaks of time upon which the creators dwell. In such time, as it quivers within the fundamental attunement—to say it more truly, as it quivers as the said fundamental attunement—in the Dasein of the people ‘there comes to be’ time; there comes about that right time, which is no inopportune time—the latter, as with everything forcibly contrived and produced in a merely calculative manner, remaining something hated by the gods.
Denn es hasset
Der sinnende Gott
Unzeitiges Wachstum.
For the God that muses
Hates
Untimely maturation.
(Fragments on the motif of the “Titans,” concluding lines, IV, 218)
The beginning of this poem reads (IV, 215):
Wenn aber die Himmlischen haben
Gebaut, still ist es
Auf Erden, und wohlgestalt stehn
Die betroffenen Berge. Gezeichnet
Sind ihre Stirnen.
Yet when the heavenly have
Built, it is quiet
On Earth, and finely formed stand
The mountains in question. Their brows
Are marked.
Such authentic time, however, is difficult to recognize, and knowledge of it can readily be destroyed by the daily events that are all too familiar and by the eternally yesterday. No amount of accumulated historical knowledge is of any help here. Exchanging hitherto known and referenced historical materials for different ones also remains useless, if the historicality of Dasein fails to become sovereign over our mere everydayness. For we can never have our authentic time—our true history—so long as we are not historical. And we are not historical so long as we remain incapable of experiencing the power of temporality from the ground up, and in such a way that we stand in the very midst of its tearing us away, which also means, so long as we remain wedded to an image of eternity that is merely constant presence and, as such, is comfortable to think; whereas eternity becomes ancient and has been: “ancient eternity becomes ever more concealed” (Fragment 4, “O Mother Earth!” IV, 239).
So ist schnellvergänglich alles Himmlische.
Thus everything heavenly passes quickly.
(“Conciliator, you who . . . ,” Appendix, IV, 341, line 5)
To pass does not here mean to perish, but rather to pass by, not to remain, not to remain there constantly present, i.e., thought in terms of the issue, to presence as something that has been, to come to presence in a coming that presses upon us.
Because we are here concerned with something other than things that are present at hand or not present at hand—things whose appearing can be directly ascertained—our experience of such eternities and times is also of a different character, one that must appear incongruous to our everyday way of experiencing time. In the ensuing lines of the poem just cited, we are told that something is indeed first recognized as what it is when it has passed, in memory (ibid., lines 5ff.):
So ist schnellvergänglich alles Himmlische. Aber umsonst nicht.
Und des Maases allzeit kundig rührt mit schonender Hand
Die Wohnungen der Menschen
Ein Gott an, einen Augenblik nur
Und sie wissen es nicht, doch lange
Gedenken sie dess und fragen, wer es gewesen.
Wenn aber eine Zeit vorbei ist, kennen sie es.
Thus everything heavenly passes quickly. Yet not in vain.
And ever knowing the measure, with protective hand, a God
Touches the dwellings of humans,
Just for a moment,
And they know it not, yet long
They ponder it, and ask who it was.
But when a time has passed, they know it.
The passing character of that which is eternal is not in vain. Rather, passing by is precisely the kind of presence belonging to the gods: the fleeting character of a scarcely graspable beckoning that, in the flash of its passing over, can indicate all bliss and all terror. The God has his own measures; just for a moment [Augenblick] he lingers, scarcely touching the dwellings of humans, and the latter do not properly know what it is—nor indeed can they know it, so long as they cling to the kind of knowing by which they know things and circumstances and themselves all at once. Yet the passing over was after all not nothing, and “long / They ponder it, and ask who it was” (lines 9f.).
Pondering long and retaining in memory are the manner in which the proximity of the gods is, so to speak, unfolded—not, of course, a mere musing that clings to something after the fact, but an actual inquiring after. “But when a time has passed, they know it” (line 11). When inquiringly they have endured the long time in its having-been, then true knowledge comes to them. Then what has been—that which still presences—comes toward them. The mission that is intimated opens up their mandate, and the latter grounds the former anew.
We said earlier (p. 69) that in the words “Not those . . .” at the beginning of the poem there lies a temporal decision. Only now do we correctly understand what is meant: not the mere choice between an old and a new, between what was then and what is today. Rather, what is to be decided is this: whether we decide in favor of the authentic time of poetizing with its having-been, future, and present, or whether we continue to cling to the everyday experience of time that regards everything in a merely ‘historiographical-chronological’ way. If we regard that which is temporal only in the way in which we habitually take it—namely, by reckoning with it—then we are governed by the corrupted essence of time. This corrupted essence of time, precisely those aspects of it with which we are commonly familiar in a more or less knowing way, is not nothing, but is a power in its own right, and one that belongs to the essence of time. The decision is whether we merely remain wedded to the corrupted essence of time, without even recognizing it as such, or whether we experience the essence of time and are willing to place its corrupted essence into confrontation with it. For the essence of time can no more be experienced by itself alone, let alone possessed, than can its corrupted essence ever be denied.
To decide in favor of the authentic time of poetizing means, however, to enter into the fundamental attunement of a holy mourning in readied distress. This cannot be unconditionally brought about in a violent or contrived manner. Thus our task is to bring ourselves before the decision as to whether, in where we are setting out from, we experience from the ground up the fact that, and the way in which, we want to partake in creating the presuppositions for such experience, or whether we work against this, if only through an indifference or being at a loss. An authentic decision for or against our entering into the fundamental attunement of the poetizing presupposes that we are strong enough to experience a need, a need from which distress and readiness first arise. There is indeed already plenty of deprivation, neediness, and lack. And yet, despite all the hardship and adversity in this, it fails to reach into that realm in which an overall threat to our spiritual and historical Dasein makes itself felt. Only in such a dimension can it be decided whether we still want to call—whether this calling is in advance originary in such a way that we then no longer move within personal lived experiences or views or within such individual groups or denominations, but rather are compelled by the historical Dasein of the people, by its innermost and most far-reaching need.
The poet’s telling is founding. Our poetizing founds and grounds a locale of Dasein in which we do not yet stand, yet to where the poetic telling seeks to impel us—a locale to which we bring ourselves whenever we respond to and understand in a fitting way this founding, grounding telling, that which is now being said—that is, whenever we want to arrive at the ground that is being laid in this grounding that founds. For manifestly lines 39ff. first bring to language the proper content of the telling.
It seems that we should now pursue the further occurrences in the poem—the arrival of the eagle and its word to the girl—while merely re-experiencing the fundamental attunement, perhaps only imaginatively, and in this way come to ‘understand’ the core content of the poem in terms of the fundamental attunement. To our intellectual reckoning, this proves to be the next step. Yet this would once again be an avoidance of the poetizing.
The eagle (its flight and its tidings) and the girl and her silent receiving of the mission—both are images that present imagistically an entire nexus of occurrence. These images demand, in the first place, a proper interpretation. Yet before we can attempt such an interpretation, we must be clear as to why images are used here at all, and why precisely these ones in their intuitable, straightforward, and immediately familiar content. Manifestly, there are no difficulties in answering this second question. For the more familiar and unforced the intuitable character of an image, the more compelling and penetrating its imagistic force. And especially if—as is the case here in the poem “Germania”—what is at stake is the telling of ultimate, fundamental orientations of Dasein and of its relations of being, the fundamental relationship of a people to its gods, then no choice remains but to have recourse to images that are as vivid as possible. For otherwise the poetic discourse would run the risk of forgoing all intuitable content, in the manner of a metaphysical treatise. Poetizing would go astray into an abstract discussion of concepts. And this ought also to have adequately clarified and answered the first question as to why the nexus of occurrence is presented imagistically here at all.
What we just presented is commonplace knowledge to everyone who has even a remote intimation of the essence of poetic telling. The language of poets is always a language of images. And yet, this is not sufficient for understanding Hölderlin’s poetizing. Indeed, what was just said, plausible though it may be, is likely to lead our interpretation astray before we have even begun.
It cannot escape notice that we are now attempting to grasp the further content of the poetizing, which first authentically brings what is essential, without relating it to the fundamental attunement—as though the fundamental attunement were to be enunciated and dealt with in a first part of the poetizing (lines 1–38), so as then to make room for another theme that is presented in the image of the eagle and the girl. If, however, the fundamental attunement of the poetizing truly is as we discovered it to be, then it must, after all, attune and determine the telling of the entire poetizing. Indeed, its attuning power must first unfold itself precisely in the ensuing part of the poetizing. It appears that now the man comes into play, who, in holy distress, is supposed to stand firm in the face of the pressure of those who, in their coming, press upon him. Yet there is no mention whatsoever of this “man” in what follows. Furthermore, the transition from line 38 to line 39 remains obscure initially. It is questionable as to whether what is said from line 39 on may be grasped at all as something that the man now sees. For that to be the case there would have to be a colon at the end of line 38, following “. . . from there be moved by many transformations” and indicating that from line 39 on, these transformations, or one of the many transformations, are being presented. One can equally well, or with even greater legitimacy, see here the commencement of something quite different: “Yet from the Aether falls. . . .” For the “yet” [aber] surely brings a contrast and introduces something new. Admittedly, the “yet” in Hölderlin’s poetizing is distinctly polysemous, and nonetheless generally essential and difficult in its content.
In the end, we will do more justice to this new beginning (lines 39ff.) and to the “yet” if we understand the whole as meaning that the man, in awaiting, looks and looks. In the meantime, however, something else is happening: that very thing that is told of in the image of the eagle and the girl. This happens, so to speak, behind the man’s back, as he is still looking back and persisting within the fundamental attunement, an attunement that, as we know, also reaches forward as readied distress.
Yet then it is entirely incomprehensible as to how the occurrence that is narrated in the said nexus of images is meant to be connected with the fundamental attunement. For the girl in her entire beyng and stance cannot be made into the bearer of the fundamental attunement; nor is the arrival of the eagle at all an arrival of the new gods, to which the fundamental attunement, as an awaiting, remains related. The eagle is, after all, only the messenger of the gods.
It is advisable for us not to diminish this absence of any immediately clear connection between fundamental attunement and the essential imagistic content of the poetizing. On the other hand, we must surely expect that if the fundamental attunement of the poetizing will retain its attuning power anywhere, it will be in the essential part of the poem, thus itself remaining poetically intact and not dissipating. Where do we find a way out here? A way that will let us comprehend this poetizing in the poet’s sense?
We must free ourselves from the commonplace view of what images and the intuitable content of poetizing are supposed to accomplish, even though this view is often entirely correct. According to such a view, these images are meant to clarify as much as possible, to make familiar and bring close to us the true states of affairs that the poet wishes to name poetically and to found. In the poetizing we are considering here, however, and in all poetizing of this kind, making things sensuously intuitable has precisely the opposite task. Because what is at stake here is the poetic founding, not of some arbitrary feeling, but of a fundamental attunement in which the historical Dasein of a people and its decision is meant to find its locale, the fundamental attunement must for this reason be maintained, preserved, and sheltered in its untouchable greatness. The task of the image is not to clarify, but to veil; not to make familiar, but to make unfamiliar; not to bring closer, but to place into a distance—and this all the more, the more originary the fundamental attunement is and the further it extends and compels the destiny of a people and its relationship to the gods together into one. The fundamental attunement is originary above all because it does not extrinsically juxtapose the most extreme contraries—namely, decisive renunciation and unconditional awaiting—but rather lets them spring forth out of a unique and primordial essence of temporality.
The originarily unitary nexus of the farthest-reaching conflicts is what Hölderlin, especially in his later period, names with his own word “intimacy” [Innigkeit] (cf. p. 225ff.). We encounter this word repeatedly, in the most varied contexts, and in a number of variations and constructions. It is one of Hölderlin’s key words. Its content cannot, of course, be captured in some scholarly definition. We wish only to ward off one misunderstanding at the outset: “Intimacy” does not mean the mere ‘interiority’ of sensation, in the sense of the closing off within oneself of a ‘lived experience.’ Nor does it mean an intensified degree of ‘warmth of feeling.’ Intimacy is also not a word that belongs in the context of the ‘beautiful soul’ and that way of conceiving the world. For Hölderlin, the word carries nothing of the flavor of some dreamy, inactive sentimentality. Quite to the contrary. It means, first, supreme force of existence [Dasein]. Second, this force evinces itself in withstanding the most extreme conflicts of beyng from the ground up. In short, it is an attuned, knowing standing within that sustains the essential conflicts of that which, in being opposed, possesses an original unity—the “harmoniously opposed” with which we are already familiar from the essay on the operations of the poetic spirit (III, 300). In his New Year’s letter to his brother, which we have already mentioned several times, Hölderlin says of the Greeks (III, 366):
that among the ancients, where each belonged with his senses and his soul to the world that surrounded him, there is much greater intimacy to be found in individual characters and relationships than, for example, among us Germans . . .
Openness for beings—letting oneself enter into them and withstanding their divisiveness—does not exclude intimacy, but precisely first grants the authentic possibility for its power, a power that unifies in its very grounds. In his magnificent poetizing of Greek existence [Dasein] in the “Archipelago,” Hölderlin names the Greeks “the intimate people” [das innige Volk] (IV, 91, lines 86ff.):
Denn des Genius Feind, der vielgebietende Perse,
Jahrlang zählt’ er sie schon der Waffen Menge, der Knechte,
Spottend des griechischen Lands und seiner wenigen Inseln,
Und sie deuchten dem Herrscher ein Spiel, und noch, wie ein Traum, war
Ihm das innige Volk, vom Göttergeiste gerüstet.
For the foe of genius, the far-governing Persian,
For years now has been counting his multitude of weapons and soldiers,
Mocking the Greek land and its few islands,
And they seemed like a game to the ruler, and even like a dream was
To him the intimate people, armed with the spirit of the gods.
“Intimacy,” however, has a decisive significance in Hölderlin’s essay entitled “Ground for Empedocles” (III, 316ff.), where Hölderlin deals not only with his own poetry of the same name, but with tragic poetry as such, and that means with tragic beyng. To be considered together with this is the short essay “Becoming in Dissolution” (III, 309ff.). In the “Ground for Empedocles” we read (III, 317):
It is the deepest intimacy that expresses itself in the tragic dramatic poem.
Hölderlin also knows a “modest,” a “bold,” and an “excessive” intimacy (ibid.). And in this context there belongs a word that concerns us and tells us about the poetic conception of “intimate” sensations—that is, fundamental attunements (III, 319ff.):
for the most intimate sensation is exposed to transitoriness precisely to [the] extent that it does not deny the true, actual, and sensuous relations (and for this reason it is also a law of lyric if whatever is intimate can there be maintained as in itself less dead, thus more readily to deny the physical and intellectual nexus).
Here it is clearly said that the nexus of beings whose being is to be founded in the poetizing—here, the fundamental relationship of a historical people to the gods—the fundamental attunement in the original unity of its conflict, must be denied, precisely so as to preserve the “most intimate sensation,” the fundamental attunement, from transitoriness, from being prematurely eroded and flattened. The fundamental attunement is for this reason not something that may be made directly ‘popular.’ In the nexus of images in the poetizing we are considering, therefore, we are not to be on the lookout for their greatest possible clarifying force. To the contrary: We must attempt to appropriate this nexus of images in its power of veiling.
Here a new perspective opens up into the essence of the truth that is proper to such a poetizing, and accordingly into the essence of the originarily founding, poetic language. If indeed we consider such language in terms of its capacity for expression, then it is here precisely not supposed to express anything, but to leave the unsayable unsaid, and to do so in and through its saying.
If the essence of truth is to be sought in the manifestness of beings, then concealment and veiling prove to be a particular way that is proper to manifestness. The mystery is not a barrier that lies on the other side of truth, but is itself the highest figure of truth; for in order to let the mystery truly be what it is—concealing preservation of authentic beyng—the mystery must be manifest as such. A mystery that is not known in its power of veiling is no mystery. The higher our knowing concerning the veiling and the more genuine the saying of it as such, the more untouched its concealing power remains. Poetic saying of the mystery is denial.
Our interpretation of the poem is thus faced with altogether unique tasks: on the one hand, the task of grasping in itself, in terms of its own intuitable content, the nexus of occurrence indicated by the images; on the other hand, the task of grasping this whole as denial and displacement of what is authentically to be said. At the same time, there lies herein the question of whether—faced with a poetic saying of this kind—interpretation does not in principle reach a limit here, and what kind of limit this is.
In any case, we stand at an important place in the course of our concern with Hölderlin’s poetizing. We stand before the closed door to that of which this poetizing authentically and ultimately tells, that which the poet names the ‘most forbidden fruit’ that ‘each shall taste last’: “the fatherland.” For the poet, this does not mean some dubious greatness of an even more dubious patriotism full of noise. He means the ‘land of the fathers’; he means us, this people of this Earth as a historical people, in its historical being. Such beyng, however, is founded poetically, articulated and placed into knowing in thinking; it is rooted in the actions of those of the Earth who are responsible for the establishing of the state, and in historical space. This historical beyng of the people—the fatherland—is sealed in a mystery, and indeed essentially and forever. Yet for this reason too we shall by ourselves never come before the closed door that leads to it; by ourselves, we simply run around somewhere and everywhere. Our interpretation of the poem “Germania” thus far was to provide us with the sign pointing the way to this door. Why we began the lecture course with precisely this poem may now have become clearer. It should also have become clear, however, that we must now leave this poem standing, untouched, as it were, until we gain a richer and more intimate comprehension of the poetic saying of the poet, in which the poet struggles to attain the locale to which the fundamental attunement of the poem “Germania” tears us, and which its authentic content precisely denies. Only at the end of our endeavors may we venture to accompany the telling of the poetizing of “Germania” that we have interrogated thus far.
We have indeed on a number of occasions already drawn on ‘excerpts’ [Stellen] from the circle of poetic works in which “Germania” stands, but only ‘excerpts’. From the course that our interpretation of the poem “Germania” has taken hitherto—a course that for some was perhaps already too tedious and laborious—we ought to have learned how inadequate an extrinsic appeal to ‘excerpts’ remains, especially when we have not sufficiently comprehended the fundamental orientation of the poetic telling. In view of the fact that we are now drawing the circle of poems to be interpreted more broadly, and seeking to grasp the poetizing in a more comprehensive way, it is necessary, at the transition point where we now stand, to undertake a fundamental reflection on Hölderlin’s poetizing and on the poet.
What is most concealed with respect to our everyday dealings with beings, and most forbidden with respect to our ever contingent and roaming curiosity, is the “fatherland.” Certainly, this is not something remote lying somewhere behind things or hovering above them. The “fatherland” is beyng itself, which from the ground up bears and configures the history of a people as an existing [daseienden] people: the historicity of its history. The fatherland is not some abstract, supratemporal idea in itself; rather, the poet sees the fatherland as historical in an original sense. The proof that this is the case lies in the fact that the poet’s fundamental metaphysical reflection on that being and remaining that the poets found, thus standing firm in the face of dissolution, from the very outset refers to the “fatherland.” The “fatherland” does not, in this context, play the extrinsic role of a case that suggests itself in order to cast light upon dissolution and becoming in dissolution by way of an example. Rather, the beyng of the fatherland—that is, of the historical Dasein of a people—is experienced as the authentic and singular beyng from which the fundamental orientation toward beings as a whole arises and attains its configuration.
The fatherland in decline, nature and humans, insofar as they stand in a particular relation of reciprocity, a particular world that has become ideal, and constitute the nexus of things, and dissolve themselves to this extent: so that out of them and out of the generations that remain and out of the forces of nature that remain, which are the other real principle, a new world, but also a new and particular relation of reciprocity may form, just as that decline proceeded from a pure yet particular world.
(Becoming in Dissolution, III, 309)
What is decisive in reflecting upon the decline is not the process of decline, but the emergence of a new unity, starting from which what existed hitherto is comprehended as dissolving itself. The decline is therefore a historically distinctive moment, one that can extend over a century, because here the unexhausted—the inexhaustible that belongs to the new commencement, the possible—can bring itself to power, granted that those human beings are there who are capable of experiencing in advance this inexhaustibility of the possible as such: of founding it, of knowing it, and of bringing it about.
This decline or transition of the fatherland (in this sense) feels itself within the parts of the existing world in such a way that in precisely [that] moment and to that degree in which what exists dissolves itself, the newly entering, the youthful, the possible feels itself also. For how could dissolution be felt without unification, so that if what exists is meant to be felt and is felt in its dissolution, then in this process the unexhausted and inexhaustible character of the relations and forces, as well as that dissolution, must be felt more through this unification than vice versa; for from nothing comes nothing, and if we take this in terms of degree, it would mean as much as that that which proceeds toward negation, and insofar as it disappears from actuality and is not yet something possible, could not act. But the possible, which enters into actuality, as actuality dissolves itself—this acts, and it brings about both the feeling of dissolution and the recollection of what has been dissolved.
(ibid., 310)
We take from these passages the essence of that originary beyng in which the poet comprehends the flight of the gods of old and the emergence of the new gods. These passages attest to how passionately the poet is concerned to think together the passing away as arising, going as a coming, to thoughtfully become master of this conflict—that is, to endure it and think it through.
In all of this, that understanding of beyng that gained power at the commencement of Western philosophy—and in the meantime has, in genuine and non-genuine variations, dominated German thought and knowing, particularly since Meister Eckhart—lies near and is once again powerful. It is the conception of being that we find in a thinker with whom Hölderlin knew himself to have an affinity: Heraclitus. We possess only fragments of his philosophy. With reference to what has been said thus far, yet also with a view to what is to follow, we shall cite several sayings of Heraclitus. We must here forgo any interpretation. See Fragment 51:
οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῶι ὁμολογέει. παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης.
“They fail to understand [namely, those who simply proceed with their existence (Dasein) in an everyday manner] that, and in what way, whatever is by itself at variance is nevertheless in agreement with itself; counter-striving harmony it is, as with the bow and the lyre” [where the ends that stretch apart are tensed together, a tension which, however, first makes possible precisely the release of the arrow and the resonance of the strings, that is: beyng]. And then an example, in Fragment 48:
τῶι οὖν τόξωι ὄνομα βίος, ἔργον δὲ θάνατος.
“The name of the bow is life [βίος], its work, however, death” [the most extreme opposites of beyng together in one].
Yet—as is already clear from the first fragment cited—this comprehension of beyng is closed to everyday understanding: namely, the insight that whatever is most intensely counter-striving is fundamentally the harmony of whatever belongs together. When everyday understanding sees harmony, it is merely superficial agreement that exists temporarily and remains without force. Whence Fragment 54:
ἁρμονίη ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων.
The harmony that does not show itself to the habitual way of seeing—that is, which remains merely a divergence of opposites for such seeing—this concealed harmony is more powerful than that which is visibly manifest, more powerful because it is the power proper to beyng as such. The poet thinks and poetizes in the direction of this ἁρμονίη ἀφανής when he says the words Innigkeit and innig—das innige Volk.1 Yet it must be noted: This ἁρμονία—harmony—is not some indifferent accord, that is, one without tension; it is not at all an agreement that comes about by leveling out and setting aside oppositions, but the converse: Opening up the conflicting parties proper opens up the harmony. It places the conflicting powers into their limits in each case. This placing of limits is not a restrictive limitation, but rather a de-limiting, the emergent setting out and fulfillment of the essence. If all beings thus stand in harmony, then precisely strife and battle must determine everything fundamentally. From this, we can first comprehend Heraclitus through one of his two sayings with which people are generally familiar, but in a corrupt and distorted form: “Battle is the father of all things.” The saying, however, properly and in its entirety reads thus (Fragment 53):
Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους.
“Battle is for all beings indeed the creator, yet for all beings also the ruler, and it indeed makes some manifest as gods, others as humans, bringing some to light as slaves, yet others as masters.” The saying is so profound in content that we cannot even remotely analyze it here. Just two things may be pointed out. Battle is the power that creates beings, yet not in such a way that, once things have come to be by way of it, battle then withdraws from them. Rather, battle also and precisely preserves and governs beings in their essential subsistence. Battle is indeed creator, yet also ruler. Wherever battle ceases as a power of preservation, standstill begins: a leveling out, mediocrity, harmlessness, atrophy, and decline. Such battle, however—and this is the other thing that must briefly be pointed out—is here not arbitrary discord or dissension or mere unrest, but the strife of profound conflict between the essential powers of being, such that in the battle the gods first come to appear as gods, humans as humans, over against one another and thereby in their intimate harmony. There are no gods and humans in themselves, or masters and slaves in themselves who then, because they are such, enter into strife or harmony. Rather, the converse is the case: It is battle that first creates the possibility of decision with regard to life and death. By proving themselves in one way or another, beings in each case first become what and how they are, and this ‘are’—being—prevails in its essence only as such proving. Another saying, Fragment 80, belongs together with the one just cited:
εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὀν πόλεμον ἐόντα ξυνόν, καὶ δίκην ἔριν, καὶ γινόμενα πάντα κατ’ ἔριν καὶ χρεών.
“Yet there is need to know: battle is constantly there participating [in all beings], and therefore ‘right’ is nothing other than strife, and all beings that come into being are by way of strife and necessity.” δίκη ἔρις—right is strife. According to common understanding, right is something inscribed independently somewhere, and with its aid and through its application strife is precisely decided and eliminated. No! Originarily and in keeping with its essence, right first emerges as such in strife; in strife it forms itself, proves itself, and becomes true. It is strife that establishes the sides, and one side is what it is only through the other, in reciprocal self-recognition. For this reason we never grasp a being if we consider only one side, yet neither do we grasp it if we merely add on the other side as well: Rather, we grasp it when we comprehend both sides in their belonging together and know the grounds for such comprehension. Heraclitus expresses this in another saying, Fragment 67:
ὁ θεὸς ἡμέρη εὐφρόνη, χειμὼν θέρος, πόλεμος εἰρήνη, κόρος λιμός, ἀλλοιοῦται δὲ ὅκωσπερ πῦρ, ὁπόταν συμμιγῆι θυώμασιν, ὀνομάζεται καθ’ ἡδονὴν ἑκάστου.
“The God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger; he changes however like fire; every time the latter is mixed with incense it is named [which means: it is] according to the scent [of the incense] at that time.”
Only on the basis of what has been said does that word of Heraclitus—which, like the saying concerning battle as father of all things, is mostly repeated thoughtlessly—gain its proper content: πάντα ῥεῖ: “everything flows.” This does not mean that everything is continually in a process of change and without subsistence, but rather that you cannot take up position on any one side alone, but will be carried, through strife as conflict, to the opposite side. And only in the back and forth of the movement that is battle do beings have their being. Flowing does not here mean simply the stubborn, constant dissolution and annihilation of things, but the converse: The flowing pertaining to conflict, i.e., conflictual harmony, creates precisely subsistence and steadfastness, beyng. (The opposition between Heraclitus and Parmenides does not lie where it is commonly sought.)
If, however, beings can thus never be grasped one-sidedly, then the naming of beings and the saying of beyng finds itself in a peculiar difficulty, above all wherever being as a whole and in its essence is to be said and made manifest. For a word indeed names a being in such or such a way, for example, in Fragment 67: God—war. The word makes the being manifest. Yet at the same time it also conceals, if we stick to this naming taken on its own. For the God is equally ‘peace.’ For this reason, the authentic, essential saying of beings is of a properly primordial kind: It is originarily that kind of saying that is proper to the gods. See Fragment 93:
ὁ ἄναξ, οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει.
“The lord, whose oracle is at Delphi [the God Apollo], neither says, nor does he conceal, but rather beckons.” Originary saying neither merely makes beings directly manifest, nor does it simply conceal them altogether. Rather, this saying is both together in one, and as this one is a beckoning—in which what is said points to the unsaid, and what is unsaid to what is said and to be said—the elements that stand in conflict to the harmony that they are, the harmony to the conflict within which alone harmony oscillates.
‘Beckonings are the language of the gods,’2 we heard earlier from Hölderlin (p 31). This echo of Heraclitus is not accidental. In his poetizing that founds being, Hölderlin’s entire thinking and understanding of beyng was subject to the power of Heraclitus, and remained so from his student years in Tübingen to the years of his greatest creativity and well beyond. The wisdom of Heraclitus was condensed in an almost formulaic manner into the words of Fragment 50: ἓν πάντα εἶναι—One is all. But “One” does not mean uniformity, empty sameness, and “all” does not mean the countless multitude of arbitrary things: rather, ἕν, “One” = harmony, is all—that which arises in each case essentially constitutes beings as a whole as diverse and in conflict with one another.
The power of Heraclitean thought over the poet’s existence [Dasein] is attested to by the fact that well into the period in which the gods with their lightning flashes had spared him already and placed him under the protection of what we, with our fragile and short-sighted standards, call ‘mental illness,’ the poet still had to struggle with that saying, ἓν πάντα.
From the summer of 1807 until his death in the summer of 1843 Hölderlin lived in Tübingen with the carpenter Zimmer. In the 1820s he became friends with the young student Wilhelm Waiblinger, who already visited him in his final year as a high school student, and saw all the manuscripts and drafts of the poet. (Cf. the diary entry of July 3, 1822, VI, 403f.) In 1830 in Rome, Waiblinger wrote an essay entitled “Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry, and Madness” (VI, 409–442). It indeed contains quite a bit of false information concerning superficial details of the poet’s life prior to his illness, details that could not have been known without the study of sources. What is valuable, however, is the depiction of what he himself experienced in his familiarity with the poet over the course of several years. We cite one passage that shows how Heraclitus was still somehow present for the poet (VI, 427):
What he is able to occupy himself with for days at a time is his Hyperion. When I visited him, I heard him a hundred times outside issuing declamations in a loud voice. His pathos is great, and Hyperion almost always lies there open; he often read to me from it. (Cf. II, 188f.)
It is no accident that Hegel who, in the sole philosophical system to be found in Western philosophy, thought the thoughts of Heraclitus in terms of their ground and to their end, was a contemporary and student companion of Hölderlin. Hölderlin and Hegel grew up in a common spiritual world and together struggled to shape it anew. One of them went the path of the poet, the other, that of the thinker. Instead of explaining Hölderlin on the basis of Hegel’s system, as is customary, and of also recording influences of the poet on the thinker, we must learn to experience the great conflict between the two precisely in their most lofty heights and their solitary peaks in each case, in order thus to first comprehend something of their true harmony. We cannot and shall not speak of Hegel within the context and charge of this lecture course, however. Nevertheless, some hints are necessary in order to clarify Hölderlin’s own relationship to Heraclitus proceeding from Hegel, and above all to bring more sharply into relief the sense of Hölderlin’s foundational word, “intimacy.”
The two Swabians Hölderlin and Hegel had been close friends especially since 1790, which marked the beginning of their study of theology together. The third Swabian in the group was Schelling, who was some five years younger than the other two. From the autumn of 1790, the three seminarians even lived together in the same dormitory in Tübingen, the Augustinerstube. In that era, and even in the last century too, it was the custom to record companionship of the heart by entries in a friendship book addressed to one another. We still possess such a friendship book entry of Hölderlin’s for Hegel (VI, 232):
Desire and Love are
the pinions of great deeds.
Tüb. |
|
v. 12 Febr. |
Written for remembrance |
1791 |
your friend |
S(ymbolum). Eν και παν |
M. Hölderlin. |
Hölderlin and Hegel passed their theological exam in the same year, 1793. In the autumn of that same year Hölderlin went to Waltershausen as a house tutor in the residence of Charlotte von Kalb. Hegel went as a house tutor to Bern in Switzerland. Yet they were to spend decisive years in immediate proximity to one another once more, years that were indeed the most decisive for each. From the end of the year 1795, Hölderlin had been a house tutor in Frankfurt am Main. At the beginning of 1797 Hegel too took up a house tutor position in Frankfurt that was arranged for him by Hölderlin. During this Frankfurt period, Hölderlin found the path to his great poetizing, while Hegel found his proper way into philosophy. For both, confrontation with the Greek world stood at the center of their poetizing and thinking during this period. When Hegel in 1801 began to give his lectures in Jena as a Privatdozent in philosophy, he had become someone other than he was before his Frankfurt period, and had become so by virtue of a creative confrontation with Greek philosophy in the proximity of the poet. In the year 1801, Hegel began his proper path of a difficult and great labor of thought. For Hölderlin, the same year is already the year of his greatest creative work. Hegel’s path, after a few detours, led to a prominent career and public acclaim. In 1801, Hölderlin wrote a word in which he knowingly saw himself to be in an altogether opposite predicament (cf. p. 120f.).
Hegel comprehends philosophy as infinite thinking. Finite thinking only ever thinks one side, thinks one-sidedly, finitely. That thinking that thinks one side and the opposing side reciprocally—that is, that thinks their conflict in its unity—is infinite. What is one-sided, finite, is dead. But this one-sided aspect is not to be rejected as a negative nothing, nor blindly passed over; rather, the one side is, as this one, to be held over against the other and to be endured in its opposition. This is why Hegel, on page 26 of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, his first major work, and at the same time his greatest work, which appeared in 1807, writes the following:3
Death, if that is what we wish to call that non-actuality, is what is most terrifying, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. Beauty, lacking strength, hates the understanding for asking of her something she is unable to do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and preserves itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures death and maintains itself within it. Spirit wins its truth only when, within absolute dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive that closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and move on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This tarrying is the magical force that converts the negative into beyng.[6]
This Preface has appeared as a separate publication in the well-known Insel series.4 The Preface was completed the evening before the battle in Jena and Auerstedt. That same day, Hegel saw Napoleon ride through the city.
Hegel here provides a magnificently structured view of the fundamental orientations assumed by the spiritual powers of his era (around 1806), not as an observer, but as one who is conscious of himself being on the verge of launching a major strike. This Preface concludes a work that is governed by the clear knowledge that philosophy is labor. See pages 53f.:5
In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious process of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and tools, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize, and how to pass judgment on philosophy, since he possesses the criterion for doing so in his natural reason—as if he did not likewise possess the measure for a shoe in his own foot. It seems that philosophical competence consists precisely in a lack of knowledge and study, as though philosophy left off where they began. Philosophy is frequently taken to be a formal kind of knowledge, devoid of content, and the insight is sadly lacking that, whatever truth there may be in the content of any discipline or science, it can only deserve the name if such truth has been engendered by philosophy. Let the other sciences try to argue as much as they like without philosophy—without it they can have in them neither life, Spirit, nor truth.[7]
As absolute thinking, Hegel’s thought seeks to bring opposites into a universal fluidity and thus to resolution. Hegel’s infinite thinking, however, is not some thought-up formula, but has arisen from, and is sustained by, a fundamental experience of Western existence [Dasein] and of the essence of its Spirit. To this essence belongs the pain of being torn into extreme oppositions. The knowledge of existence being dismembered in this way is what Hegel calls the “unhappy consciousness.”6 It is the proper spur of Spirit, which drives its happening in the most diverse configurations and stages of world history, and thus drives Spirit to itself, to its essence. Spirit knows itself in philosophy as absolute knowing itself. And in this knowing, it is at the same time truly actualized.
For Hegel, however, the actuality of Spirit in history is the state, and the state can only be what it has to be if it is permeated and sustained by the infinite force of infinite Spirit—that is, if it actualizes universally in a living unity the most extreme opposition between the free independence of the individual and the free power of the community. In his Philosophy of Right, §185,7 Hegel says that former states were not yet able to be founded upon the developed principle of Spirit. The grounds for their decline lie in the fact that the truly infinite force was lacking: the force that is to be found only in that unity that lets the opposition within reason unfold into its entire strength, and that has conquered it, thus fulfilling itself within it and holding the opposition together within itself.
Hegelian thinking is inspired by a new, creative retrieval and enactment of the original thought of Heraclitus. In this retrieval, the entire history of World Spirit that has, in the meantime, run its course is conceptually integrated into the ‘flux’ of this thinking and differentiated in terms of its essential stages.
Hölderlin too, however, was subject to the power of the Heraclitean thought. A later thinker, Nietzsche, would also come under its power. Indirectly, the commencement of German philosophy with Meister Eckhart fundamentally stood under this power. The name Heraclitus is not the title for a philosophy of the Greeks that has long since run its course. Just as little is it the formula for the thinking of some universal world humanity in itself. Presumably, it is the name of a primordial power of Western-Germanic, historical Dasein, and indeed in its first confrontation with the Asiatic.
We are not to think that we could escape from this power, that we could be released from a new confrontation with this primordial power, a confrontation that could perhaps exceed all confrontation hitherto. Certainly, this confrontation is not some leisurely game of scholarly comparison of current views with earlier views, but rather a questioning that is truly necessitated, one that has the task of once again first bringing about a historically spiritual space. This can occur only if such questioning is necessitated from out of the ownmost need of our historical Dasein. How many experience the need and have the courage to know of it is a matter of indifference. The need is in any case. It is the need of needlessness, the need of the complete inability to experience the innermost question-worthiness of Dasein.
Anxiety in the face of questioning lies over the Western world. It binds peoples to worn-out and dilapidated paths and drives them back in flight into their decrepit shells. Where a rupture does occur, they do not want to see that something other than a mere variation on internal political affairs is happening there.
Yet the first thing is that we ourselves comprehend this, and do not forget the need of a century overnight, but learn to know that Hölderlin has in advance founded the need pertaining to a new commencement, so that it awaits us. His saying has coined in advance this need in ever-new forms, and only the poetic word itself, not some extensive and yet lame paraphrase, is capable of maintaining its power to awaken. We said earlier (p. 44ff.) that the inner movement of the poetic saying in the poem “Germania” is a turbulence that tears us away to a determinate location. The poet establishes this locale in a sound and robust word in the first three lines of the poem “Mnemosyne” that we have already mentioned several times (IV, 225):
Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos
Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast
Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren.
We are a sign that is not read
Without pain we are and have almost
Lost our tongue in foreign parts.
Dasein has become foreign to its historical essence, its mission and mandate. Alienated from itself, it remains without vocation, indeterminable and hence “unread.” Its vocation remains absent because the fundamental attunement of standing within the essential conflicts is without attuning force, without pain—that is, without the fundamental form of knowing that belongs to spirit, whence “Without pain we are.” Where there is no attuning opening up the clefts of beyng, there too there is no need of having to name and say, hence: ‘we have almost lost our tongue in foreign parts.’ We are “a sign,” a beckoning that has ossified, that has been forgotten, as it were, by the gods, “a sign” for which interpreters must first be nurtured again.
Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos
Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast
Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren.
We are a sign that is not read
Without pain we are and have almost
Lost our tongue in foreign parts.
The poet stands at such a site of metaphysical need. Yet whoever’s poetizing, thinking, and saying must hold out at such a locale comprehends solitude as a metaphysical necessity. That is, he must know that in this solitude there prevails precisely the supreme intimacy of a belonging to the beyng of his own people, even though appearances may indicate merely one who stands removed and remains unheard. Because the poet has to bear all of this as a human being, we may not be surprised to hear a frightful word from around the end of his year of great creativity, 1801. It is found in that letter to his friend Böhlendorff from December 4, written shortly before his departure for Bordeaux, from where the poet returned half a year later, destroyed and defeated. I shall deliberately include the part that was cited earlier (p. 30), so as to maintain the overall attunement of the letter (V, 321f.):
O friend! The world lies brighter there before me than hitherto, and more grave! it pleases me how things are going, it pleases me, just as in summer when “the ancient, holy father by his gentle hand blesses us with the lightning he shakes down from crimson clouds.” For of all the things I can behold of God, this sign has become for me the chosen one. Before I could rejoice over a new truth, a better view of that which lies over and around us, now I fear that things may go for me in the end as they did for the ancient Tantalus, who bit off more of the gods than he could chew. But I do what I can, and think, when I see, if I too must take my path the same way as the others, that it is godless and crazy to seek a path that would be safe from all danger of attack, and that for death, nature offers no remedy.
And now, farewell, my dear friend, until you hear more from me. I am now full of parting. I have not wept for so long. Yet it has cost me bitter tears, resolving now to leave my fatherland, perhaps forever. For what do I have more precious in the world? But they have no use for me. I wish to, and indeed must, remain German, even if the need of the heart and the need of nourishment should drive me to Tahiti.
“But they have no use for me.” How much longer will the Germans fail to hear this frightful word? Unless a great turning in their Dasein makes them lucid, what then can possibly give them ears to hear? It would, however, run counter to the will of the poet if we were to drag this word from this necessarily discrete letter to his friend out into the public eye. The poet has preserved the same word poetically for us.
. . . Viele sind gestorben
Feldherrn in alter Zeit
Und schöne Frauen und Dichter
Und in neuer
Der Männer viel
Ich aber bin allein.
. . . Many have died
Generals in ancient times
And beautiful women and poets
And in recent times
Many men
But I am alone.
(“The Titans,” IV, 208, lines 7ff.)
The fundamental attunement of Hölderlin’s poetizing is a holy mourning, yet in readied distress. In attuning, it must determine for us the locale from which beings as a whole can be experienced anew, can come to power in a structured way, and be conserved in a genuine knowing. The fundamental attunement cannot remain some floating intimation for us. We have already given thought to our own attuned determinacy and to the individuation of attunement. This mourning and this plaint is a mourning and having plaint together with the “waters of the homeland” (“Germania,” line 4). The distress is that of the Earth as homeland. For this reason, we must seek out the rivers and the Earth as homeland, and apprehend correctly the poet’s telling of them. We shall venture into the sphere of the river poems and select as our first poem the one entitled “The Rhine.”
In our previous meeting we accomplished the transition from the poem “Germania” to the poem “The Rhine.” What was said in our previous meeting by way of concluding our preliminary interpretation of the poem “Germania” shall not be repeated again here. We shall attempt to undertake the transition through renewed reflection on our overall intent. Such reflection is now necessary in order that we learn to comprehend the properly philosophical sense of our endeavors. And such reflection is also now possible, given that in our interpretation we have covered a certain stretch of our path, such that deliberations on fundamental matters of principle will no longer remain vacuous.
Superficially considered, the titles of the two poems already point to a certain connection: “Germania” as the general and “The Rhine” as a particular in relation to this general. Even if this way of conceiving matters presents the connection in a highly indeterminate and even inappropriate manner, we can nevertheless see in this an indication that we are keeping within the same sphere of poetizing. Admittedly, what we have presented thus far, if it has clarified anything at all, must have made clear to us that the extrinsic form of the poems and the poetizing that belongs to them are altogether divergent, their unity notwithstanding. In terms of the actual poetizing in the two poems, the statement that “The Rhine” represents the particular in relation to “Germania” tells us nothing, and is indeed meaningless, even though it remains correct that the Rhine river constitutes one particular detail of the German land. By this route we shall never become aware of the connection between the poems and the unity of their poetizing.
In order to bring about the correct transition from “Germania” to “The Rhine,” we must revisit those domains opened up by our interpretation thus far. Over and beyond a summary that recaps what has been said thus far, we wish thereby to determine more precisely the intent of the lecture course.
It may have been noticeable that we avoided giving an explanation, let alone any justification, of our own manner of proceeding in the interpretation. We did mention right at the outset that our ‘procedure in general’ was to thoughtfully grasp the poetic, without thereby installing a philosophical system as the standard or even trying to glean such a system from the poetizing. Furthermore, we emphasized that our ‘procedure in particular’ should avoid a mere process of the ongoing narration of the poet’s life and works, but should rather take as its initial point of engagement what in truth should be named last of all: the “fatherland”—that is, the innermost and most far-reaching historical vocation of the people. The goal is thereby set as the highest of all. What we seek to elaborate directly is precisely related to this, yet is by far more provisional.
We first wish to find a point of entry into the domain in which this poetizing unfolds its power, and not, therefore, to become acquainted with many of the different poems so as to construct a world picture from there. Within the domain and power of the poetizing, we must first of all determine the locale from which and toward which the power of the poetizing opens up and maintains its sway. This metaphysical locale of the poetizing is circumscribed by what we set into relief as the fundamental attunement: a holy mourning, yet in readied distress.
To the extent that we have been able to say something thus far about the general essence of what we are calling ‘fundamental attunement,’ this has occurred as a negative gesture: (1) Attunement, and especially fundamental attunement, is no mere feeling, not some epiphenomenon of psychic lived experience. (2) Attunement cannot be comprehended at all coming from the perspective of the doctrine of soul and spirit that has been passed down; rather, it is precisely a look into the essence of fundamental attunement that compels us to relinquish the commonplace representation of the kind of being pertaining to the human being, and to ground it more primordially. Why this is so, and how the concept of human existence [Dasein] transforms itself starting from here, cannot be indicated here. Presumably, however, with regard to the said fundamental attunement of the poetizing of “Germania,” we may provide some pointers for our thinking that can help us to enter the proximity of the concept of a fundamental attunement.
The fundamental attunement of a holy mourning, yet in readied distress, alone places us at once before the fleeing, the remaining absent, and the arriving of the gods—yet not as though the said being of the gods were set before us or represented in the attunement. Attunement does not represent something or set it before us: Rather, it transports our Dasein out into an attuned relation to the gods in their being thus and thus. Insofar as the gods thoroughly govern historical Dasein and beings as a whole, however, the attunement at the same time, from out of this transport, transports us specifically into those relations that have evolved toward the Earth, the countryside, and the homeland. The fundamental attunement is accordingly a transporting out toward the gods and a transporting into the Earth at the same time. In attuning in this manner, it opens up beings as such in general, and this opening up of the manifestness of beings is indeed so originary that, by virtue of the attunement, we remain inserted into and bound into beings as opened up. This means that we do not first have representations of the gods from somewhere—representations and a representing that we then furnish with affects and feelings. Rather, attunement, as transporting out and transporting into, first opens up that realm within which something can first be specifically set before us or represented.
Only on the basis of a certain suppression and blocking of attunement—on the basis of an attempted, apparent forgetting thereof—do we arrive at what we call the mere representing of things and objects. Yet such representation is not what comes first, as though something like a world were built up layer by layer, as it were, by a heaping up and accumulation of represented things. A world can essentially never be opened up or glued together as the subsequent combining of a manifold of perceived things, but is that which is originarily and primordially manifest in advance, within which this or that can first come toward us. The opening up of world occurs in fundamental attunement. The power of a fundamental attunement that transports us out, transports us into, and thereby opens up is thus at the same time grounding. That is, it places Dasein into its grounds and before its abysses. The fundamental attunement determines for our Dasein the locale and time of its being, a locale and time that are manifest to Dasein itself. (Locale is not to be taken spatially, nor time temporally, in the usual sense.)
By virtue of the power of fundamental attunement, the Dasein of the human being is, in accordance with its essence, exposure in the midst of beings that are manifest as a whole, an exposure that Dasein must take on, so as at the same time to take on the preserving of those beings that are manifest as a whole within such exposure. In so doing, Dasein in one way or another conserves within it the possibility of a history—that is, fulfills or squanders this possibility. Dasein is delivered over to beings as such: both to that being that it itself is, and to those beings that it itself is not. Therein lies the distinction of human Dasein: that it not only ‘is,’ but that all being must be taken up by it in one way or another, sustained and guided by it. Even indifference and forgottenness are merely ways in which Dasein delivers itself over to being as such. This fundamental trait of human Dasein—that it must, insofar as it is, be concerned in one way or another with being—we call care. In giving it this name, we are not raising to the level of a metaphysical concept or making into a worldview one of those feelings familiar in the everyday realm—fear, anxiety, care, and the like. Rather, it is the fundamental experience of the essence of the historical Dasein of the human being that in the first instance demands to be named and that, whenever it is accomplished, can be conceived only from out of this origin.
If we ponder the essence of fundamental attunement and its power to transport us out and transport us into, to open up, and to ground, then it immediately becomes clear that attunement is what is least of all subjective or a so-called interior of the human being; for fundamental attunement is, by contrast, the way in which we are originarily transposed into the expanse of beings and the depths of beyng. The human being’s going into him- or herself does not here mean staring at or monitoring one’s private lived experiences; rather, it means going out into one’s exposure to beings as manifest. Only because fundamental attunement originarily transports and transposes us can it also limit Dasein, restricting it to the sphere of those everyday beings that are closest to us, letting Dasein drift along on the surface of beyng. For fundamental attunement is in each case this or that attunement: not some fixed attribute, but a happening. Human Dasein is indeed always attuned, if only in the manner of a bad or disgruntled mood, or in the peculiar manner of that mood that is familiar to us as the dull, vacuous, and dreary lack of attunement, familiar to us in the everyday realm as that which we express in the statement “I’m not up for anything”—the primordial form of boredom, which for its part can unfold into a fundamental attunement. Because Dasein—insofar as it is—is attuned, for this reason an attunement can in each case be changed into a different one only by way of a counter-attunement. And only a fundamental attunement is capable of bringing about a change of attunement from the ground up—that is, a transformation of Dasein that amounts to a complete recreating of its exposure to beings, and thereby to a recoining of beyng.
The fact that, within modern thinking, and already prior to it, attunements are counted as something ‘subjective’—as merely accompanying us in each case and as what are least graspable—is no accident, nor a mere inattentiveness or even incapacity on the part of psychological inspection. This is the case if only because experiencing the essence of attunement remains impossible so long as one views the issue psychologically and portrays the human being as a subject that is, in addition, surrounded by so-called objects—though why, one really does not know. As though subject and object were fixed blocks lying present at hand, between which, subsequently and in addition, various threads were stretched, including those of attunements. The opposite is true. It is the originary character and power at any given time of a dominant and prevailing fundamental attunement that first opens up that realm within which the human being can differentiate himself from nonhuman beings, that realm within which the borders can first be drawn between what is to be called subjective and objective—granted that one may still attribute a justified legitimacy to this distinction at all, once the essence of fundamental attunement has been comprehended.
In attunement there occurs the inaugural exposure to beings. This entails at the same time that the Dasein of the human being is in itself already transposed into the Dasein of others: that it is, as it is, only in being with others. Dasein is essentially being with one another, being for and against one another. In accordance with the world that is opened up at any given time in a dominant fundamental attunement, and in keeping with the manifestness of that wherein Dasein is grounded, it finds its basis and the realms of its decisions and of the modes of its comportment. This being with one another of Dasein is, in keeping with the fundamental character of Dasein, in itself historical, and thereby bound to the powers of history and configured by them.
The fundamental attunement dominant at any given time, and the opening up of beings as a whole occurring in it, is the origin that attunes and determines what we are calling the truth of a people. The truth of the people is the manifestness of being as a whole that prevails at a given time, in accordance with which the sustaining, configuring, and guiding powers receive their respective rank and bring about their attuned accord. The truth of a people is that manifestness of being out of which the people knows what it wills historically in willing itself, in willing to be itself.
The fundamental attunement—which is to say, the truth of the Dasein of a people—is originarily founded by the poet. The beyng of beings thus unveiled, however, is comprehended and configured and thereby first opened up as beyng by the thinker, and the beyng that has been comprehended in this way is set into the ultimate and preeminent gravity of beings—that is, into a determinate, attuned historical truth—by the people being brought to itself as a people. This occurs through the creating of the state accorded the people in its essence—a creating accomplished by the creator of the state. This entire occurrence, however, has its own times, and thereby its own temporal unfolding. The powers of poetizing, of thinking, of the creation of the state—especially in eras of developed history—act in both forward and backward directions, and are not at all calculable. They can act in unrecognized ways over a long period of time, alongside one another without bridges and yet to the benefit of one another, in each case in accordance with the different unfolding of power belonging to poetizing, thinking, and the action of statesmanship, and in different degrees of publicness in each case. These three creative forces of historical Dasein act to bring about that to which we can alone attribute greatness.
Everything great is unique, yet this uniqueness has its own manner of steadfastness—that is, of historically transformed and altered return. ‘Unique’ here means: precisely not present at hand on one occasion and then past, but rather, having been and thereby prevailing within the constant possibility of a transformed unfolding of its essence, and accordingly within the propensity to be discovered and to become powerful ever anew and in an inexhaustible manner.
What is small has its steadfastness too: It is the blunt obstinacy of the everyday, of the ever-the-same, which is steadfast only because it closes itself off and must close itself off against all transformation. The uniformity of the everyday is as necessary as the uniqueness of essential saying, thinking, and acting. If, however, we take the measures for historical beyng and knowing from the everyday alone, then we must constantly reside in a realm that is completely out of joint. In that case, we never comprehend that Sophocles, for example, can, and indeed must, one day also be interpreted otherwise; that Kant can, and indeed must, be comprehended otherwise; that Frederick the Great can and must one day be portrayed otherwise. Everyday opinion thinks that there must be a Sophocles in himself, a Kant in himself, a Frederick the Great in himself, in the same way as the desk here is a desk and the chalk, chalk. Supposing that there were, for example, an interpretation and depiction of Sophocles’ poetizing in itself, and suppose this interpretation could be seen by Sophocles: Then he would have to and indeed would find this interpretation boring in the highest degree. For he did not poetize so that some inconsequential, world-poor imitation could be erected somewhere.
Is there, then, no historiographical truth? This conclusion is premature. There is historiographical truth. Yet in order to comprehend it as such, those who seek to do so must themselves first stand within the power of history. Then they know that a historiographical truth ‘in itself’—in the superficial, everyday sense of the correctness of statements—is nonsensical, more nonsensical than a square circle. At most, there could be an objective truth about history in itself for an Absolute Spirit. Yet for such a Spirit, something like this is impossible for a different reason, namely, because historiographical science is superfluous for it and contrary to its essence.
What is great has historical endurance because it is unique. What is great has greatness because, and insofar as, it in each case has something greater beyond itself. Such being able to have something greater beyond itself is the mystery of that which is great. Whatever is small is incapable of this, even though, properly speaking, it most directly and comfortably bears the greatest distance from that which is great. Yet whatever is small wills only itself; that is, it wants to be small, and its mystery is no mystery, but rather a ploy and the irksome deviousness of diminishing and casting suspicion upon, and thereby of assimilating to itself, all that is not of its kind.
The opening up of truth that configures and shapes the historical Dasein of a people occurs in and from out of a fundamental attunement whose originary character, clarity, extent, and binding force are never brought to bear at a single stroke. The fundamental attunement itself, however, must first of all be awakened. For this battle to transform the attunements that still dominate and perpetuate themselves at any given time, the first-born must be sacrificed. They are those poets who, in their saying, ahead of time tell of the futural beyng of a people in their history and, in so doing, necessarily go unheard.
Hölderlin is such a poet. The fundamental attunement of a holy mourning, yet in readied distress, that is awakened in his late and most mature poetizing, founds the metaphysical locale of our futural historical beyng, if indeed it fights its way toward the vocation of its greatness. The flight, absence, and arrival of the gods of the people are opened up in this fundamental attunement. Our historical Dasein is thereby placed into the supreme need and into a decision that lies far before and beyond the question of whether it will be Christendom or not, of whether there is to be a schism in denominations or not; before and beyond all such things because it is the question of whether, and in what way, the people grounds its historical Dasein upon an originarily unitary experience of being bound in return to the gods, and can thus first comprehend and preserve its vocation. The question is not, for instance, that of how a supposedly already-existent people comes to terms with a religion or denomination that has been passed down. What is at issue is the true appearing or non-appearing of the God in the being of the people from out of the need of its beyng, and for such beyng. This appearing must become the fundamental event. Otherwise, all that remains is confusion and the persistent illusion of an equalizing in which nothing occurs.
. . . wenn aber
Ein Gott erscheint, auf Himmel und Erd und Meer
Kömmt allerneuende Klarheit.
. . . but when
A God appears, upon heaven and Earth and sea
Comes all-renewing clarity.
(“Conciliator, you who never believed . . . ,” IV, 162, lines 11ff.)
Hölderlin knows of the entirely singular character and gravity of the need and vocation that prevail in his fundamental attunement. Cf. “Bread and Wine,” strophe VII (IV, 123f., lines 109–124):
Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter,
110
Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt.
Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten,
Ob wir leben, so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns.
Denn nicht immer vermag ein schwaches Gefäss sie zu fassen,
Nur zu Zeiten erträgt göttliche Fülle der Mensch.
Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben. Aber das Irrsaal
Hilft, wie Schlummer und stark machet die Noth und die Nacht,
Biss dass Helden genug in der ehernen Wiege gewachsen,
Herzen an Kraft, wie sonst, ähnlich den Himmlischen sind.
Donnernd kommen sie drauf. Indessen dünket mir öfters
120
Besser zu schlafen, wie so ohne Genossen zu seyn,
So zu harren und was zu thun indess und zu sagen,
Weiss ich nicht und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?
Aber sie sind, sagst du, wie des Weingotts heilige Priester,
Welche von Lande zu Land zogen in heiliger Nacht.
But friend! we come too late. The gods indeed live,
110
Yet over our heads in another world above.
Endlessly they are at work there and seem little to heed
Whether we live, so greatly do the heavenly protect us.
For not always can a weak vessel grasp them,
Only at times can the human withstand divine fullness.
Life follows as a dream of them. Yet errancy
Helps, like slumber, and need and the night make strong,
Until heroes enough have grown in a cradle of ore,
Hearts in their strength, as before, approach the heavenly.
Thundering then they come. Yet often it seems to me
120
Better to sleep, than to be thus without companions,
To wait in such manner and what to do and to say meantime,
I know not and wherefore poets in time of need?
Yet they are, you say, like the wine god’s holy priests,
Who journeyed from land to land in holy night.
Here, holy mourning borders on complete hopelessness and despair. Yet at this border there ensues the most profound turnaround; there arises the courage to hold out in the storms of the gods and to await the lightening flash—that is, to sow such ability to wait into the Dasein of the people in foretelling it poetically.
The interpretation we have provided of the fundamental attunement of mourning leaves little room for the misunderstanding to arise that what is at issue here is a passive immersion in some impotent, general melancholy. As a readiness that is an awaiting, mourning is not only altogether remote from such melancholy, but we must pay heed in general to the fact that, in accordance with its intimacy, there lies contained within the essence of the fundamental attunement a counter-attunement. Hölderlin elucidates this on one occasion in an epigram entitled “Sophocles” (IV, 3):
Viele versuchten umsonst, das Freudigste freudig zu sagen,
Hier spricht endlich es mir, hier in der Trauer sich aus.
Many tried in vain to joyfully say the most joyful,
Here finally it speaks to me, here within mourning.
The counter-attunement of joy, however, is here not just something like the opposite side that also lies present at hand, but is rather that joy that is brought to attune within mourning. More precisely, this attuning that thus oscillates in such conflict is characteristic of fundamental attunement. Such attunement in each case attunes, from the ground up, all essential attunements, and, in its own way in each case, determines and attunes their rank as well.
If, here and now, we endeavor to cultivate the correct hearing for this telling of the poet’s, then we do so because the fundamental experience of the need pertaining to modern thinking—of its uncomprehended anxiety in the face of a real questioning after that which is properly worthy of question—opens our eyes to the need of this poet, and does so because one need contains the other within it. It therefore remains superfluous to provide lengthy assurances that what calls upon us to concern ourselves with precisely this poetizing, in the context of a far-reaching, fundamental task of philosophy, is neither some particular orientation of aesthetic taste, nor some superficial predilection for the poet and his work, nor even the necessity (which certainly exists) of appropriating this work.
The reflections just provided have been undertaken with a view to helping us to understand the transition from the poem “Germania” to the poem “The Rhine” from out of the sense of the task we have set ourselves. If this transition is to continue this task and to make it more incisive—and this is what it seeks to accomplish—then the selection of the poem “The Rhine” must be intended to intensify and enrich the unfolding of the fundamental attunement that we have initiated—which is to say, however, that it is to bring closer to our comprehension the beyng that is opened up in this attunement.
The poem “The Rhine” belongs to the river poems. Earlier (p. 81ff.>), we already pointed to the sense and significance of the rivers and of the telling of them. “[T]he yearning waters / Of the homeland”1 assume an essential role in the grounding opening up of the world of historical Dasein. Cf. “The Ister” (IV, 221f., lines 49ff.):
. . . Umsonst nicht gehn
Im Troknen die Ströme. Aber wie? Sie sollen nemlich
Zur Sprache seyn. Ein Zeichen braucht es,
Nichts anderes, schlecht und recht, damit es Sonn’
Und Mond trag’ im Gemüth’, untrennbar,
Und fortgeh, Tag und Nacht auch, und
Die Himmlischen warm sich fühlen aneinander.
Darum sind jene auch
Die Freude des Höchsten. Denn wie käm er sonst
Herunter?
. . . Not in vain do
Rivers run in the dry. Yet how? Namely, they are
To be to language. A sign is needed,
Nothing else, plain and simple, so that sun
And moon may be borne in mind, inseparable,
And pass on, day and night too, and
The heavenly feel themselves warm by one another.
Whence those ones too
Are the joy of the Highest. For how else would he
Descend?
The river poems are neither descriptions of nature nor mere symbolic images, say for human existence [Dasein]. Both do, indeed, appear to play a role here. Yet there is another meaning and reason for this, and this is the case because the poet’s founding telling compels beings as a whole into a new projection: nature, history, and the gods. We shall necessarily go astray with regard to this poetic struggle for an anticipatory configuring that shapes in advance the whole of beyng so long as we take our guiding thread from commonplace views of the world in appropriating this poetizing, or from views that we justify to ourselves by appealing to philosophical systems, such as German Idealism.
What we have here is not an indeterminate confluence of the realms of nature, history, and the gods in some murky pantheism; nor is it an arraying of nature, history, and the gods alongside or on top of one another as circumscribed realms or fields. It is neither a mere renewal of the ancient picture of the world nor the mixing of such a world picture with some indeterminate, Enlightenment Christendom. What we must know here is this: The poet experiences poetically a creative decline of the truth of beyng hitherto, which is to say that in the dissolution thereof, new and youthful powers captivate him and tear him onward. Yet all this happens poetically. We should not, therefore, be of the opinion that such beyng, as shaped in the telling of the poet, could be readily dressed in the cloak of a ‘philosophical’ discourse, so as to transform the poetic saying into the thinker’s knowing by such procedures, and from there into a useful and profitable knowledge of things.
If a task here stands ready for philosophy, then such a task can be determined only from out of philosophy’s ownmost necessities—that is, in terms of what is transmitted in the Greco-Germanic mission, from out of which thinking, from its own origin, may enter into an originary dialogue with poetizing and its need. Our interpretation here serves only the poet; it leaves thinking’s dimension and its necessities—that is, its need—knowingly unsaid.
1. “In beautiful blue . . . ,” IV, 25, line 32.
1. Tübingen, 1977 (14th edition). Gesamtausgabe Bd. 2. Frankfurt, 1977. §§65ff. Translated as Being and Time by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
2. Fragments on the motif of the “Titans,” IV, 217, line 67; “Remarks on Antigone,” V, 254; and elsewhere.
1. “The Archipelago,” IV, 91, line 90.
2. “Rousseau,” IV, 135, lines 39f.
3. Fourth edition, 34. Hegel, Werke, Jubiläumsausgabe. Edited by H. Glockner. Volume 2. Stuttgart, 1964.
4. Leipzig, 1920. Frankfurt, 1964.
5. Fourth edition, 61f.
6. Hegel, Werke. Volume 2, 166ff. (II, 158ff.). Stuttgart 1964, 4th edition.
7. Hegel, Werke. Volume 7, 265f. (VIII, 249f.). Stuttgart 1964, 4th edition.
1. “Patmos,” first version, IV, 190, lines 23f.