The Poet As Destiny The Inaug

The Poet as Destiny:
The Inauguration of Heidegger’s Dialogue with Holderlin
A Dissertation
Presented in
Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
November, 2007
BY
Julia A. Davis
Department of Philosophy
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois
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ABSTRACT
The Poet As Destiny:
The Inauguration o f Heidegger’s Dialogue with Holderlin
Julia A. Davis
This dissertation offers an analysis of Heidegger’s 1934/35 inaugural lecture
course on the poet Friedrich Holderlin, Holderlin’s Hymns “Germania ” and “The
Rhine. ” It combines exegesis of Heidegger’s individual interpretations of Holderlin’s
hymns, while arguing that Heidegger’s radical reconceptualization o f Holderlin as a
destiny is central for understanding Heidegger politics. It thus advances the thesis put
forward by Dominique Janicaud in The Shadow o f That Thought that Heidegger’s
thinking undergoes a “tearing revision” in the 1930s. Chapter One locates this revision in
the tension between Dasein’s individual fate and its common destiny in Being and Time,
arguing that Heidegger’s privileging of death generates an insoluble impasse evident in
Dasein’s inability to carry through on the disclosure of its authentic possibilities in
language. The dissertation makes the strong claim that Being and Time generates an
aporia between language and death that informs and situates Heidegger’s subsequent turn
to Holderlin as a destiny. It takes up this claim through a series of chapters that focus on
the way the “Germania ” and “The Rhine ” course both revises and inaugurates a
terminological vocabulary sustained in Heidegger’s later thinking. Chapter Two explores
what Heidegger means by “dialogue,” understanding this in terms o f a chain of mediation
between poet, thinker, state-creator, and people. Central to this is Heidegger’s analysis of
Holderlin’s mediation of the gods’ language through Holderlin’s founding of
fundamental attunement. Chapter Three extends this analysis by tracing out the disclosive
movement of the attunement “holy affliction, mourning yet readied” in relation to the
gods and the Earth. This chapter asserts that Holderlin’s poetry makes the Earth available
in a way that allows Heidegger to answer the aporia generated by language and death in
Being and Time. Chapter Four considers what it means for Heidegger to assert Holderlin
as a destiny through an interpretation o f the poet as demigod and between. The
dissertation includes original work on Heidegger’s analyses of holy mourning, the
demigod in connection to the “as”-structure, and Being’s need and use of Dasein. The
dissertation was directed by Professor William McNeill.
To those I have lost and found in the course of writing,
and especially to the memory of my parents,
Bette C. Irelan Gaffney and Thomas H. Gaffney
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................................... iii
ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED W O RK S.................................................v
PREFACE Defense Presentation....................................................................... viii
INTRODUCTION The Poet As Destiny: The Inauguration of Heidegger’s

Dialogue with Holderlin.................................................................. 1
Chapter One Synopsis............................................................................................................ 12
CHAPTER ONE “Together in the Same World”: Ambiguity and

Community in Being and Tim e................................................... 18
Ambiguity and Community

The Undecidability of “the Same World”
Idle Talk and the Making Ambiguous of Anxiety
The Aporia of Anxiety
Chapter Two Synopsis...........................................................................................................57
CHAPTER TWO “Since we are a dialogue”: Holderlin’s Mediation

o f L anguage...................................................................................63
Holderlin As Mediator
“The Most Double-Edged and Most Ambiguous”
Ambiguity and Overhearing
Dialogue As Correspondence
Chapter Three S ynopsis......................................................................................................102
CHAPTER THREE Holy Affliction and Fidelity to the Earth: Mourning,

Community, Possibility.............................................................110
The Holistic Disclosivity o f Attunement
Abiding In Mourning
Readiness and the Turn in Temporality
Chapter Four Synopsis........................................................................................................150
CHAPTER FOUR The Poet As Dem igod....................................................................157
Divine Excess
The Demigod As Between
Lack As Excess
Creativity As Self-limitation
CONCLUSION/FURTHER W O RK ..................................................................................180
APPENDICES
Appendix A “Germania,”
translated by Michael Hamburger..............................................................187
Appendix B “The Rhine,”

translated by Michael Hamburger..............................................................191
Appendix C The Poet As Destiny

Dissertation Defense Presentation.............................................................195
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................ 199
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A cknowledgements
This dissertation has taken so long (and is the final outcome o f several changes of
direction) that I need to thank people not only for their intellectual input and
philosophical contributions but for their patience. I thus owe a special debt of gratitude to
my director William McNeill, who not only made concrete and helpful suggestions on the
individual chapters as they were being formulated, but who more importantly exemplified
a style of Heideggerian scholarship and close reading that I have attempted to follow. I
am particularly grateful for the opportunity to have worked with him on the translation of
Heidegger’s “The Ister” lecture course, which was really the beginning of this project. It
was Michael Naas who helped me during my first year of graduate school with my
writing and who was willing to show a certain confidence in me that was important then
and has remained important. (I continue to work on both the writing and the confidence.)
David Krell has taken me on walks in Merzhausen, St. Ulrich, Chicago and Walla Walla
during which he has given me a few sentences or a few words that have always been
exactly right, but that have taken me years to catch up with. I owe thanks to Elizabeth
Rottenberg for her willingness to sign onto my committee as well as for the generosity of
spirit that meant her first words to me were, “What is your next project?”
The chapter “The Poet as Demigod” appeared in Continental Philosophy Review
no. 38 (2006) under the title “Need Delimited: The Creative Otherness o f Heidegger’s
Demigods”; I thank the editor, Anthony J. Steinbock, for his permission to use it here.
iii
Closer to home I wish to thank my friends: Rene Dubay for taking such good care
of me and for her beautiful daughters; Karen Feldman for intense conversations and for a
model of what it means to do most everything in a much smarter way; Rebecca Hanrahan
for consistently good advice; and Sue Tarver for horses and for her own matter of fact
bravery and competence.
I don’t know how to thank Cynthia Witman; the fact of my finishing says it all.
But it was Cynthia who taught me how to have faith and to work through everything else
with the motto “it will take what it needs to.” (There is no more strict a rule.)
Finally, this dissertation would not have been possible without the love and
conversations of my husband, Tom Davis, who has been there with me and through
everything.
iv
V
Abbreviations
Works by Heidegger in German
EHD Erlauterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Pages 1-

143, zweite Auflage, 1951. Pages 152-193, vierte Auflage, 1971. The page
numbers of the second edition, given in the margin o f the fourth edition,
will be cited.
EM Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1966.
GA26 Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz.

Gesamtausgabe Bd. 26. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978.
GA29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 29/30.

Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981.
GA39 Holderlins Hymnen »Germanien« und »Der Rhein«. Gesamtausgabe Bd.

39. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980.
GA52 Holderlins Hymne »Andenken«. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 42. Frankfurt:

Klostermann, 1982.
GA53 Holderlins Hymne »DerIster«. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 53. Frankfurt:

Klostermann, 1983.
GA65 Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Gesamtausgabe Bd. 65.

Frankfurt am Main, 1989.
GA66 Besinnung. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 66. Frankfurt am Main, 1997.
H Holzwege. Klostermann, 1972.
SZ Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1967.
UK Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks. Introduction by Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960.
Works by Heidegger in Translation
B Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London:

Continuum, 2006.
EHP Elucidations o f Holderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. Amherst:

Humanity Books, 2000.
BT Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, N.Y: State

University of New York Press, 1996.
FCM The Fundamental Concepts o f Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude.

Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995.
HHI Holderlin’s Hymn “The Ister. ” Translated by William McNeill and Julia
Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
IM An Introduction into Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
MFL The Metaphysical Foundations o f Logic. Translated by Michael Heim.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
OWA “The Origin of the Work of Art,” translated by Albert Hofstadter in Basic
Writings. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1977.
PLT Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York:

Harper and Row Publishers, 1971.
Preface
Dissertation Defense Presentation
I want to thank you for coming, and I want to acknowledge that I have crafted my
remarks today with the specific aim of addressing the graduate students. This is for two
reasons: First, in the last few years I’ve noticed that I ’ve been approaching philosophical
material—the activity of my own reading and writing—first as a teacher, with the result
that I make better, more risky structural moves in the effort to build to a point while
letting that point remain inconclusive. Thus in telling my first year Core students at
Whitman College that I would be absent today to defend my dissertation, and was
nervous about that defense, I had one student blurt out, “You mean you’re still a
student?,” and another say, “Can’t you just go in and teach?” Recalling Heidegger’s
reference to the figure of the teacher in What is Called Thinking?, now that I’m finally
(almost) done, I would give anything to be with you in Professor McNeill’s Being and
Time seminar because now I actually understand what it means to be a student.
My second point concerns how I will be presenting the content and philosophical
stakes of a narrowly defined project on Heidegger. Interestingly, it too has a connection
to my first year students in that for the last month—from Gilgamesh to just this week on
Euripides’ Bacchae—we have been circling around the topic of destiny. Almost without
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exception, my students feel compelled to go back to destiny in their papers as a trumping
explanatory move; they are fascinated by the way even the gods are made subordinate to
destiny, by the way destiny is preeminently related to death, suffering, and what we
explore in class as “big gestures,” at the same time they don’t trust destiny as a ‘move,’
and are even repelled by it, which in turn leads them into glib generalization. “What is the
real reason Xerxes invades Greece?” Answer: “Destiny.” In doing all the work, the
concept of destiny does, for my students, no work. So without exception, I write in their
margins, “Where is the friction here?” “What is the larger configuration of concern that
destiny tries to think?” “What, as a structure o f radical limitation, makes it repellant to
you?” “How can you think that structure as something different from a purely mechanical
causal determinism?” “If destiny is more complicated than causal determinism, how is
the experience of limitation also more complicated?” “Where—and how—does it come
to locate human beings?”
You can guess where this might go with Heidegger. The real work of this
dissertation has been to try to make honestly intelligible what it means for Heidegger to
declare Holderlin the destiny (Geschick) of the German people, beginning with the
1934/35 lecture course, Holderlin’s Hymns “Germania ” and “The Rhine ” (GA39), and
continuing on—no matter what other lecture courses, poets, and principles with which he
was engaged—as a kind of parallel track throughout his entire thinking life.
Parallel track is not quite right. It is the track, and Heidegger says so, repeatedly,
and often in unusual and deeply personal places like the Der Spiegel interview (his
reputation), his introductory remarks to the recording o f his reading o f Holderlin’s poems
(his voice), and the travel sketch dedicated to his wife, Elfrida, from their trip to Greece
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(the returns of old age). Even in more regular contexts, Heidegger often gives Holderlin
the final word, and gives it in a way less invitation than stamp or seal—the sealing o f a
fate—not so much posing Holderlin as a question, as soliciting him as the answer. This,
of course, presupposes that “we” (and I put this in quotes) are able to undergo the
transformations demanded by the work of coming to that answer. It was Heidegger’s
great loneliness, and his real failure, that “we”—because there is no “we” without the
submission to Holderlin’s poetry—are not yet ready and may never be ready. To cite the
epigraph to my dissertation, which is taken from Heidegger’s 1963 recording of his
reading of Holderlin’s poems, “Will we ever grasp this? Holderlin’s poetry is a destiny
for us. It waits for the day when mortals will correspond to it.”
This is not a normal philosophical commitment to a poet or a poetry, whatever we
might take any of these words to mean, but especially the word “commitment.” My initial
philosophical attraction to Heidegger already as an undergraduate was, precisely, to what
I perceived to be his commitment to language and poetry, a commitment that exceeded
the “How does a text work?” of standard literary criticism, to the new world we find
ourselves in when the text does its work—however that happens. And in Heidegger’s
elucidations of Holderlin, such work happens suddenly and irrevocably, as an excess that
restores, like the way one looks down to discover that the ground—a ground—has
already risen up beneath one’s feet. This is something that comes always as a surprise,
and is captured by Heidegger in the phrase “to see again as though for the first time” and
in his remarkable analysis of greeting as a being greeted in the 1942 “Andenken” lecture
course.
Preface
Not a normal commitment, then, but a profound and attractive sensitivity to the
internal relationship between language and disclosure evident in the phrase “as though for
the first time,” which, for Heidegger, is neither about analogy nor imagination, but about
possibility, about the possibilizing of language, which Holderlin in a privileged sense er-
findet—invents in the finding—and findingly founds as what remains.
But to press the question, “Where is the friction here?” The friction is that this
“not normal” commitment possesses a dirty flip-side that goes back to a trumping
explanatory move and “big gestures” so extreme that Heidegger, in the words o f one
commentator, veers off into a “hyperbolic unreality.” (For example, the marginal
comment to “The Ister” lecture course about the birth o f Heidegger’s grandfather in a
“sheepfold” [read: “manger”] near the Upper Danube during the time Holderlin was
writing “The Ister” hymn.) In my effort to think through what critics are saying when
they charge Heidegger with “interpretative violence” (I’m thinking o f Paul de Man and
Veronique Foti in particular), I’m returned to my students’ repellence at the totalizing
gesture implied by destiny, which, if one consents to it, seems to subordinate all other
concerns to a single track. At best, this leads Heidegger into a sustained reductive reading
of a major German poet. At worst, it is self-aggrandizing, bordering on the messianic, and
perhaps— depending upon how much sheer willfulness one accords to Heidegger—even
diabolical. At base, it appears simply inhuman.
This is the friction that I have wanted to address in my dissertation: Heidegger
approaches Holderlin according to a set of interpretive commitments that exceed literary
criticism, and I want the relationship between philosophy and poetry to be more than
commentary in its capacity to inaugurate worlds. At the same time, however, and to put
Preface
this in Heideggerian terms, in declaring Holderlin a destiny, Heidegger would appear to
accord himself the power to “get back behind” thrownness, which is, of course, the
violent fantasy of being able to give oneself one’s own ground.
In Being and Time, Heidegger makes clear that this is something that Dasein
cannot do, and I believe him. Thus while the projective disclosivity of Holderlin’s poetry
has the power to recast Dasein’s thrownness—this is the inauguration and iteration of the
“to see again as though for the first time”—the work o f art cannot supply the terms o f its
own reception, which first become available only through its “happening.” Heidegger’s
dialogue with Holderlin attempts to supply the terms of such reception, and in so doing,
outpace the always errant course of a contingent historical grounding, which places
Dasein into the limits of its finitude exactly in the thwarting, shattering, and rebounding
of the will to ground. Heidegger acknowledges this as the irreducible vulnerability of a
poetic thinking and thinking poetizing, and attempts to maintain a deferred, but expectant
open-endedess that is also an aspect of how the “Germania” and “The Rhine” course
engages the question of creative untimeliness. Yet there remains the fa c t o f Heidegger’s
privileging Holderlin, a privileging that extends to the fact that it is also Heidegger who
alone is in the position to uniquely see Holderlin as a destiny.
Significantly, there is an important and obvious reason for this facticity, but also
one difficult to account for because of the way it situates the presuppositions of how one
interprets; namely, the central significance Heidegger accords the flight of the gods. Here
I want be clear that I’m distinguishing between how the flight of the gods shows up as a
topic within Heidegger, and how that flight precludes one from (or equally predisposes
one to) making interpretive moves that prove to be inevitably question-begging. Before
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turning to my two working definitions of destiny, which is what I will be presenting
today, I want to address why I think it is necessary to approach Heidegger’s dialogue
with Holderlin as the interpretive enactment of a destiny.
I remain mostly dissatisfied with the critical approaches to Heidegger that reduce
his dialogue with Holderlin to some aspect of a “mytho-poetic” mystification—the
infamous Black Forest fairytale—which disposes him to Nazism by undercutting the
necessary critical distance required of a thinker. Thus while most of these critics would
agree that Holderlin gets the flight of the gods right, the implication is that Heidegger
betrays this insight by insisting on the possible arrival of new gods such that the very
means through which he claims to overcome metaphysics returns him to a thinly
disguised onto-theology. The Earth is fine, only a little crunchy with Van Gogh’s shoes,
but all that work on the Heimat is sure evidence of an unapologetic nostalgia best
remedied by sending Heidegger back to the overcoming o f his own Nietzsche
interpretation or by bringing in a poet (preferably Celan) whose unrelenting barrenness is
capable of showing us what the death of God really looks like. And anyways, Holderlin’s
gods never stopped being Greek, or Christian, or Greco-Christian, whatever, but farewell,
and thank God we’re past them.
Yet what such interpretations tend to set aside is that Holderlin, despite the
fragmentariness and enormous problems posed by his corpus, does indeed have a
coherent poetic vision. To use a term currently out o f fashion, this coherent vision makes
Holderlin’s mature poetic work “great” in a way that puts it on a par with Pindar’s Odes,
Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost as the poetic realization of a
concrete and particular world that is simultaneously (but never exactly) “our” world.
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What is distinctive about Holderlin’s poetry is that this world bears witness to the
absence of the gods in the way the poems move toward the overcoming of that absence,
but whose inability to arrive at completion itself only serves to show up that absence still
more vividly. This makes Holderlin’s poetry and its interpretation fundamentally
different from the task that confronted the medieval Dante exegete, which was to show
how The Divine Comedy was to be placed alongside the Gospels as equally participating
in the project of salvation, the poem’s self-reflexivity a kind of wink to the reader about
the spiritual work being required (“Don’t get distracted by the art!”), rather than
Holderlin’s anxiety over the possibility of the poem’s ever being completed on grounds
internal to the poem’s own subject matter.
Such incompleteness challenges the possibility of reading Holderlin at all because
the flight of the gods begs the question of how we gain access to Holderlin’s poetry in a
fundamental way. On the one hand, this leads to the deconstructive interpretation of de
Man, who takes up the internal limit of the possibility of the poetry’s completion as
primarily a concern about the nature o f reading. On the other hand, this leads to the
destinal interpretation of Heidegger, whose dialogue with Holderlin interpretively enacts
the terms that would allow the possibility of the poem’s happening—and thereby its
completion—as the undergoing of the flight of the gods. One thing is clear: The textual
reading and the destinal reading are incommensurate.
Here I want to make the strong claim that Heidegger scholars need to come clean
about the presuppositions of their own interpretive stance with regard to the flight of the
gods. I want to understand in nitty-gritty, often boring detail how Heidegger’s line-by-
line explications o f Holderlin’s poem operate. This means that I’m not interested in
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giving a rhetorical analysis. Rather, I have consented to Heidegger’s “interpretive
violence” in order to understand Heidegger’s own coherent vision—the vision of
Holderlin as destiny—from the inside. While this has taken longer than I wanted, it has
meant that I have developed a conceptual language to describe the internal relationship
between Heidegger’s detailed explications of Holderlin’s poems and his politics. In
answer, then, to the question, “Where is the friction here?,” the friction is that the excess
that leads Heidegger to understand Holderlin’s poetry as a happening also exposes him to
the necessity o f hyperbolic excess in a way that haunts his political commitments, both
real and ir-real. Let me now turn to my two definitions of destiny as binding limitation
and becoming who you are.
First of all, I understand destiny as the enactment of an experience of limitation.
This suffering o f limitation circumscribes Dasein’s finitude, but finitude understood in an
expanded sense. For in contrast to Heidegger’s analysis of destiny in §74 of Being and
Time, the very phrase “Holderlin as destiny” implies the privileging o f language over
what would seem to have to be Dasein’s direct access (direct, because always mine) to its
own death. This is Heidegger’s brilliant move in the “Germania" and “The Rhine”
lecture course, and what allows him to get to the “original community” (ursprungliche
Gemeinschaft) implied in “we Germans”: Dasein’s individuation takes place through
Holderlin’s language in relation to the Earth as the abysmal ground of Dasein’s
mortality, but also in relation to the Earth as the site of a contingent historical grounding,
which brings forward that abyss by undergoing it as a limit. “Contingent,” however, does
not mean arbitrary, but “contingent” because finally ground-less; the experience of
limitation is a coming to be settled enacted only in the dwelling, which the absence of a
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foundation both makes possible and gives as possibility. Thus while destiny is predicated
on the fact of Dasein’s mortality as an absolute limit (Heidegger’s asserts in GA39 that
every conception of destiny must take into account death), Dasein undergoes the
experience of mortality in the ecstatic transport that actively locates it between the gods
and the Earth. That is to say: actively locates it in the way the overpowering o f the divine
radically dis-places human being, but radically dis-places human being in a manner that
first makes available the Earth as what can to be returned to and settled. It is through the
temporal structure of what might be called this “original return” that the Earth first
becomes homeland.
The movement described here is an exposure (aussetzen), transposure (versetzen),
and taking up (iibemehmen): an exposure to the overpowering of the divine whose excess
allows for the “as though for the first time” of the happening of the manifesting o f beings
as a whole (this includes Mit-dasein and, very trickily, the gods); a transposure that is the
transporting into the happening of relation itself “implied” or “structured into” (einfugen)
the manifesting of this whole precisely as a whole (“the hol-y” as a kind o f inviolable
intactness); and the taking up of this movement as the enactment o f finite possibility
realized in what Heidegger at one point calls “care,” but is more fully explored in his re-
appropriation of Dasein as a “between.” (Whence Heidegger’s extended analyses o f the
Rhine river and of Holderlin himself as demigods.) As this “between,” Dasein dwells
poetically upon the Earth, beneath the sky, and, perhaps most importantly, in the midst o f
beings as a whole. Significantly, then, the “between” is also a “center” or “middle”
(Mitte)—the gathering inward intensifying o f difference in relation so perfectly pitched in
its tension that it allows beings to appear completely still, even plastic, possessing an
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intimacy that makes them feel as though they’re always approaching, but also a
remoteness and reserve that keeps them in their outline and has the power to awaken awe.
This helps explain why Heidegger writes neither an aesthetics nor an ethics: Limitation is
built into the happening of the manifesting o f beings as this takes place through
Holderlin’s language in a privileged sense. Instead of a system, one gets a world.
When, however, my first-year Core students get hung up on destiny, what
troubles them is that the gods seem at once the authors of destiny and also subordinate to
its power. This makes the relationship between the gods and destiny seem both
asymmetrical and circular, as the gods appear on both sides of the equation. So too
Heidegger’s analysis in the “Germania ” and “The Rhine ” lecture course. For within the
context of the movement just articulated, it becomes clear that you don’t get to the
holistic disclosivity o f world without the excess implied by the gods; exposure is the
opening up and being transported into what is opened up. At the same time, however, the
gods appear within the world as part of the larger configuration of holistic difference in
relation, which here needs to be understood as fitting relation. The German word “das
Schickliche” (fitting relation) is thus interchangeable with Geschick (destiny);— destiny is
what it is, and only what it is, as the giving of fitting relation, which binds what it relates
into that ‘fitted-ness’ as the context through which it first becomes what it is. This will be
the tie-in to my second definition of destiny, where such becoming simultaneously
implies a coming into one’s own.
The gods therefore come to appear not just as initiating excess, they also appear
under the umbrella o f destiny in placing human mortality into its proper limits within the
context of a world. This is crucially important. For according to Heidegger, the
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possibility of such fitting relation has been fundamentally disrupted and interrupted by
the flight of the gods. In contrast to Being and Time, where death, so to speak, “goes all
the way down,” the flight of the gods places into question what it means for human
beings to be able to die; with this flight there is nothing within the world that would bring
human being into its limit, and so nothing that would allow Dasein to go toward its death
as the enactment of finite possibility realized not just within the world but rather as
world. The fitting response to this upheaval is mourning through which the possibility of
Dasein’s death is taken up in undergoing the experience of its utter abandonment upon
and to the Earth.
Let me tease out two implications: First, the way death can be taken up as an
existential given comes itself to be situated historically. This is implicit in what it means
for Heidegger to call Holderlin (rather than death) a destiny. Heidegger thus substantially
retools the asymmetrical and circular relationship between mortality and historicity
presented in Being and Time; moreover, he does so in a way that is factically urgent,
where this factical urgency commits him to a particular line or track of possibility
designated by the proper name “Holderlin.” Second, whether a-theist or theist, this has
important implications for all talk of “Heidegger and the gods.” Both positions put the
accent on whether or not the gods show up within the world, rather than confronting the
asymmetry and circularity that allows the gods to show up on ‘both sides of the
equation,’—an initiating excess as well as difference in relation that literally spans
Dasein’s mortality by bringing it into its proper limits. Heidegger touches on this when
he later refers not to destiny per se, but to “the god o f gods.”
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I want now to address my second definition of destiny as how one becomes who
one is. This line is attributable first to Pindar (whom Horace notably called a “great
river”), and is subsequently taken up by both Holderlin and Nietzsche. It also appears in a
footnote to Heidegger’s discussion o f the projective disclosivity of understanding in
Being and Time as the rallying cry, “Become what you are!” Beginning in the early 1930s
Heidegger returns to this rallying cry as it specifically concerns the Germans through his
interpretation of Holderlin’s Dec. 4, 1801, “Letter to Bohlendorff,” which lays out the
endowments and tasks of the Germans and Greeks respectively. This includes the line
often cited by Heidegger during this period, “We learn nothing with greater difficulty
than the free use of the national.” To become who “you” are is to become who “we” are,
where the “I” and the “we” reciprocally presuppose—and thereby implicate—each other
in their very possibility.
Though any talk of “the Germans” together with the “national” seems, no doubt,
suspicious, Heidegger neither subscribes to the biologistic conception of German identity,
nor to the racial romanticism of Herder (though he appears perilously close to the latter),
where each position implies an essentialist reification of what it is to be German. Such
reifications reduce being German to what might be termed a “fact” of thrownness, which
it then fixes in conditioning any further sense o f possibility. This in turn results in a hard
determinism (“biology is destiny”) that one is causally condemned to follow out. The
demand to “become who are you,” therefore, seems immediately counterintuitive in
traversing and unsettling presuppositions about the relationship between being and
becoming. For instead o f a ‘hard determinism,’ it implies what I termed in my
dissertation a “proleptic” temporal structure, which, taken in its root meaning as a
xviii
Preface
“receiving beforehand,” reverses the traditionally metaphysical sequence o f a cause
followed by an effect. This is the disclosive structure of the “will have already been” of
the historical a priori. The distinction, then, is between a mechanical causal determinism
and a structure of finite determination that conditions the way in which possibility comes
to appear as concretely situated possibilities.
The work of art, and Holderlin’s poetry in a privileged sense, does something
special here. As Heidegger stresses in the “Germania” and “The Rhine” course, destiny
is not just thrownness, it is also projection (Entwurj)—the casting forward o f what has
been into the future in a way that throws it open so that it rebounds back on to Dasein as
the possibility it already will have been, and yet must also factically become, in being
taken up as a possibility. When it comes to being German, Heidegger is interested in two
givens,—that one is always bom in a particular place and into a particular language.
These two givens can, of course, lead to the creepy “Blut und Boden” nationalisms that
still predominate today. I have tried to indicate why Heidegger’s analysis of the Earth
makes this not only more complicated, but creatively challenges what it means to be
rooted in a place in a way that is not reducible to nostalgia.
Understanding Heidegger’s relationship to the German language is more
challenging, as Heidegger accords German (together with Greek) a “spiritual” privilege.
Although the Germans may be bom into German, that they speak German is not,
paradoxically, itself a foregone conclusion. Here we see again why Heidegger privileges
Holderlin, Holderlin who (re)invents German by stretching the disclosive possibilities
already present in German through his poems and translations. Interestingly, this
stretching of German to the point at which it begins to speak German takes place on the
xix
Preface
level of syntax as a kind of ur-rhythm (Heidegger would use the term Seinsgejuge). This
presents itself in the attention Heidegger accords connectives and intensifiers like “aber”
(but), “denn” (since) and “ofoc/z” (?). Heidegger repeatedly comments that these little
words sound “un-poetic,” not just un-highminded, but terminally and prosaically and
relentlessly everyday. Yet these little words are the site of the inaugural event of
connection that takes place through Holderlin’s poetry as the happening of a world, “as
though for the first time,” again and again. They fit and are fitt-ing, and it is this that
makes Holderlin a destiny.
xx
INTRODUCTION
The Poet As Destiny
Holderlins Dichtung ist fur uns ein Schicksal. Es

wartet darauf, dafi die Sterblichen ihm
entsprechen. (EHD, 195)
Holderlin’s poetry is a destiny for us. It waits for

the day when mortals will correspond to it.
(EHP, 224)
The Poet As Destiny
This dissertation offers a detailed analysis o f Heidegger’s first lecture course on
the German Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin, Holderlins Hymnen »Germanien« und
»Der Rheim , which Heidegger delivered at the University of Freiburg during the
Wintersemester of 1934/35. Although there is substantial scholarship on Heidegger’s
lifelong dialogue with Holderlin’s poetry, this work is unique in offering a sustained
thematic reading o f Heidegger’s inaugural lecture course on Holderlin. Thus rather than
staging an analysis that focuses on key passages or insights taken from various lecture
courses and talks, it presents a unified argument that seeks both to situate Heidegger’s
turn to Holderlin in terms o f Being and Time and to show how Heidegger himself
conceives that dialogue as a “task” that, at least initially, has clear lineaments, framing
structural insights, and an animating vision that necessitates reconsideration of the
Holderlin lecture courses in relation to what goes under the name of “Heidegger’s
politics.”
The basis for this unified argument is the role that destiny plays throughout the
Heideggerian corpus, beginning with the paired notions of Schicksal and Geschick in §74
of Being and Time, extending to Heidegger’s initial declaration o f Holderlin as a destiny
in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course, and continuing on in such minor but
personal works as Aufenthalte and Heidegger’s 1963 “Preface to the Reading of
The Poet As Destiny
Holderlin’s Poems” from which my epigraph is taken. Without succumbing to its
possibly fatalistic interpretation, it is important to emphasize what is implied by the
phrase the ‘role that destiny plays.’ For at stake in Heidegger’s dialogue with Holderlin is
not primarily what Heidegger has to say on the subject of destiny—which in the 294 page
»Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course could be condensed down to a mere eight pages—
but how he understands that dialogue to itself prepare a destiny whose fundamental
posture remains one of expectancy. Holderlin as the destiny of the German people is yet
to come; it is the day that awaits the arrival of the people rather than the people who
await the arrival of the day. This expectancy in turn positions Heidegger’s interpretive
address—how he understands his thinking to be both anticipated and necessitated by
Holderlin—in which destiny is enacted through Heidegger’s elucidation o f Holderlin’s
poetry and its further address to the German people. This is to say that the notion of
destiny is located in the enacted structure of dialogue itself, and specifically in the
interpretative presuppositions that situate (or foreclose) the possibility o f any such
address.
“Destiny” is not a fun notion. It suggests imposition, determinism, the foreclosure
of freedom together with the possibility of autonomous action, fatality, doom, and, if not
death itself, then the experience of radical limitation that is its ongoing approximation. It
also seems appallingly anachronistic, which not only makes it difficult to approach but
also actively ‘puts off.’ Thus although the significance o f destiny for Heidegger is often
nodded to within the secondary literature, there are few works that acknowledge its
importance as being on the level with such central Heideggerian themes as time,
The Poet As Destiny
language, and more recently through the work of Jacques Derrida, spirit.1 When destiny
is thematically taken up, it is most often situated in terms o f Heidegger’s elaboration of
epochality in such works as The Principle o f Reason or his later concern with
technology.2 That Heidegger asserts Holderlin as a destiny starting in already 1934, and
continuing on through 1963—and that even in their contexts there is something strangely
overdetermined in these continued assertions— seems almost studiously avoided.
The important exception to this is Dominique Janicaud’s The Shadow o f That
Thought: Heidegger and the Question o f Politics, which tracks the arc of Heidegger’s
“destinal-historicalism” from Being and Time to his meditation on technology as the
connecting link between Heidegger’s thought and his involvement with National
Socialism.3 Janicaud’s analysis is at once interpretively nuanced and personal in the way
it seeks to avoid reduction or hyperbole in order to more rigorously engage the internal
connection between Heidegger’s thinking and his political commitments. Central to
Janicaud’s thesis is his claim that there is a “tearing revision” in Heidegger’s thinking
during the 1930s that implicates the notion of destiny in Heidegger’s political
1 Derrida’s 1987 lecture O f Spirit: Heidegger and the Question trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1989) was groundbreaking in examining
Heidegger’s use o f the term Geist as one o f the organizing idioms o f Heidegger’s thinking. While
“spirit” would seem to speak against Heidegger’s own usage in other contexts, Schicksal is a term
he explicitly, repeatedly, and ongoingly takes up and assigns. It thus carries with it the
connotation o f a different kind o f use, as the expression o f a factical commitment that takes place
for Heidegger always as a decision. This in turn gives destiny a different kind o f weight in
considering the key terms that would link Heidegger’s thinking to his politics.
2 This connection is taken up in Reiner Schurmann’s Heidegger on Being and Acting: From
Principles to Anarchy trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987).
3 See Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow o f that Thought trans. Michael Gendre (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1996). David Krell identifies Janicaud’s book as “perhaps the
most sustained and thoughtful o f all [the books that treat Heidegger’s political engagement],” and
repeatedly identifies it as “an eminently philosophical book”— high praise. I agree with Krell that
this little known book has not received the treatment it merits. See David Farrell Krell, Daimon
Life: Heidegger andLife-Philosophy. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 163-170.
The Poet As Destiny
involvement at the same time that it challenges the very terms in which that political
involvement has so far been understood.
Though Janicaud is careful to situate this “tearing revision” within a wider
context—he identifies the centrality of Holderlin for Heidegger at the same time that he
remains sensitive to the influences of Nietzsche, Jiinger, Greek tragedy, and German
Idealism—I contend that this revision is to be located principally in the »Germanien« und
»Der Rhein« course. As Heidegger’s first lecture course on Holderlin and, as Janicaud
points out, deeply personal in immediately following on the failure of the Rectorship with
an interpretation of poetry centrally (if opaquely) about the Fatherland, the »Germanien«
und »Der Rheim course revises as it inaugurates: It initiates such important innovations
as the world-opening dimension of the work o f art, the abyss of the Earth as self-
concealing withdrawal, Being’s need and use of a “between,” and history as translating
between what is foreign and what is one’s own. As a rupture or breach, the »Germanien«
und »Der R heim course therefore signals not only Heidegger’s departure from key
structural insights articulated in such works as Being and Time, but his radicalized
interpretation and reappropriation o f those insights as his thinking uniquely comes into its
own through his dialogue with Holderlin.
This is evident, for example, in the underlying definition of destiny as the context
through which “one becomes who one is.”4 In Being and Time, such becoming is
4 Heidegger touches on this sense o f becoming in Being and Time when, in addressing the
projective disclosivity o f understanding, he writes: “And only because the being o f the There gets
its constitution through understanding and its character o f project, only because it is what it
becomes or does not become, can it understandingly say to itself: ‘become what you are! ’” (SZ
145; BT 136). Such becoming is how Heidegger interprets the movement o f destiny as the
projecting into the future o f what has been— though through Holderlin the notion o f a project
shifts from the disclosivity o f understanding to the poetic Entwurf as the opening up o f the
horizon o f a shared destiny. Franipoise Dastur also identifies the significance o f this line in her
The Poet As Destiny
circumscribed by death as the possibility Dasein always already is, which
correspondingly informs Heidegger’s understanding of individual fate and its relation to
common destiny in §74. The original givenness of death—which is made available
through the attunement of anxiety—determines the structure of both how Dasein projects
possibilities and how its own possibility of being is finally limited. Indeed, the brute
givenness of death makes it difficult to conceive destiny in any other way. Which in turn
makes it difficult to conceive how a poet can be a destiny.
A careful reading of the »Germanien« und »Der Rheim lecture course reveals
that at issue for Heidegger in the notion of destiny is the experience o f radical limitation
undergone through the disclosure of the overpowering. While this disclosure was tied in
Being and Time directly to death, in the »Germanien« und »Der R heim lecture course it
occurs through the revelation of the flight o f the gods in Holderlin’s poetry as Dasein is
transported into the Earth upon which it “poetically dwells.” It is important to emphasize
that access to the Earth is not direct but instead takes place by way o f Holderlin’s poetic
work, which in turn becomes the context through which Dasein’s individuation is
authentically realized. This means that the possibility o f death is mediated by Holderlin’s
poetry, and comes to be historically situated by the necessity o f mourning the flight of the
gods. Here Heidegger’s “tearing revision” can be seen to take up formative insights from
Being and Time into mortality and limitation at the same time as it displaces the
originality of death with the way in which the projective creativity of the work o f art
discloses possibility.
discussion o f the temporality o f Being and Time, which concludes with an expanded discussion o f
the epochality o f Geschick in relation to Heidegger’s politics in which she precisely returns to the
temporality o f becoming. See Heidegger and the Question o f Time trans. Franfois Raffoul and
David Pettigrew (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1999) 35, 67.
The Poet As Destiny
With its focus on destiny, this dissertation extends the work of Janicaud by
offering a detailed analysis of such revisions within the context of a lecture course hailed
as pivotal yet little read and still untranslated; it is my aim to make these revisions vivid,
while at the same time demonstrating the relevance o f the »Germanien« und »Der R heim
course for any interpretation of the Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), An
Introduction into Metaphysics or the “Origin of the Work of Art” (much less Heidegger’s
subsequent work on Holderlin), which read differently in light of such an analysis. In
approaching my individual chapters I have therefore sought to emphasize discontinuities
within framing structural insights such as Heidegger’s analysis of the originality of
attunement or the experience of limitation implied in the “between.” While each of my
chapters taken individually thus addresses a particular section of the »Germanien« und
»Der Rheim course—Chapter Two concerns Heidegger’s “Preliminary Meditation” on
language, Chapter Three focuses on the “Germania” hymn, Chapter Four on the “Rhine”
hymn—I have sought to avoid narrow exegesis in favor of a thematic analysis whose
framing insights build off one another and so bring forward the larger stakes at issue in
the progressive movement of the lecture course.
These larger stakes are twofold, and include the issue of the critical reception of
Heidegger’s dialogue with Holderlin in the secondary literature, and what it means to
arrive at a politics through an interpretation of poetry. With regard to the first, I have
always found myself put off by criticisms o f Heidegger’s analyses as “interpretatively
violent” or part o f a mytho-poetic obfuscation that betrays a desire to return to the
Greeks. Both charges are each in their way dismissive and therefore get in the way of
developing an internally located critical vocabulary capable o f showing the relation
The Poet As Destiny
between Heidegger’s interpretive position, decisions he makes in analyzing particular
passages of text, and the way each are situated within, in terms of, and by the question of
destiny. Consequently, I have sought to develop a vocabulary better suited for showing
the performative or enacted dimension of Heidegger’s dialogue with Holderlin, using
such phrases as the “active reception” of Holderlin’s poetry where “active reception”
implies transformation, or “Holderlin’s mediation of language” where “mediation”
implies the enactment of relation as this takes place through Holderlin’s poetry as
exposure to the divine.
Though I’m not insensitive to the criticisms that attach to Heidegger’s
interpretation of Holderlin, I believe the presuppositions that locate them frequently
impede following out how Heidegger understands his interpretation of Holderlin to be a
“politics” that defers talking about “the political.” Heidegger is in fact explicit about the
way such presuppositions foreclose being able to hear, where hearing is in fact one o f the
most loaded terms in the lecture course in internally connecting Heidegger’s analyses of
specific passages on hearing to the risk and even necessity of being overheard.5 1 have
therefore sought to hear Heidegger in a manner that consents to the strangeness of his
project while at the same time attempting to maintain that strangeness as holding open the
space for a critical appropriation.
5 In “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology” Jacques Derrida addresses the significance o f hearing in

Heidegger and includes a discussion o f mortals’ “not-wanting-to-hear” the origin in Heidegger’s
analysis o f the “Rhine” hymn in GA39. See Reading Heidegger: Commemorations ed. John
Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 163-218. Although the scope o f Derrida’s
discussion is much wider than what I offer here, it provided an important clue to how the problem
o f hearing could be seen to position Heidegger’s interpretive address in a way that is central to his
assertion o f Holderlin as a destiny. In the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course Heidegger offers
readings o f passages in which Holderlin poetizes hearing that are intended to be ‘educative’ in
appealing to a still deeper level o f hearing at issue in the lecture course as a whole. This would be
what it means to hear Holderlin as the destiny o f the Germans.
The Poet As Destiny
Although Heidegger does inevitably succumb to talking about the political—there
are references to the Fatherland and the state-creator, a criticism of the comparison
between the Fxihrer and Christ (in which it is the Fiihrer who is done the disservice), and
an extended analysis on the purity of origin—these comments must themselves be located
within the notion of politics enacted as dialogue. Significantly, this dialogue not only
includes Holderlin, but is instead understood as the dialogue between creators—poet,
thinker, and state-founder—as this dialogue inaugurates and prepares for the conversation
“we” are. Heidegger’s politics is thus to be found in the structure o f address that situates
this dialogue, which is enacted in his analyses of specific passages o f Holderlin’s poetry.
As a consequence, Heidegger’s politics cannot be separated from those specific analyses
with regard to their content, and, more importantly for Heidegger, their poetic structuring.
Teasing out the implicit politics of the enacted dimension of Heidegger’s
conversation with Holderlin has been an ongoing challenge in conceiving this
dissertation. Finally, I have yielded to the importance of first offering a detailed
exposition o f key structural insights—the model of revision and inauguration—inviting
the reader to see the connection between poetry and politics. Because o f the necessity of
putting these readings first, I have deferred pursuing these connections until my
conclusion. It is therefore finally in the conclusion that I return anew to the question of
what is at stake for Heidegger in asserting Holderlin as a destiny for the German people.
It is my hope that this approach will make a textual contribution to Heidegger studies—
for instance, Heidegger’s analysis of mourning introduces the tension between willing
and letting be taken up in Heidegger’s later “Gelassenheit” piece—while at the same time
contributing a new conceptual vocabulary for discussing both Heidegger’s interpretation
10
The Poet As Destiny
of Holderlin and his politics. It is also my hope that this approach makes analysis harder
and more complicated, as Heidegger’s inaugurating insights into poetic dwelling cannot
be separated from the notion of destiny, nor can his inaugurating insights into the self-
concealing withdrawal of the Earth be separated from the “we.” Nor, finally, can his
stunning creativity as a thinker be separated from a lecture course that begins and ends by
invoking violent excess.
11
CHAPTER ONE SYNOPSIS
Together in the “Same World”:
Ambiguity and Community in Being and Time
The aim of this chapter is to show part of the motivation for Heidegger’s turn to
Holderlin as a destiny by, so to speak, filling in the “back-story” of how Heidegger
conceives the interrelation between Dasein’s individual fate (Schicksal) and its common
destiny (Geschick) in §74 of Being and Time. Within Heidegger scholarship this is a
common approach: an author uses Being and Time to introduce vocabulary and structural
insights in order to show their development and transformation in later works. However
in the context of this dissertation, such a strategy is complicated by what Dominique
Janicaud refers to as the “tearing revision in Heidegger’s thinking”—a tearing revision
that is most strongly and originally articulated in Heidegger’s assertion o f Holderlin as a
destiny in the 1934/35 »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course. Thus one of the central
claims of this thesis concerns the decentering of Dasein’s death as immediately accessible
to it through the attunement of anxiety in favor o f Holderlin’s projective disclosure of the
possibility o f the mortal realized “upon the Earth” and in mourning the flight of the gods.
Consequently, my analysis is intended not to present a fluid narrative that
emphasizes the continuity of such Heideggerian themes as “world,” but rather to make
vivid this tearing revision by calling attention to the aporetic tension between language
and death. As such, the chapter is intended to philosophically motivate and situate
12
Chapter One Synopsis
Heidegger’s turn to Holderlin by way of a dynamic internal to Being and Time; it focuses
on two interrelated structural tensions—the first concerns language, and the second the
world-collapsing disclosivity of anxiety—that problematize how Dasein gains authentic
access to the possibilities that allow it to become who it already is.
Although the aporetic tension between language and death has been variously
taken up in the secondary literature as the relation between the implicit solipsism of
Dasein’s being-toward-death and Heidegger’s failure to develop the notion of
community, I contend that what generates this aporia is not a latent subjectivism, but
instead the underlying ambiguity o f Dasein’s initial discovery of beings through the
referential totality of significance. The prior disclosure of world “lets” both beings and
others come to appear as relevant by enabling them to be taken up as already accessible
in their being. World thereby precedes and determines Dasein’s own possibilities for
disclosure in a manner that includes the being of others. At the same time, however,
Heidegger claims that the granting of that prior access “distorts” or “conceals” exactly by
allowing beings to appear as already familiar in their accessibility.
As his analysis of the “double possibility of logos” in Being and Time indicates,
Heidegger locates the problem of ambiguity internal to the disclosive structure of
communication itself, which simultaneously lets beings appear and makes manifest “the
way of seeing” that determines in advance how they can come to appear. Thus on the one
hand, Dasein’s always prior discovery of world restricts possibilities of meaning in such a
way as to be held in common (this for Heidegger is the basis of Dasein’s shared destiny).
Yet on the other hand, the prior assumption o f such commonality enables Dasein to listen
only for what communication is more narrowly “about” rather than for the way o f seeing
13
and hearing that—as already presupposed—“lets” or allows communication. This
modification in the nature of listening preempts what can appear to Dasein as a
possibility at the same time it creates a space of appearance that makes authentic
discourse indistinguishable from idle talk. Instead then of the enactment of a shared way
of seeing, the ambiguity of language allows for the “leveling o ff’ o f Dasein’s possibilities
to the uniformity of the they.
Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s having “grown up” within the context of what
he terms “traditional interpretedness” is essential for following out how the aporia
between language and death comes to be generated. For as indicated above, Dasein’s
prior discovery of world determines how Dasein’s being is disclosed and thus how it
comes to project possibilities. It is therefore not simply that Dasein’s access to others is
initially inauthentic or “absorbed,” but that the distortion implied in Dasein’s always
prior discovery of world implicates how Dasein’s There is disclosed in a manner that
initiates a thoroughly delusional structure in how it projects its possibilities.
To follow out this point it is necessary to attend to the role ambiguity plays in
allowing Dasein to avoid the imminence of its own death as the possibility it already is.
As Heidegger’s analysis of the statement “one dies” makes clear, the “superior
indifference” intoned in this truism stands as an aggravating “temptation”: It not only
presents Dasein with an interpretive possibility already available to it, it speaks from out
of the position of already having assumed that interpretation. As a result, ambiguity
inaugurates Dasein into the they by covering over death as the basis of Dasein’s
individuation while it at the same time creates the futurally-oriented temporality of fear.
14
The active concealment that takes place as Dasein assumes the position o f the
they is essential for understanding what emerges in Being and Time as the bivalent
turning of attunement. As Heidegger asserts, Dasein is for the most part delivered over to
itself in being turned away from itself as a fearful avoidance and flight. Dasein’s prior
discovery of world thus discloses its There in a manner that forecloses Dasein’s access to
its own death through the very way it projects possibilities—possibilities that ambiguity
allows Dasein to mistake as its own, as the very mechanism through which it fearfully
evades itself. While the prior claim of Dasein’s death is, of course, presupposed in this
turning away, the radical inaccessibility of mortality stands in tension with world as a
‘before’ that remains fundamentally unavailable within it and so radically interruptive in
relation to it.
This explains what emerges in the analysis of attunement as the world-collapsing
disclosivity of anxiety, which Heidegger claims is a “distinctive attunement” in turning
Dasein toward its There. Notably, the collapse of world takes place through the
undermining of the referential totality of significance in which beings “no longer speak.”
In interrupting how Dasein projects possibilities, the collapse of the referential totality of
significance casts Dasein back on to its own throwness, which discloses its very
possibility as being-in-the-world. Anxiety thereby reveals world as world by
interruptively putting out of action the disclosive structures of language that allow the
always prior disclosure of world to have been taken up. It is in this context that
Heidegger refers to an “existential identity” or “solipsism” between Dasein as a site of
disclosure and what is disclosed. Such identity, in actively excluding ambiguity, reveals
death as the possibility Dasein already has been and thereby opens the disclosive space
15
for Dasein to become who it already is as it retrieves this possibility in resoluteness. The
enactment of this becoming is how Heidegger understands “individual fate” (Schicksat)
in Being and Time.
Given, however, the priority o f death, together with the bivalent turning of
attunement, the difficulty emerges in the transition from anxiety back to world as the
context in which Dasein fully comes into its own through the realization o f its
possibilities as already shared with others. And it is this transition that §74 elaborates.
While Heidegger claims that Dasein’s factical possibilities are not to be taken from death,
the way anxiety excludes the possibility of ambiguity creates a disclosive space that
allows Dasein to “become clear” about the possibilities it already shares with others,
which Heidegger claims have been “guided in advance by Dasein’s being together in the
same world.” The at once singular and individuating clarity that allows Dasein’s
resoluteness before its own death is thus here taken to extend to how Dasein discerns the
authentic possibilities it shares with others through which its own disclosure is
“completed.” This is what Heidegger means by a “common destiny” (Geschick).
While Heidegger’s elaboration of the transition between fate and destiny is at best
forced (his use of the phrase the “same world” is equivocal within Being and Time as
Dasein’s initial assumption of such sameness precisely allows it to project possibilities
not its own), a further problem emerges in the way Dasein’s factical possibilities first
become free in communication. For not only is ambiguity internal to the disclosive
structure of language itself, communication speaks into and from out of the prior
disclosure of world in which idle talk remains indistinguishable from authentic discourse.
16
The aporia that emerges between language and death points up two issues critical
for understanding Heidegger’s turn to Holderlin as the destiny of the Germans. First, the
problem of ambiguity is internal to the disclosive structure o f language itself, and is
therefore irreducible. In order to resolve the disclosive redoubling of ambiguity, Being
and Time sets up a structure in which Dasein’s authentic possibilities can be disclosed
only in the collapse of language through which Dasein will have already been granted an
initial access to beings (including Dasein’s own disclosure) that is “distorted.” The
interruptive ‘before’ of anxiety collapses that prior access in collapsing language. It does
not however transform the disclosive structure of that prior access itself, which
Heidegger suggests is already assumed in the interpretations (or “way of seeing”) that are
themselves “deposited” or “preserved” in a given language. This leads to the second
point. The disclosivity of anxiety together with the bivalent turning of attunement is itself
aporetic. The way the existential identity of anxiety discloses the “as”-structure by
revealing world as world does not inaugurate relation—and thereby create the disclosive
space for an authentic being-with-others—but instead suspends it. The structure of a
bivalent turning that privileges anxiety but makes fear dominant means that there is no
attunement whose disclosivity grants an authentic access to others as constitutive of
Dasein’s own disclosure as being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s assertion o f Holderlin as a
destiny answers this aporia.
17
CHAPTER ONE
“Together in the Same World”:
Ambiguity and Community in Being and Time
“Together in the Same World”
Dichtung— kein Spiel, das Verhaltnis zu ihr nicht die

spielerische, sich selbst vergessen machende
Entspannung, sondem die Erweckung und der
ZusammenriB des eigensten Wesens des Einzelnen,
wodurch er in den Grund seines Daseins zuriickreicht.
Kommt jeder Einzelne von dorther, dann ist die
wahrhafte Sammlung der Einzelnen in eine uspriingliche
Gemeinschaft schon im voraus geschehen. Die grobe
Verschaltung der Allzuvielen in einer sogenannten
Organisation ist nur eine behelfsmaflige Vorkehrung,
and nicht das Wesen. (GA39, 8)
Poetry— not play, the relationship to poetry is not a kind

o f recreation through which one relaxes by forgetting
oneself. Rather, it is the awakening and pulling oneself
together o f the most proper being o f the individual
through which he reaches back into the ground o f his
Dasein. If each individual comes from there, the true
gathering o f individuals has already happened in
advance. The crass jumbling together o f the all-too-
many into a so-called organization is only a temporary
measure but not what is o f the essence.
19
Heidegger’s brief introduction to the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course is
intended not so much to situate his interpretation as to clarify for his auditors the peculiar
way they are already implicated in it. To start with Holderlin is to be directed toward the
origin, which Heidegger, referring to a fragment from the ode, “At one time I questioned
the muse.. here understands in relation to the German Fatherland: “The Fatherland, our
Fatherland Germania—for the most part forbidden, withdrawn from the hurry o f the
eveiyday and the noise of industry” (GA39, 4). As the above quotation indicates, poetry
is not about relaxation or even the production of critical analyses that fuel the scholarship
industry with their own kind of talk. It is instead the context in which Dasein by
awakening to itself as an individual is gathered into a community that has already
happened in advance o f it and that constitutes its own highest possibility.1 Such an
awakening signals not only Dasein’s inauguration into that community, it does so as the
decisive departure from the dominating structures of the everyday to which Heidegger
claims it is to never again return (GA39, 22). A nationalist rally in support of the
Fatherland may group people together, but it alone can never allow them to become a
people.
1 Heidegger offers a thematic analysis o f the structure o f awakening in the 1929/30 lecture course,
The Fundamental Concepts o f Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (§16). In this lecture
course, he defines awakening as the letting-be (Seinlassen) o f a fundamental attunement (in this
context it is the attunement o f profound boredom) that is already there, but whose full
efficaciousness has not yet been revealed or explicitly taken up.
20
Though I will turn to the detailed analysis of the phrase “original community” in
the next chapter, I want to use this reference to the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course
to contextualize the problematic relationship between individual fate (Schicksal) and
common destiny (Geschick) that emerges in Heidegger’s analysis of authentic historicity
in §74 of Being and Time. That is, I want to use this reference to the »Germanien« und
»Der Rhein« course to point toward the way in which poetry’s mediation of individuality
as community answers the aporia between the non-relationality of Dasein’s being-
toward-death and the loss of its individuation in the they (das Man).
The aporia between death and community has been taken up in the critical
literature on Being and Time as the problem of Heidegger’s “existential ‘solipsism,’” a
phrase Heidegger himself uses to characterize the way fundamental attunement of anxiety
individuates (SZ 188; BT 176). In disclosing world as irrelevant, Angst collapses the
referential totality of significance through which Dasein gains access to both beings and
others as being-in-the-world. It thereby takes Dasein back from the loss of its
individuation in the they through the creation of an “existential identity” that enables
Dasein to recover death as its own highest possibility.
This privileging of anxiety has been understood to undercut Heidegger’s analysis
of being-with (Mitsein) in a way that foreshadows his own later political involvement
with National Socialism.2 It is, however, my contention that the impasse Heidegger
2 In her early work on Heidegger Marjorie Grene develops this connection in terms o f what she
describes as “an existential loneliness” that she further connects to Heidegger’s inability to follow
through on the connection between Schicksal and Geschick. See Heidegger (London: Bowes and
Bowes, 1957) 51-59. She returns to this point (accusing Heidegger o f being “a petulant and over
anxious self-apologist”) in her excoriating conclusion. More recently, Jacques Taminiaux has
addressed the problem o f Dasein’s solipsism in connection to both the redoubling o f ambiguity in
Being and Time and Heidegger’s inability to develop the notion o f praxis in a genuinely plural or
political sense. He writes: “Taken in its purity, the Heideggerian concept o f world present in
21
encounters when he turns to community in Being and Time is not to be found in the
analysis of anxiety taken in itself, but in the tension between the disclosive modalities of
anxiety and ambiguity as they specifically pertain to language. This emerges throughout
Heidegger’s analysis as the tension between the inaccessibility that occurs in the collapse
of the referential totality of significance and the self-endangering of language through an
indiscriminate access that in actual fact covers over the possibility of community. Here I
am again taking my cue from the »Germanien« und »Der Rheim course in which the
ambiguity of poetic speech allows passage to the founding of community that occurs in
Holderlin’s hymns even as it simultaneously threatens to undermine that founding. The
syntactical junctures or Seinsgefiige, which are for Heidegger the most important
dimension of Holderlin’s poetry, sound “everyday” rather than being heard as the
founding invention (Er-finden) of the disclosive possibilities inherent in the German
language—a founding invention that is to serve as the basis for an “original community”
in mediating Dasein’s authentic access to others. Seen from this perspective, Heidegger’s
assertion of an “existential ‘solipsism’” (rather than an epistemological or metaphysical
solipsism) to establish Dasein’s individuation resolves the redoubling at play in
ambiguity through which language renders an authentic possibility always already
indistinguishable from an inauthentic possibility.
fundamental ontology, i.e., hou heneka metamorphosed into a Worumwillen, is a self-referential

focus empty not only o f things, but also o f people. It is not a dwelling or a common realm, but the
pure and clear nothingness grasped in the moment o f vision (Augenblick) by a Dasein resolutely
confronting— in separate individuation— the absence o f dwelling, which brings about the
Grundstimmung o f anxiety. To be sure, Being-with-others and speech are essential characteristics
o f Dasein, i.e. existentialia. But, if we ask what authentic Mit-Sein amounts to, we soon realize
that this existentiale taken in its purity is strictly monadic” (131). See “The Reappropriation o f the
Nichomachean Ethics: Poiesis and Praxis in the Articulation o f Fundamental Ontology” in
Heidegger and the Project o f Fundamental Ontology trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State
University o f New York Press, 1991) 111-137.
22
This chapter explores the aporetic tension between anxiety and community by
problematizing the claim Heidegger makes in his concluding discussion o f historicity that
Dasein’s individual fate is “already guided beforehand in being-with-one another in the
same world” (SZ 384; BT 352). This guidance constitutes Dasein’s common destiny and
first “becomes free” through, in particular, communication (Mitteilung) as the context in
which the community enacts itself through the explicit articulation o f its shared
possibilities. I am interested in the way Heidegger’s use of the phrase “the same world”
evades the problem o f how Dasein gains authentic access to others through language.
How, for example, does Heidegger understand Dasein to make the transition from the
non-relationality of anxiety to authentic being-with others if the ambiguity that haunts
this “same world” in its pejorative sense as publicness can be resolved only through the
introduction of a new form of solipsism? How can an attunement whose distinction lies
precisely in its ability to collapse world effect a transformation in the prior disclosure of
world as what Dasein shares with others as the “same world”? What prevents the
disclosive redoubling of ambiguity from contaminating—Heidegger uses the word
“verstellt,” “to distort” or “deform,” in the »Germanien« und »Der R heim course— any
return to language?
In posing these questions I have tried to keep in mind several things. First, that
my overall aim in this chapter is to contextualize Heidegger’s turn to Holderlin by way of
a text whose key concerns and thematic analyses will be more familiar to readers than the
still untranslated »Germanien« und »Der R heim course. My intention then is not so
much to answer the above questions as part of any definitive reading of Being and Time,
but rather to indicate a series of overlapping tensions that inform Heidegger’s turn to
23
Holderlin as the destiny of the German people. (Indeed, I will return to versions of these
same questions in my conclusion as no less urgent at the end of this dissertation than at
its beginning.) Second, I argue that in order to show the radicalization of Heidegger’s
own thinking that takes place both in and as this “turn,” it is first necessary to have some
sense for where Heidegger starts in his understanding of such key notions as attunement,
language, world, and destiny. Seen in this way, my analysis not only seeks to motivate
my subsequent interpretation of Heidegger’s dialogue with Holderlin, but is already
retrospectively motivated by it in its approach to Being and Time, a strategy sustained
throughout the other chapters of this work.
Ambiguity and Community
In his discussion of authentic historicity in §74 of Being and Time, Heidegger
makes clear that the possibilities that determine Dasein’s factical existence are not to be
taken from death. And though he defers answering the question o f what Dasein factically
resolves upon (Heidegger indicates that this can be determined only within the context of
Dasein’s “generation” and through its choice of a hero), in this section he points the way
out of the existential solipsism that characterized his earlier analysis o f anxiety. “It is
true,” Heidegger states, “that Dasein is delivered over to itself and its potentiality-of-
being, but only as being-in-the-world’ (SZ 383; BT 351). Thus even as the non-
relationality of death disclosed through anxiety is radically individuating, Dasein’s ability
to complete its own authentic occurrence is determined by the way in which the
disclosure of its There already includes within it the disclosure of others. As Heidegger
24
goes on to claim, individual fates “are guided beforehand in being-with-one-another in
the same world and in the resoluteness for definite possibilities [Im Miteinandersein in
derselben Welt und in der Entschlossenheit fu r bestimmte Moglichkeiten sind die
Schicksale in vorhinein schon geleitet]” (SZ 384; BT 352). It is through the guidance
granted by the always prior disclosure o f world that Dasein shares a common destiny
with others and so may be said to be part o f a community or people {Volk).
Yet the question remains not only how Dasein makes the transition from the non-
relationality of anxiety back to world, but what is meant by the phrase “being-with-one-
another in the same world [my emphasis].” For as Being and Time analyzes in detail,
Dasein for the most part understands itself in terms of the they in which the authority of
public interpretedness substitutes or “leaps in” for Dasein’s having to explicitly hand
down to itself the traditional possibilities that constitute its inheritance (Erbe). Reiterating
a point first made in his discussion of idle talk, Heidegger writes:
Geworfen ist [Dasein] angewiesen auf eine »Welt« und existiert faktisch mit Anderen.
Zunachst und zumeist ist das Selbst in das Man verloren. Es versteht sich aus den
Existenzmoglichkeiten, die in der jeweils heutigen »durchschnittlichen« offentlichen
Ausgelegtheit des Daseins »kursierien«. Meist sind sie durch die Zweideutigkeit
unkenntlich gemacht, aber doch bekannt. Das eigentliche existenzielle Verstehen entzieht
sich der uberkommenen Ausgelegtheit so wenig, dafi es je aus ihr und gegen sie und doch
wieder fur sie die gewahlte Moglichkeit im Entschlufi ergreift. (SZ 383)
As thrown, [Dasein] is dependent upon a “world,” and exists factically with others.
Initially and for the most part, the self is lost in the they. It understands itself in terms o f
the possibilities o f existence that “circulate” in the actual “average” public
interpretedness o f Da-sein today. Mostly they are made unrecognizable by ambiguity, but
they are still familiar. Authentic existentiell understanding is so far from extricating itself
3 Interestingly, it is precisely at that juncture in which Heidegger makes a commitment to

Dasein’s specific factical possibilities in, for example, declaring Holderlin a destiny that Phillipe
Lacoue-Labarthe accuses him o f “indulging in philosophy” (12). Philosophy (as opposed to
thinking) arises then when Heidegger moves away from the existential-formal structures o f Being
and Time in order to actually pursue Dasein’s factical commitments that Heidegger here defers.
See Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction o f the Political trans. Chris Turner. (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1990) 9-15.
25
from traditional interpretedness that it always grasps its chosen possibility in resolution
from that interpretation and in opposition to it, and yet again for it. (BT 351)
To come into its own, Dasein must be taken back from the ambiguity that shadows its
factical existence and that undermines the possibility o f community by already having
allowed Dasein to lose itself in the they. Despite the fact that Dasein’s definite
possibilities remain embedded in traditional interpretedness and are “still familiar,” the
disclosive redoubling of ambiguity prevents them from being recognized as traditional
possibilities. Dasein’s inability to make distinctions as itself the manifestation of this loss
thus creates a thoroughly delusional structure by allowing Dasein to project “chance
possibilities” (zufallige Moglichkeiteri) that in fact cover over its authentic possibilities
while themselves seeming genuine.
Paradoxically, it is the solipsism o f anxiety that compels Dasein’s recognition of
the authentic possibilities it shares with others through the opening up of a disjunctive
gap that takes Dasein back from the loss o f its individuation in the they. In the
indeterminacy of what anxiety is “about,” anxiety collapses the referential totality of
significance through which Dasein has been previously granted access to beings by
world. As we will see, the distinctiveness of anxiety in Being and Time lies in the way it
lets beings and others become accessible in their inaccessibility through which they no
longer “speak,” that is, through which they no longer address Dasein as meaningful
possibilities.
Though I later address Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in detail, the collapse of
relevance casts (wirfij Dasein back onto its There through the creation o f an “existential
identity” between what anxiety is for and what anxiety is about. By excluding the
redoubling of ambiguity, the underlying solipsism o f this identity creates the context in
26
which Dasein’s authentic possibilities are revealed by undoing Dasein’s prior disclosure
as being-in-the-world. It thereby opens the space for Dasein to be claimed by the
possibilities it already is, beginning most importantly with the possibility of its own
death.
Heidegger describes this in §74 as the movement of a violent recontextualization
in which Dasein’s There as the open site of possibility is itself recast in being thrown
back onto itself: The disclosure of the overpoweringness of death tears Dasein back (reifit
aus) from the loss of its individuation in “the endless multiplicity of possibilities offering
themselves nearest-by” (SZ 384; BT 351). This tearing back in turn thrusts Dasein into
(stofit ein) the limits of its fmitude through the singularizing disclosure of death as its
preeminent possibility. In this movement o f being tom from-thrust into, the revelation o f
the overpowering creates the context in which Dasein is abandoned to its own
powerlessness as the possibility of its impossibility. It is in the suffering o f limitation that
takes place through such abandonment that Dasein is individuated—indeed, fatally so.
We will later see Heidegger revise this same movement in his analysis of holy affliction,
mourning yet readied as Dasein is transported into the overpowering of the divine in
being transported away from the gods and into the power of the Earth to which it is
similarly abandoned.
In Being and Time, the recasting of Dasein’s There serves as a decisive transition
in Heidegger’s analysis as Dasein’s abandonment to itself enables it to recognize the
traditional possibilities it shares with others as being-in-the-world. In a passage critical
for understanding how ambiguity haunts this transition, Heidegger asserts: “The more
authentically Da-sein resolves itself, that is, understands itself unambiguously in terms of
27
its ownmost eminent possibility in anticipating death, the more unequivocal and
inevitable is the choice in finding the possibility of its existence. \Je eigentlicher sich das
Dasein entschliefit, das heifit unzweideutig aus seiner eigensten, ausgezeichneter
Moglichkeit im Vorlaufen in den Tod sich versteht, um so eindeutiger und unzufalliger ist
das wahlende Finden der Moglichkeit seiner Existenz.]” (SZ 384; BT 351). As the
specific wording of this sentence indicates (“Je eigentlicher, das heifit, unzweideutig...um
so eindeutiger und unzufalliger”), the unambiguous disclosure of Dasein’s death is
understood by Heidegger to extend to the unequivocal revelation of the authentic
possibilities Dasein shares with others. Thus, although Dasein’s factical possibilities are
not to be taken from death, the way anxiety lets beings and others appear as inaccessible
initiates a structure of disclosive implication that, in excluding the possibility of
ambiguity, opens the space in which Dasein is first able to distinguish between an
authentic and a chance possibility. This structure of implication, instead of operating
according to a strict necessity, simplifies Dasein’s possibilities so that they are so
singular—indeed, so singular as to initially be existentially identical—that Dasein is
compelled (but not coerced) to recognize those possibilities that are already its own.
Destiny for Heidegger is the free binding o f a limit as it is taken up as a limit; it is a
choice Dasein submits itself to as it yields to the experience o f its own finitude and
becomes who it already is. The unambiguous revelation o f its own death thus allows
Dasein to “become clear” (hellsichtig zu werden) about the authentic possibilities it
shares with others by enabling it to see the “chance elements of the situation disclosed”
(SZ 384; BT 352). That is, by enabling it to see how its factical possibilities have already
been delimited by the initiating context of traditional interpretedness. Such clarity in turn
28
enables Dasein to hand down to itself traditional possibilities through which it completes
its own occurrence as it is simultaneously bound to others as historical.4
It is at this juncture that Heidegger’s use of the phrase “being-with-one another in
the same world” becomes pivotal. For even as the non-relationality of death is radically
individuating, death in Being and Time may be termed ‘original’; as Dasein’s preeminent
possibility, it is the most important structure of the given—what Heidegger in §74 refers
to as an “inheritance” (Erbe). This means that Dasein holds death ‘in common’ with
others even as it is absolutely unable to share that commonality with them. Thus despite
the fact that Dasein’s own death remains inaccessible to even itself, this originality allows
Heidegger to make the transition from individual fate to common destiny: Because every
Dasein is capable o f death as the possibility it already is, every Dasein is capable of the
experience of anxiety. (However, as we will later see, the insidiousness of the they lies in
the way it uses the ambiguity of language to prevent Dasein from having the courage to
experience anxiety.) In disclosing death as the limit of its possibility, the non-relationality
of anxiety recasts Dasein’s There in a manner that, although not granting it direct access
to others, grants it access to that access by allowing Dasein to “become clear” about the
possibilities it already is. And since, according to Heidegger’s interpretation, Dasein has
4 John Caputo offers a very different interpretation o f this same passage in Demythologizing
Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), writing, “The whole that is gathered
together into the simplicity o f a Geschick is not ‘mankind,’ or the ‘West,’ or ‘Europe,’ but (our)
people {Volk). This is a bald and gratuitous move. Why should the collective Geschick— even
granting that there is such a thing— be the Geschick o f a people?.. .Indeed, what is a ‘people’? Is
it defined by race, blood, and ethnicity? By the unity o f a single language? Or by legal citizenship
in a state? One can hardly imagine that it is as a multilingual, multicultural conglomerate o f
immigrants o f the sort one finds in the United States” (81). I understand destiny as the limitation
o f possibilities o f interpretation as these are ambiguously preserved in language; a community is
thus defined by a set o f shared interpretive presuppositions that create a ‘space o f appearance’ or
world. See also Magda King’s more general discussion o f the passage in A Guide to H eidegger’s
Being and Time ed. John Llwelyn (Albany: State University o f New York Press, 2001) 308-9.
29
been “guided beforehand” by its being together in the same world, it then follows that the
traditional possibilities recognized by each individual will be the same possibilities
recognized by others. The “existential ‘solipsism’” of anxiety in resolving the disclosive
redoubling of ambiguity thus allows Dasein to realize its authentic relation to others by
placing it into the community already presupposed by the phrase “being-with-one another
in the same world.” It is in being abandoned to itself that Dasein is simultaneously bound
to others through the disclosure of its factical possibilities as being-in-the-world, which in
having been “guided beforehand” limit who Dasein can become. Destiny, as Heidegger
claims, “is not composed of individual fates” but is rather an “occurrence-with”
(Mitgeschehen) (SZ 384; BT 351).
While the structure of disclosive implication initiated by anxiety allows Dasein to
“become clear” about the traditional possibilities it shares with others, in order to fully
realize itself as being-in-the-world Dasein must make the transition back into language.
Thus even as Dasein’s individual fate implies an occurrence-with, this happening remains
implicitly self-enclosed: In excluding the possibility of ambiguity, the non-relationality of
anxiety opens up the disclosive space in which Dasein is first able to discern its authentic
access to others without itself allowing Dasein to follow through on that access.
Heidegger therefore claims that the power of destiny first becomes free “in
communication and battle [in der Mitteilung und im Kampf]” (SZ 384; BT 352).5 To
5 Though I have not been able to track this out in further detail, Karsten Harries points to the
significance o f Heidegger’s use o f the term “battle community” (Kampfgemeinschaft) in a 1922
letter to Karl Jaspers. Although Heidegger retains his affection for martial language, this “battle
community” is primarily interpretive in calling for a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the
academic philosophical establishment. This is how I am understanding “battle” or “agon” in this
chapter— as an interpretive against that is also a for. Gadamer by contrast will understand
Heidegger’s reference to battle here as referring specifically to World War I. See Karsten Harries
30
come into their own, the traditional possibilities Dasein holds in common with others
must first be disclosed in language. It is through language that the community enacts
itself by explicitly “‘sharing’” (teilen) how those possibilities situate Dasein in the “same
world” in guiding beforehand who it can become.
Here it is salutary to compare the further move into communication through
which Dasein “completes” its own happening with the notion of “original community”
quoted as the epigraph to this chapter. In the »Germanien« und »Der Rheim course,
Heidegger posits language rather than death as ‘original’; it is Holderlin’s poetry that is
the context through which Dasein is individuated as it is abandoned to the Earth in the
attunement of holy affliction. Consequently, Dasein’s realization of its individuation is
itself a happening o f language—what Heidegger develops in the »Germanien« und »Der
Rhein« course as a “dialogue” (Gesprdch)—that places Dasein into the community
inaugurated through Holderlin’s poetry by allowing language to speak in a way that is
authentically disclosive.
With Dasein’s return to communication the problem of ambiguity necessarily
reemerges, and does so in a way that reveals the aporetic tension between anxiety and
language in Being and Time. For the non-relationality of anxiety in collapsing the
referential totality of significance does not transform the way language itself speaks.
Thus despite the fact that anxiety casts Dasein back onto its possibility as being-in-the-
world, the way it opens up by letting appear as inaccessible does not transform the
previous disclosure of world as the context in which Dasein completes its own authentic
occurrence. This introduces a kind o f equivocation in Heidegger’s use of the phrase “the
“Shame, Guilt, Responsibility” in Heidegger and Jaspers ed. Alan M. Olson (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1994) 49-64.
31
same world” evident in his analysis in the way ambiguity generates a kind of
undecidability. While the existential solipsism of anxiety is meant to address precisely
this equivocation, it generates a bivalent structure between the inaccessibility of death
and the granting of an always prior access through world. In other words, there is no way
for Dasein to move from the inaccessibility of anxiety back to the referential totality of
significance, as the way language covers over the non-relationality of death first allows
Dasein’s fall into the they.
The Undecidability o f “the Same World”
To better clarify how ambiguity must necessarily reemerge as Dasein moves from
anxiety back into the referential totality of significance, it is helpful to consider one of
Heidegger’s most important uses of the phrase “being together in the same world.”
Notably, this citation falls between Heidegger’s single remark on an “authentic alliance”
(eigentliche Verbundenheit) in which Mitdasein devotes itself “to the same thing in
common” (SZ 122; BT 115) and his analysis of the leveling down of Dasein’s
possibilities by the they to the sameness of a uniformity. Heidegger writes:
Die Welt gibt nicht nur das Zuhandene als innerweltlich begegnendes Seiendes frei,
sondem auch Dasein, die Anderen in ihrem Mitdasein. Dieses innerweltlich freigegebene
Seiende ist aber seinem eigensten Seins-sinn entsprechend In-Sein in derselben Welt, in
der es, fur andere begegnend, mit da ist. Die Weltlichkeit wurde interpretiert (§18) als das
Verweisungsganze der Bedeutsamkeit. Im vorgangig verstehenden Vertrautsein mit
dieser lafit das Dasein Zuhandenes als in seiner Bewandtnis Entdecktes begegnen. (SZ
123)
The world not only frees things at hand as beings encountered within the world, but also
Da-sein, the others in their Mitdasein. But in accordance with its own meaning o f being,
this being which is freed in the surrounding world is being-in in the same world in which,
as encounterable for others, it is there with them. Worldliness was interpreted as the
referential totality o f significance (section 18). In being familiar with this significance
32
and previously understanding it, Dasein lets things at hand be encountered as things
discovered in their relevance. (BT 115)
As indicated earlier, the referential totality of significance grants Dasein access to both
beings and others in the way it lets them be encountered as relevant. However what needs
to be emphasized is Dasein’s always prior familiarity with such meaningfulness: The
referential totality of significance not only “frees,” but “previously frees” or “previously
discloses.” Heidegger for that reason identifies it as an “a priori perfect” (SZ 85; BT 79),
as such prior discovery will have delimited in advance not only how Dasein has been
granted access to beings and others, but how that access will have also determined the
possibilities for Dasein’s own disclosure as being-in-the-world.
Here Heidegger’s later note elucidating the sense o f this “apriori” in terms of
“what has been” is particularly helpful in clarifying the relationship between Dasein’s
previous discovery of relevance and the initiating context of traditional interpretedness.
For in having determined in advance Dasein’s access—and this includes Dasein’s access
to itself as thrown being-in-the-world—the interpretedness o f language implicit in the
referential totality of significance serves a transcendental function without itself being
transcendent. By this I mean that Dasein’s always previous discovery of relevance
‘conditions’ the possibilities of its understanding in a manner that, in already having been
taken up, determines how Dasein is its There; that is to say, it determines what can appear
to Dasein as a possible possibility. This will be essential for following out Heidegger’s
analysis of the statement “one dies,” as Dasein’s always prior discovery of relevance
conceals the inaccessibility of its own death by having placed it within the disclosive
horizon of possibility. By virtue of its already having been taken up, the referential
totality of significance thus frees meaning by restricting Dasein’s possibilities of
33
interpretation to what has already been made previously available. And although such
restriction can be seen to situate Dasein within “the same world” in the way it guides by
simplifying the possibilities of relevance, it simultaneously precludes the agonistic “in
opposition to and yet again for” by allowing a shared context of meaning to be
unproblematically assumed. In other words, the way the referential totality of
significance will have already granted Dasein access to others covers over Dasein’s
needing to hand down to itself this interpretive restriction through which it is actively
bound to those others in the delimitation of its factical possibilities as being-in-the-world.
The covering over at play in the simultaneous freeing and restricting of meaning
results in a modification in the notion o f access itself, evident in Heidegger’s analysis of
publicness, and is therefore essential for understanding the undecidability introduced by
ambiguity. As the reference to “openness” in the German word die Offentlichkeit
suggests, publicness may be understood to designate a disclosivity whose apparent
obviousness allows it to have already been assumed. As Dasein’s interpretive starting
point, such obviousness conceals the possibility of Dasein’s authentic access to beings
precisely by enabling beings and others to appear as already accessible. This is a critical
point: The way the referential totality of significance previously frees meaning allows for
a redoubling in the happening of disclosure itself through which it conceals its own
disclosivity in an openness that is, so to speak, ‘too open.’ Thus rather than restricting
Dasein’s possibilities for interpretation in a manner that situates it in “the same world,”
Dasein’s always previous discovery of relevance enables an indiscriminate access that
itself allows the proliferation of “chance possibilities.” Absorbed to the point of
indifference, publicness is literally open to all. Heidegger writes,
34
[»Die 6ffentlickeit«] regelt zunachst alle Welt- und Daseinsauslegung und behalt in
allem Recht. Und das nicht auf Grand eines ausgezeichneten und primaren
Seinsverhaltnisses zu den »Dingen«, nicht weil sie uber eine ausdracklich zugeeignete
Durchsichtigkeit des Daseins verfugt, sondem auf Grand des Nichteingehens »auf die
Sachen«, weil sie unempfmdlich ist gegen alle Unterschiede des Niveaus und der
Echtheit. (SZ 127)
[“Publicness”] initially controls every way in which the world and Dasein are interpreted,
and it is always right, not because o f an eminent and primary relation o f being to
“things,” not because it has an explicitly appropriate transparency o f Dasein at its
disposal, but because it does not get to “the heart o f the matter,” because it is insensitive
to every difference o f level and genuineness. (BT 119)
In the paradoxical way it obscures by claiming that things are “familiar and accessible”—
a tonality Heidegger will later characterize in terms of a “superior indifference”—
publicness levels off Dasein’s possibilities for interpretation by making those possibilities
conform to what it has already dictated in advance. It thereby subordinates the disclosure
of Dasein’s “there” to its own prior disclosure, “leveling o ff’ Dasein’s possibilities for
being into the sameness of a uniformity. As the condition o f Dasein’s intelligibility to
both itself and others, publicness takes on a kind of independent authority that in turn
undermines Dasein’s ability to “become stranded” or “shatter” (scheitem), and it is
precisely through such shattering that a primary relation to beings first becomes available
to Dasein as phenomena appear strange (unheimlich) or inaccessible. It is notable that
such strangeness occurs in Being and Time only through the collapse o f language, but not
within it.
The way the referential totality of significance initially grants access by covering
over its own disclosivity has important implications for Heidegger’s analysis of
communication through which the community is to enact itself in language. Thus
although Dasein’s interpretive possibilities are at the outset determined by the absorbed
openness of the public, the role that language itself plays in the creation o f that openness
35
remains less clear. It is not simply, then, that Dasein is initially situated within a
disclosive space that is thoroughly ambiguous, but that communication in order to
‘speak’— in order to restrict meaning so that it can be genuinely held in common—must
threaten its own disclosivity in a way that renders it irreducibly ambiguous. Heidegger in
his analysis of truth refers to the “double-possibility” of logos (SZ 226; BT 207), which
in either discovering or covering over, must be reasserted against and thus ultimately fo r
itself: “All new discovery takes place not on the basis of complete concealment, but takes
its point of departure from discoveredness in the mode of illusion [Scheiri]. Beings look
like..., that is, they are in a way already discovered, and yet they are still distorted” (SZ
222; BT 204).
While the »Germanien« und »Der R heim course is explicit about the internal
relationship between ambiguity and language (I will revisit in Chapter Two what I lay out
here in my discussion of the “essential dangerousness” of poetic speech), this double
possibility is evident in Heidegger’s characterization of communication as the “disclosed
being toward what is talked about in discourse” (SZ 168; BT 157). As he elaborates in his
analysis of discourse in section 34 of Being and Time, communication is the explicit
“sharing” (teilen)—and this word almost always appears in quotation marks— of how the
disclosure of Dasein’s There already includes within it the disclosure of others. Taking up
his earlier statement that the primordial meaning of logos is apophainesthai, Heidegger
thus defines communication as a speaking forth that “let[s] be seen” (SZ 32; BT 28-9):
“[Communication] is a letting someone see with us what has been pointed out in its
definite character. Letting someone see with us shares with the others the beings pointed
out” (SZ 155; BT 145). Although Heidegger nowhere makes this point explicit,
36
communication is revealed to have a dual aspect essential for understanding how
ambiguity is consistently aligned with Dasein’s capacity to distinguish what discourse is
authentically “about.” For as the above quotation indicates, communication as apophansis
not only lets be seen the position “from” which Dasein is speaking, it is inevitably
referred to the previous discovery o f beings that constitutes what is spoken about. Taken
together, these two aspects bring the hearer into what Heidegger designates as a “primary
relation” by letting be seen the way of seeing that allows beings to be encountered so as
to already be held in common. Here the German word “Mitteilung” suggests not only “to
impart [teilen]'” but to “take part \mitteilen]” through the explicit sharing of the disclosure
of beings already shared and that is itself a function of Dasein’s being together in “the
same world.”6
The pointing out of what has been “covered over” or “distorted” makes manifest
the concealment that itself lets beings come to appear in their appearance. It thereby
completes the happening of disclosure through which beings show themselves “as” what
they are by making explicit the “as” in language (what Heidegger terms the
hermeneutical or existential “as”). Thus although simultaneous, there is a distinction
between the letting be seen that defines what communication is “about” and the eventful
self-disclosure that underlies such pointing, which lets be seen the seeing through which
6 Given Heidegger’s emphasis on communication as “battle” or “struggle” in §74 o f Being and

Time, it is important to stress how Heidegger understands Mitteilung to entail differentiation and
separation. This comes to the fore in Heidegger’s treatment o f the hermeneutical “as.” Instead o f
conceiving the happening o f relation enacted by the “as” only in terms o f a synthesis, Heidegger
calls attention to the unity— evident in the simultaneous operation o f synthesis and diairesis— o f
both taking apart and putting together; the implicitly confrontational dimension o f the
hermeneutical “as” places the relata apart in order to relate them precisely through the synthesis
enacted by the “as.” Consequently, the “as” holds open difference as part o f the very mechanism
o f how it “lets” or “allows” relation. Authentic communication then is contestive in enacting the
separation that holds open the possibility o f difference in holding open world.
37
Dasein will have already been granted access to beings and others by world. The latter
will be important for understanding the significance Heidegger attaches to the self-
reflexivity of Holderlin’s pointing toward himself as he indicates not his success, but his
own failure to be heard.
Understood as a “letting see with,” communication for Heidegger should be
understood performatively. In its double-aspect, it brings the listener toward what
communication is about only through the revelation of a being toward... that, as already
shared, itself allows for communication: “What is ‘shared’ [in communication] is the
being toward what is pointed out which has a way of seeing common to all. We must
keep in mind that this being-toward is being-in-the-world, namely in the world from
which what is pointed out is encountered” (SZ 155; BT 145). As this quotation suggests,
community is not given through a set of essential characteristics, but is itself enacted
through language as the explicit articulation of a common way of seeing; it is in being
toward what is pointed out through communication that Dasein is also toward others.
Here however it needs to be emphasized that such sharing is not a back-and-forth
between speakers that operates on the model of intersubjective exchange. Rather,
communication is primarily attestive as the making explicit of a common way o f seeing
through which Dasein has been previously granted access to beings by world, for it is just
such access that Dasein shares with others by virtue of being in “f/ze [same] world.”
Heidegger accordingly describes Dasein’s relationship to Mitdasein as a “self-contained,
indifferent side-by-sideness” (SZ 175; BT 163), where “indifferent” implies not a lack o f
concern but the setting back of Dasein’s always prior discovery o f beings— a setting back
38
that holds open the disclosive space of world in holding open the possibility of
difference.
As the explicit sharing of a being-toward, Heidegger claims that communication
brings the listener into a primary relation with beings. In its apophantic dimension it
thereby creates the context in which this “primary relation” is itself enacted through the
rediscovery o f beings in speech, which paradoxically recovers beings from the distortion
itself generated by language as it conceals its own happening. However it is at this
juncture that the authority exercised by publicness becomes key as the possibility of such
a primary relation is excluded by the public’s claim that beings are already “familiar and
accessible.” This exactly precludes the possibility of beings’ needing to be discovered
anew. As Heidegger asserts, “Hearing and understanding have attached themselves
beforehand to what is spoken about as such” (SZ 168; BT 157). Significantly, this
“attaching itself beforehand” results in a modification of the disclosive structure of the
“about.” For where the performative or enacted dimension of communication as a “letting
see with” brings the hearer into a primary relation with beings, the derivative speech of
idle talk severs the double aspect of communication that enables it to disclose. It thereby
generates both a second and a secondary sense of the “about.” As Heidegger goes on to
elaborate, idle talk listens solely to what is spoken about in order, on the one hand, to
compare it to what it already knows—indeed, this is how it levels off Dasein’s
possibilities for being—and, on the other hand, to pass it on in a manner that reiterates it
as authoritative. As a consequence, communication becomes something that takes place
simply for its own sake through the reaffirmation of what comes to appear as already
obvious.
39
While the double aspect of communication itself allows the possibility of such
shifting over (Heidegger later calls ambiguity a “temptation”), the modification of
genuine discourse into idle talk is to be located not in speech per se, but in the inability to
hear evident in such attaching itself beforehand. The public’s constant reiteration of what
is obvious thereby precludes the necessity of listening through which Dasein is brought
into a primary relation with beings and so becomes capable of an authentic alliance as it
devotes itself to the same thing “in common” through which the possibility of difference
comes to be held open. This will be of decisive significance in the »Germanien« und
»Der Rheim course, as Heidegger locates “original community” not in Dasein’s capacity
to speak but in its ability to hear as the “preceding bond” of an “original community.” In
other words, it is in endangering its own happening that language requires a listening that,
in restricting Dasein to what it constantly lets be discovered anew, simultaneously binds
it to others in the space opened up by that manifesting.
It is, however, at this point that the undecidability of ambiguity becomes an issue
for Heidegger, as the indiscriminate access of publicness undermines Dasein’s ability to
distinguish between what is authentic and what is inauthentic. As Heidegger elaborates,
Wenn im alltaglichen Miteinandersein dergleichen begegnet, was jedem zuganglich ist

and woriiber jeder jedes sagen kann, wird bald nicht mehr entscheidbar, was in echtem
Verstehen erschlossen ist und was nicht. Diese Zweideutigkeit erstreckt sich nicht allein
auf die Welt, sondem ebensosehr auf das Miteinandersein als solches, sogar auf das Sein
des Daseins zu ihm selbst.
Alles sieht so aus wie echt verstanden, ergriffen und gesprochen und ist es im Grande
doch nicht, oder es sieht nicht so aus und ist es im Grande doch. Die Zweideutigkeit
betrifft nicht allein das Verfugen uber und das Schalten mit dem in Gebrauch und Genufi
Zuganglichen, sonder sie hat sich schon im Verstehen als Seinkonnen in der Art des
Entwurfs und der Vorgabe von Moglichkeiten des Daseins festgesetzt. (SZ 173)
When in everyday being with one another, we encounter things that are accessible to
everybody and about which everybody can say everything, we can soon no longer decide
what is disclosed in genuine understanding and what is not. This ambiguity extends not
only to the world, but likewise to being-with-one-another as such, even to the being o f
Dasein itself.
40
Everything looks as if it were genuinely understood, grasped, and spoken whereas

basically it is not, or it does not look that way, yet basically is. Ambiguity not only affects
the way we avail ourselves o f what is accessible for use and enjoyment, and the way we
manage it, but it has already established itself in understanding as a potentiality for being,
and in the way Da-sein projects itself and presents its possibilities. (BT 162)
The difficulties introduced by this quotation are profound given the way in which the
factical possibilities Dasein shares with others are to become free through “battle and
communication.” For the way language discovers and covers itself over pertains not just
to specific instances of ambiguous speech, but modifies the disclosive space of world
through which beings and others are first freed by language to be encountered. At issue
then is not an epistemological confusion that can simply be cleared up through further
talk, but a disclosive redoubling internal to the happening of language that allows for the
creation of a thoroughly delusional structure, as Dasein is unable to distinguish between a
genuine and a non-genuine possibility. Given such undecidability, there is literally no
way to ‘tell the difference’ through language itself between authentic speech and idle
talk. As we will see, both poetry and genuine phenomenological insight sound everyday
in their capacity to be heard as cliches, that is, in their capacity to be heard not as a
rediscovery but as the restatement of an already obvious truth.
At this juncture I want to point back to Heidegger’s analysis o f anxiety in §74 and
toward what I will take up in the next chapter as the chain of mediation between poet,
thinker, and statesman. For Heidegger in Being and Time attempts to resolve the
irreducible ambiguity of language by way of an attunement whose disclosive structure
itself collapses how the referential totality o f significance has always previously granted
Dasein access to both beings and others. While the existential identity of anxiety opens
up the disclosive space that enables Dasein to distinguish its authentic possibilities, the
problem of ambiguity must necessarily reemerge as Dasein makes the transition from the
41
inaccessibility of anxiety to the always prior disclosure of relevance that itself makes
communication possible. This means that when Dasein turns to communicate the
authentic possibilities about which it has become clear through anxiety, it does so within
the disclosive space of publicness, which has dictated in advance how its words can be
heard. To the extent that genuine discourse presupposes the possibility of a listening that
binds Dasein into what it discloses, it remains questionable how Dasein can complete its
own authentic occurrence. This reveals two problems that themselves highlight the
aporetic tension between anxiety and language. First, in taking Dasein back from the loss
of its individuation in the they, the non-relationality of anxiety does not of itself change
the disclosive space of world through which Dasein has been previously granted access to
both beings and others. Indeed, I want to suggest that this informs Heidegger’s turn to the
work of art—and poetry in particular—whose projective disclosivity opens up world
rather than collapses it. And second, given the double possibility of logos as a
simultaneous uncovering and covering over, the problem of ambiguity is quite simply
irreducible. It thus challenges any notion of authentic community, any conception of a
“being-together within the same world.” While Heidegger’s failure to acknowledge the
former arguably entangles him in the delusional structure itself generated by ambiguity,
the latter points to how Heidegger’s reconceptualization of ambiguity and hearing in the
»Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course can be seen as a response to Being and Time.
42
Idle Talk and the Making Ambiguous o f Anxiety
Before turning to how the undecidability o f ambiguity necessitates the solipsism
of anxiety, I want to first address Heidegger’s analysis of the statement “one dies.” This
analysis is critical for clarifying the aporetic tension between anxiety and language, as the
previous disclosure of relevance allows the loss o f Dasein’s individuation in already
having covered over the inaccessibility of its own death. It thereby renders anxiety
ambiguous through the creation of the attunement of fear, which allows for the possibility
of an indiscriminate access by turning Dasein away from itself.
The way ambiguity determines how Dasein’s possibilities come to be articulated
first emerges in Heidegger’s analysis of the everyday interpretation of death pronounced
in the truism “one dies” (§51).7 As Heidegger writes, “if idle talk is always ambiguous, so
is this way of talking about death” (SZ 253; BT 234). Significantly, Heidegger here
makes the connection between such talk and the rendering ambiguous o f anxiety as fear,
which covers over the inaccessibility of death as the basis o f Dasein’s individuation.
Though the structure o f ambiguity is to conceal by letting appear as already accessible,
the pronouncement “one dies” should be read not as a further example o f cliched speech,
but as the cliche that first makes cliche as such possible: As the mechanism through
which Dasein loses itself, the ambiguity that underlies “one dies” inaugurates the they,
and inaugurates it in a manner that simultaneously justifies it as authoritative. Heidegger
7 Robert Bemasconi offers a detailed treatment o f this section o f Being and Time in his chapter
“Literary Attestation in Philosophy: Heidegger’s Footnote on Tolstoy’s ‘The Death o f Ivan
Ilyich’” in Heidegger in Question: The Art o f Existing (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993) 76-
98. Though he also addresses the statement “one dies,” he does not discuss this in relation to
ambiguity.
43
makes this point when he writes, “With such ambiguity, Da-sein puts itself in the position
of losing itself in the they with regard to an eminent potentiality-of-being that belongs to
its own self. The they justifies and aggravates the temptation [Versuchung] of covering
over for itself its ownmost being-toward-death” (ibid.).
While the above quotation identifies ambiguity as a temptation, Heidegger’s
analysis of how publicness will have already granted an indiscriminate access suggests
that ambiguity is primary even as Dasein’s insight into its own death remains available to
it through anxiety. This is evident in what Heidegger identifies as the “superior
indifference” and “air of superiority” intoned in the pronouncement “one dies.” In this
particular instance, the authority of the they has not only delimited in advance Dasein’s
possible interpretations of death, more importantly it has determined Dasein’s stance
toward its own death. By allowing (or “tempting”) Dasein to assume the position of the
they, ambiguity inaugurates Dasein’s own entry into it by covering over the
inaccessibility of death as the locus of its individuation.
The mechanism through which this shifting over takes place becomes clear in
Heidegger’s elaboration of the distinction between an empirical certainty and a being-
certain that directly implicates Dasein. The air of superiority intoned in “one dies”
derives from its status as a factual pronouncement whose truth is so obvious as to appear
unambiguous. The concealment that underlies this obviousness thus enables Dasein to
substitute one sense of certainty for another: In seeming to acknowledge the certainty of
death, the obviousness of the statement “one dies” puts itself in the place of a being-
certain that directly implicates Dasein by revealing death as its own. The ambiguity of
language thus protects Dasein from—rather than exposes it to—how Dasein already is
44
the possibility of its death. It is important to press what is at stake in this shift: Dasein
uses a truism—uses, I will argue, language itself—to cover over the inaccessibility of
death as the possibility it already is. Because of the manner in which the referential
totality of significance lets death appear as accessible in such a way as to have already
been taken up, this shifting over forecloses the possibility of a disclosure that directly
implicates Dasein in death as its own. To be implicated in this way, to be certain, is to be
individuated. It is, then, by covering over the inaccessibility o f death to even itself that
ambiguity ‘first’ puts Dasein in the position of losing itself in the they at the same time as
that loss ‘first’ generates the they together with ambiguity. As a consequence, “one dies”
becomes a peculiar kind o f speech act whose bindingness lies in the way it seems to
acknowledge the imminence of death while using that superior act of acknowledgement
to place Dasein above how death is anxiously its own.
The disclosive structure of a concealment that covers itself over is critical for
understanding how anxiety is rendered ambiguous as fear. Though Heidegger in an often
quoted statement on Aristotle’s Rhetoric comments that “publicness as the kind of being
of the they.. .uses mood and ‘makes’ it for itself’ (SZ 138; BT 130), how such “making”
occurs is to be located in the specific way “one dies” recasts the inaccessibility of death
by making it something accessible. While in the context o f Being and Time it is
questionable whether authentic speech can disclose what is inaccessible, the
pronouncement “one dies” turns death into something that both happens to others—
happens to the anonymous they of which Dasein has become a part—and takes place in
the future. Thus coincident with Dasein’s loss of itself in the they is the inauguration of
the temporality that first makes fear possible. Or put somewhat differently, by projecting
45
death into the future the they not only makes it something to be feared, but first “makes”
the attunement of fear.
To clarify the peculiar sense of making being played out in the self-justificatory
relationship between ambiguity and the they, it is helpful to consider the delusional
structure through which ambiguity conceals by way of the inauguration of a different
sense of the “about.” For it is not simply that the they renders anxiety ambiguous through
the creation of fear;—it makes anxiety ambiguous as fear. Which is to say, that it covers
over the possibility of anxiety by redescribing anxiety as fear. Here it is again important
to emphasize the significance Heidegger attaches to the “air of superiority” intoned in
“one dies.” This superiority not only allows Dasein to lose its individuation, it has already
determined in advance how Dasein can talk about death. Any discourse that does not
reiterate the truth of “one dies” becomes a manifestation of bad taste, namely, the bad
taste of showing oneself to be a coward. In this way, the they prevents Dasein from being
able to have the courage to even experience anxiety:
Die als Furcht zweideutig gemachte Angst wird uberdies als Schwache ausgegeben, die
ein selbstsicheres Dasein nicht kennen darf. Was sich gemafi dem lautlosen Dekret des
Man »gehort«, ist diese gleichgtiltige Ruhe gegeniiber der »Tatsache«, dal3 man stirbt.
Die Ausbildung einer solchen »tiberlegenen« Gleichgiiltigkeit entfremdet das Dasein
seinem eigensten, unbezuglichen Seinkonnen. (SZ 254)
Angst, made ambiguous by fear, is, moreover taken as a weakness no self-assured Da
sein is permitted to know. What is ‘proper’ according to the silent decree o f the they is
the indifferent calm as to the ‘fact’ that one dies. The cultivation o f such a ‘superior’
indifference estranges Da-sein from its ownmost non-relational potentiality-of-being.
(BT 235)
In being made ambiguous, the disclosivity of anxiety is covered over and reinterpreted as
fear as part of the very mechanism through which the attunement o f fear itself comes to
be created.
46
Because of how the statement “one dies” inaugurates the temporality of fear,
Dasein has grown up initially within an interpretative framework in which it has been
estranged from its own death as the basis o f its individuation. Despite Heidegger’s
suggestion that Dasein can speak about death authentically, the way language makes
beings and others accessible through the prior disclosure of the referential totality of
significance reveals the aporetic tension between the non-relationality o f death and the
prior disclosure of relevance through which language grants access to beings and others.
Because ambiguity is inherent in the disclosive happening of language itself, the only
way Heidegger can resolve the problem of ambiguity is through the collapse o f language.
While it is clear such a collapse can take Dasein back from ambiguity, the difficulty lies
not simply in how cliches protect Dasein from being implicated in its own death, but in
how language necessarily covers over the inaccessibility of death in seeming to make it
accessible within the context of the prior disclosure of the referential totality of
significance. I want to suggest by way of transition that the manner in which public
interpretedness makes anxiety ambiguous by turning it into fear is limited not simply to
idle talk but implicates all language and communication in turning Dasein away from its
death. For it is as this turning away that Dasein is first granted access to world.
The Aporia o f Anxiety
Although Heidegger’s interpretation of the statement “one dies” follows after his
thematic analysis of attunement (§29), the making ambiguous of anxiety as fear casts that
analysis in a new light, especially as it pertains to the way the they prevents Dasein from
having the courage to even experience anxiety. This is evident in Heidegger’s elaboration
47
of the “primordial disclosivity” of attunement, which either turns (kehrt) Dasein away
from its There as a fearful avoidance and flight or, in the privileged attunement of
anxiety, turns Dasein toward itself by opening up the possibility of resoluteness. I want to
now make the transition from Heidegger’s analysis of language to his analysis of
attunement by showing how the concealment of a “being-certain” that directly implicates
Dasein sets up a bivalent structure in which Dasein is granted access to beings and others
only through the covering over of the original inaccessibility of death, a covering over
that in turn conceals itself—and quite literally, in this turning as an evasion and flight—
through the creation o f an indiscriminate access that entangles Dasein as it projects
possibilities not its own. Thus where the existential identity of anxiety resolves the
disclosive redoubling of ambiguity, the bivalent structure of this turning toward/turning
away from generates a new set of tensions in how it locates what is inaccessible only in
terms of the collapse of the way language grants any kind of access. This transition also
marks a shift from my emphasis on the equivocation at issue in Heidegger’s use o f the
phrase “the same world” to a more focused discussion o f the aporetic disclosivity of
anxiety itself in relation to world.
In order to understand what I’m calling the aporetic disclosivity o f anxiety, it is
first necessary to review the role attunement plays in constituting Dasein as being-in-the-
world. Despite Heidegger’s assertion that mood is “equiprimordial” with language and
understanding, the way that attunement opens up by delivering Dasein over to itself as
thrown being-in-the-world reveals it to have a disclosive privilege.8 It is significant that
8 In his chapter “The Primacy o f Stimmung Over Dasein’s Bodiliness” Michel Haar analyzes the
“anterior dimension” o f attunement as situating in disclosing beings-as-a-whole. See The Song o f
the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds o f the History o f Being trans. by Reginald Lily.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 34-46. Although he specifically calls attention to
48
in both Being and Time and the »Germanien« und »Der R heim course Dasein’s authentic
possibilities are first made available to it only through a change of attunement that, in
“seizing” or “befalling” Dasein, transforms how its There is disclosed. In opening up
Dasein to itself by ‘situating’ it, Dasein’s already having found itself in a mood thus
determines how its There is disclosed in a manner that governs Dasein’s possibilities of
being.
This is particularly important in considering the relationship between the way in
which the they makes fear and what Heidegger delineates as the “first essential
ontological characteristic of attunement” (SZ 136; BT 128). Rather than disclosing
Dasein’s There in a way that allows it to take up its authentic possibilities, Heidegger
claims that attunement for the most part delivers Dasein over to itself as the fearful
evasion and flight from itself. Significantly, this evasion takes place as Dasein is
delivered over to its There precisely in being turned away from it: “The first essential
ontological characteristic of attunement is: Attunement discloses Da-sein in its
thrownness, initially andfor the most part in the mode o f an evasive turning away”
(ibid.). As this quotation suggests, the way the they makes anxiety ambiguous as fear
allows for the creation of a disclosive space in which Dasein first finds itself as the
evasion of itself. In tempting Dasein to cover over the certainty of its own death, the
ambiguity of language conceals its own concealment precisely as this turning away
through which Dasein is granted an indiscriminate access to beings that allows the
Heidegger’s interpretation o f Holderlin’s founding o f holy affliction as disclosing the “the limits
o f the world” (42), he poses the question, “Nevertheless, does not anxiety have a privilege
answering finally, yes, it has a “trans-epochal privilege” (44). This is exactly where I disagree.
Heidegger’s shift to Holderlin as a destiny reveals the primacy o f language, and indicates a
decisive reconfiguration in the relationship between language, world and death elaborated in
Being and Time. Though Heidegger o f course does not abandon anxiety, its privilege is displaced
together with the various shifts in Heidegger’s conception o f history/destiny.
49
proliferation of possibilities not authentically its own. Heidegger’s conception of the
disclosivity of attunement as a turning thus sets up a bivalent structure in which the
radical inaccessibility of death and the granting o f an authentic access to beings and
others by language are rigidly demarcated. This means that Dasein’s recovery of an
authentic access does not simply require the collapse of its previous access (this is the
interpretation Being and Time itself puts forth), but that the granting of any access
necessarily turns Dasein away from itself in covering over the inaccessibility of Dasein’s
own death.
The further implications of this bivalent structure do not become clear until
Heidegger’s elaboration of the second ontological characteristic of attunement (the third
characteristic concerns Dasein’s ability to be touched or affected), which makes explicit
the relationship between the manner in which Dasein’s There is disclosed and its
determination as being-in-the-world. The way that Dasein finds itself in its There as
attuned thus determines how beings and others come to appear to Dasein as constitutive
of its own disclosure. Heidegger makes this point when he writes:
Die Stimmung h a tje schon das In-der-Welt-sein als Ganzes erschlossen und macht ein
Sichrichten auf...allererst moglich. Das Gestimmtsein bezieht sich nicht zunachst auf
Seelisches, ist selbst kein Zustand drinnen, der dann auf ratselhafte Weise hinausgelangt
und auf die Dinge und Personen abfarbt. Sie ist eine existenziale Grundart der
gleichsurspriinglichen Erschlossenheit von Welt, Mitdasein und Existenz, weil diese
selbst wesenhaft In-der-Welt-sein ist. (SZ 136-7)
M ood has always already disclosed being-in-the-world as a whole and first makes
possible directing oneself toward something. Being attuned is not initially related to
something psychical, it is itself not an inner condition which then in some mysterious
way reaches out and leaves its mark on something. This is the second essential
characteristic o f attunement. It is a fundamental existential mode o f being o f the
equiprimordial disclosedness o f world, being-there-with, and existence because this
existence itself is being-in-the-world. (BT 129)
As Heidegger’s almost circular formulation in the last sentence indicates (mood
has already disclosed being-in-the-world because existence itself constitutes being-in-the-
50
world), the way attunement opens up by delivering Dasein over to its There in turn—and,
again, quite literally in the way Dasein’s There is disclosed as this very turning—
determines how Dasein as being-in-the-world comes to be articulated. Heidegger in the
»Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course therefore claims that fundamental attunements are
“world-opening” in disclosing being-as-a-whole (das Seiende im Ganzen) (GA39, 82):
How Dasein is delivered over to its own thrownness determines how beings come to
appear to Dasein in a way that simultaneously situates it within that happening of
disclosure in delimiting how it will have already factically taken up that disclosure. The
disclosure of Dasein’s There in Being and Time as the fearful avoidance and flight from
itself thereby inflects how Dasein is granted access to both beings and others in such a
way that it can lose itself in them.
It is, however, in the context of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety that the aporetic
structure of attunement as a turning first begins to emerge. For in disclosing death as the
possibility that Dasein already is, Heidegger accords anxiety a privileged status in Being
and Time\ as “distinctive” (ausgezeichnet), it is the single attunement that turns Dasein
toward itself. “Being-toward-death,” as Heidegger claims, “is essentially anxiety.”
Significantly, this turning toward in order to reveal the inaccessibility of death collapses
the very structures that themselves situate Dasein as being-in-the-world. In contrast to the
derivative attunement of fear, which lets particular entities be encountered as threatening,
what anxiety is “about” is neither definable nor locatable within the disclosive space of
world. “Thus neither Angst ‘sees’ a definite ‘there’ and ‘over here’ from which what is
threatening approaches. The fact that what is threatening is nowhere characterizes what
Angst is about. Angst does not know what it is about which it is anxious” (SZ 186; BT
51
174). As Heidegger’s use of quotation marks indicates, the indefiniteness of anxiety falls
outside (or perhaps more accurately before9) the structure of the “about”: The “nothing”
and “nowhere” that distinguish anxiety exceed the referential totality of significance,
which, as we have seen, depends on the always prior disclosure of relevance for the
projection of meaning. Consequently, anxiety not only disrupts language, but remains
fundamentally unavailable to it, a point I address in considering Dasein’s return to
language once anxiety has “quieted down.”
The unlocatability of anxiety signals an important modification in the way
attunement may be understood to disclose beings-as-a-whole. In exceeding the referential
totality of significance, the indeterminacy of what anxiety is about lets innerworldly
beings and others become accessible in their inaccessibility in which they “no longer
speak,” that is, in which they no longer address Dasein in their meaningfulness as
possibilities. “The ‘world,’” Heidegger asserts, “can offer nothing, nor can the Mit-dasein
of others” (SZ 187; BT 175). It is through the collapse of Dasein’s always previous
discovery of world that anxiety opens up a disjunctive gap in the way Dasein projects
possibilities that ultimately casts it back onto itself as thrown being-toward-death. This is
an important point: Anxiety turns Dasein toward itself and delivers it over to the
inaccessibility o f its own death in disclosing both beings and others as inaccessible in
9 This point is suggested in the analysis o f trauma given by Jean-Frangois Lyotard in Heidegger
and “the jew s ” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota
Press) and needs more elaboration than what I offer here. Lyotard via Freud describes anxiety as
the irruption o f an originary repression that takes place prior to language and so announces itself
precisely in the collapsing o f language (or representation). Though Lyotard says comparatively
little about Heidegger’s actual analysis o f anxiety in Being and Time (see p. 60)— he focuses
instead on the different ways Heidegger ‘betrays’ anxiety in forgetting the jews— what he
analyzes as the temporal structure o f trauma would be helpful for clarifying how in Being and
Time anxiety exceeds language in manner that undoes it. Developing this connection remains
under the heading o f “further work.”
52
their being. Although Heidegger later insists that “world is not absent,” the
distinctiveness of anxiety is to be found in the way it discloses Dasein’s There in a
manner that lets innerwordly beings and others be encountered in the resistant
uncanniness of their withdrawal. Thus while “world” in one sense is not absent, the
structures of relevance that in fact allow it to be world “collapse” or are “emptied out”
(versinken). This opens up a disjunctive gap in how Dasein projects possibilities, as the
futural orientation that allows Dasein to project chance possibilities as themselves the
articulation o f Dasein’s fearful evasion of itself gives way to the indefiniteness o f an
encroaching threat that Heidegger describes as being so near that it is “already ‘there.’”
Indeed, the threat is so near as to be Dasein’s There.
What however emerges in the space of this disjunctive gap is a peculiar kind of
self-reflexive ‘turn’—a self-reflexive turn that is not the operation of a subject, but
instead the interruption of the projective structure of understanding as Dasein is cast back
onto itself through the disclosure o f death as the possibility it already is. Heidegger’s
language of “werfen” is important here, for the way anxiety is about the “about” throws
Dasein back onto its There in holding it open in its very possibility as being-in-the-world.
Notably, this turn is further evident in Heidegger’s analysis o f the way in which anxiety
can be seen to reveal the “as”-structure: In collapsing the referential totality of
significance, the indefiniteness of what anxiety is about discloses Dasein to itself as
determinative of the very structure of the “about.” Heidegger thus writes that “that about
which Angst is anxious is being-in-the-world i t s e l f and that “Angst as a mode of
attunement first discloses world as world” (SZ 187; BT 175). Though Heidegger in the
»Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course claims that fundamental attunements are “world-
53
opening” precisely in how they inaugurate the “as”-structure, the distinctiveness of
anxiety lies precisely in the way it collapses world in order to reveal it as world.10 In
exceeding the referential totality of significance, anxiety thus first comes to reveal the
“as”-structure as the “as”-structure, however it does so in a way implicitly aporetic in
collapsing the disclosive structure of language that itself constitutes world.
It is in taking Dasein back from its “ ‘worldly’ possibilities” in order to give it
back to itself in its being possible that Heidegger makes the statement that the manner in
which anxiety individuates may in fact be understood as a kind of solipsism: “Angst
individualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as ‘solus ipse.’ This existential ‘solipsism,’
however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of
a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before world
as world, and thus before itself as being-in-the-world” (SZ 187; BT 175). In contrast to
the epistemological or metaphysical solipsism of the subject, which Heidegger frequently
characterizes as “encapsulated,” the existential identity that underlies this version of
solipsism in fact presupposes world. The difficulty posed by this passage is not the
10 Michel Haar also calls attention to the tension underlying this point when he writes, “Yet
precisely if [Dasein] no longer understands anything in the world, how can it understand itself as
being-in-the-world? Does not the melting away o f significations and o f the identity o f world
entail the melting away o f one’s own identity? Anxiety, says Heidegger, does not deliver Dasein
over to the solitude o f an ‘existential solipsism,’ precisely because it now finds itself before the
w orld as world, and at the same time before itself as pure being-in-the-world. Yet if the world is
at that moment devoid o f meaning, how can the meaning o f world as world, o f world as such
survive the shipwreck o f all significations?” (49). While Haar’s series o f questions here point to
what I have been exploring as the aporetic tension between language and anxiety, he answers
these questions by claiming that an “originary anxiety” intensifies the “pure possibility o f being-
in-the-world” while leaving it unaffected. This however omits the significance o f Heidegger’s
understanding o f attunement in Being and Time as a bivalent turning toward/turning away from
that implicates how beings in their totality are disclosed. My key claim is that anxiety is a dead
end when it comes to finding an attunement that is world-opening. See “The Limits o f
Resoluteness and the Initially Latent, Then Explicit Primacy o f Originary Temporality Over
Authentic Temporality” in Heidegger and the Essence o f Man, trans. William McNeill (Albany:
State University o f New York Press, 1993) 27-56.
54
movement from a self-enclosed subject to world, but rather in the “existential identity”
apparent in the way in which anxiety is about the “about” or in how it discloses world as
world. Thus although the collapse of the referential totality of significance allows Dasein
to be claimed by death as the possibility it already is, what remains unclear within the
context of Heidegger’s analysis is how Dasein is to move from the disclosure o f world as
world to the factical articulation of itself as being-in-the-world, which includes the
granting of an authentic access to others through, in particular, attunement and language.
For as Heidegger’s analysis suggests, the aporia of anxiety lies precisely in how it
collapses world without being able to transform the prior disclosure of world through
which Dasein’s disclosure includes the disclosure o f others.
There is thus a very peculiar moment in Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety as Dasein
makes the transition from the collapse of the referential totality of significance back into
language. As Heidegger writes, “When Angst has quieted down, in our everyday way of
talking we are accustomed to saying ‘it was really nothing’” (SZ 186; BT 174). Though
Heidegger clarifies that this statement speaks ontically in locating the “nothing” within
the context of relevance, it is only through such quieting down that Dasein again becomes
capable of speech. And ironically, when it speaks it does so ambiguously, revealing both
the genuine ontological insight into the nothing developed in Heidegger’s 1929 lecture
“What is Metaphysics?” and the dismissive superiority that characterized the fearful
turning away of the they. It is with this “it was really nothing” that the deeper structural
aporia between anxiety and language most clearly emerges. For on the one hand, the non-
relationality of anxiety turns Dasein toward the imminence of its own death by letting
beings and others appear as inaccessible, while on the other, the prior disclosure of the
55
referential totality of significance necessarily covers that inaccessibility precisely by
making it accessible. This means that there is not only no way to say what anxiety is
“about”—which exactly exceeds language in a way that makes anxiety capable of
collapsing it—but also no way for Dasein to sustain the clarity achieved through anxiety
that would enable Dasein to distinguish between a “chance” or an authentic factical
possibility. Dasein’s return to language and communication must necessarily reintroduce
the problem of ambiguity through the reintroduction of the prior disclosure of relevance,
which allows language to bear out its own significance and factically situates Dasein
“together in the same world” with others.
56
CHAPTER TWO SYNOPSIS
“Since we are a dialogue”:
Holderlin’s Mediation o f Language
Where Chapter One sought to motivate Heidegger’s turn to Holderlin by showing
the aporetic tension between language and death, this chapter takes up that aporia by
specifically looking at how Heidegger reconceives language through Holderlin’s poetry.
In contrast to Being and Time, where the disclosive structure of the referential totality of
significance allowed Dasein to lose itself in the they, Holderlin’s poetry becomes the
context through which Dasein’s individuation is authentically realized through language.
This allows Heidegger to resolve the tension between Dasein’s individuation and its
authentic access to others, and is essential for following out what it means for Holderlin
to be a destiny. Because of the way language grants a common access to beings,
Heidegger claims that an “original community” has already taken place in advance in
Holderlin’s poetry; the realization o f Dasein’s individuation through what I develop as its
active reception of Holderlin is at once conditioned by, and the condition for, that
community as the context through which Dasein becomes who it already is. The
“originality” implied in the granting of a common access in turn allows Heidegger to
recuperate the notion of an “authentic alliance” pointed to in Being and Time in which
Dasein “devotes itself to the same thing in common” within the space of appearance of
57
Chapter Two Synopsis
world as this is developed in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« lecture course in terms
of a “preceding bond.”
In order however to understand how Holderlin’s poetry allows for an authentic
access to beings, others and even to Dasein itself, it is first necessary to understand how
Heidegger conceives Holderlin’s exemplary relation to language. In his analysis of
Holderlin’s self-reflexive references to his own vocation, Heidegger emphasizes the
poet’s relationship to the gods to whom the poet is “exposed” in being placed under the
claim of the divine. According to Heidegger’s analysis, the poet’s vocation is to “grasp”
in language the structure o f this exposure, which takes place through Holderlin’s
founding of the fundamental attunement o f holy affliction, mourning yet readied.
Through this “grasping” the poet mediates the hinting language o f the gods, “building it
into” the language of the people as its foundation. The ecstatic disclosivity o f attunement
(which is subsequently developed in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course as
Dasein’s “exposure in the midst of beings as whole”), lets the manifestness of beings
happen by transporting Dasein into the space of appearance opened up by attunement and
thereby transposing it into the being o f others simultaneously.
Holderlin’s mediation of language is key for understanding how Heidegger
relocates the disclosive redoubling of ambiguity together with Dasein’s capacity to
“listen” or “hear.” For where Dasein’s prior discovery of world through the referential
totality of significance implied a “distortion” or “disfiguring,” in the »Germanien« und
»Der Rhein« course such veiling is understood to be internal to the structure of
Holderlin’s mediation. Through the enactment of that mediation, Holderlin is exposed to
the overpowering proximity of the gods—an exposure that he founds as attunement but
58
also “veils” in protecting the people from the underlying excesses of his own relation to
the divine (namely, the implicit presumption of his vocation and the excessive proximity
of the overwhelming, which ultimately consumes him).
The positive significance attached to this veiling is important for highlighting the
contrast with Being and Time, as the redoubling internal to language is here understood
not to fundamentally undermine its capacity to speak but instead enables language to
“happen” through the disclosure of the overpowering as this is explicitly tied to the
manifestation of the divine. Heidegger takes this up in his “Preliminary Remarks” as the
essential and double-edged dangerousness of language: On the one hand, language
exposes Dasein to the overpowering manifestation o f beings, which come to appear “as
though for the first time,” while on the other, it endangers its own disclosive happening
by covering over its capacity to expose through which language again declines into
cliches and idle talk. Significantly, this decline not only allows beings to appear already
familiar and accessible, but allows Holderlin’s poetry to appear already familiar and
accessible.
As a consequence, the relocation of ambiguity to Holderlin’s mediation allows the
transition from the disclosure of Dasein’s prior or everyday access to beings at the same
time it covers over Holderlin’s poetry as the privileged site of that transition. Thus
although the notion of a mediation marks a significant departure from the aporetic tension
generated by an absorbed initial access and an anxiously solipsistic inaccessibility, it also
introduces a new problem for Heidegger that directly concerns the implicit politics of his
own dialogue with Holderlin. For at issue is how the people gains access to Holderlin’s
poetry as the context for the transformation of its own prior access to beings. This
59
transformation allows the people to become who it already will have been through the
active reception of Holderlin’s poetry, an active reception that in turn completes
Holderlin’s mediation as the people is exposed to the divine through the happening of
language.
Heidegger addresses himself to this problem in his multilayered analysis of
hearing, which on one level concerns the dialogue between the three creative powers—
poet, thinker, and statesman—as opening up the “historical-spiritual space” of
Holderlin’s poetry, and on another level, concerns the interpretation of Holderlin’s line
“Since we are dialogue.” This latter interpretation directly takes up the relationship
between dialogue and hearing as the enactment of the “we.”
It is my contention that the specifically political dimension of the »Germanien«
und »Der Rhein« course is to be found in the structure of Heidegger’s interpretative
address as he takes on the problem of Holderlin’s being “overheard,” through which
Holderlin’s poetry is received as already accessible. Implicit in Heidegger’s interpretive
address is thus also a deeper methodological problem, for ambiguity determines how
“we” gain access to Holderlin’s poetry. While Heidegger seeks to position Holderlin’s
poetry as a “battle,” explicitly invoking the language o f §74 from Being and Time, he
also understands himself to “structure” and “order” Holderlin’s founding o f fundamental
attunement. As a result, his conversation with Holderlin can be seen to enact a kind of
further mediation as Heidegger interpretively enacts what it means to hear Holderlin’s
poetry.
Although Heidegger indicates that his conversation with Holderlin is specifically
addressed to the state-creator (whose task it is to effect fundamental attunement for the
60
people), the implicit reflexivity of his analysis of the line, “Since we are a dialogue,”
shows the deeper relationship to language itself at stake in that dialogue. As such, it is not
simply about hearing Holderlin, but about the nature of hearing per se as the enactment of
what Heidegger terms an “original community.”
When Heidegger first introduces the line, “Since we are a dialogue,” he states that
it is highly ambiguous. He then uses this ambiguity to turn the line into its cliched or
everyday version, “We are a dialogue,” leaving out the connective “Since.” This allows
Heidegger to offer a reading that contrasts the instrumental conception o f language in
which hearing follows as a consequence of speaking with the understanding o f language
as exposure to the divine. Significantly, it is with the notion of exposure that hearing
becomes the precondition for (rather than the consequence of) speaking as Dasein is
simultaneously transposed into the happening of the manifestation o f beings through
language. This transposure includes the being of others. Heidegger therefore understands
the manifestness of beings as a “preceding bond,” locating conversation not in terms of
the prior givenness of beings, but as the happening of their manifesting into which Dasein
is bound and thereby finitely limited through the disclosure of the overpowering.
It is important to point out a final contrast with Being and Time, as Dasein’s
always prior discovery of world was seen to foreclose the possibility o f hearing by
allowing a shared context of understanding to have already been assumed. This was in
turn understood to cover over the disclosive space of world, distorting its openness into
the publicness of the they and allowing for an indiscriminate access to beings that
undercut the capacity of language to ecstatically transport. While anxiety as a distinctive
attunement was understood to take Dasein back from the inauthenticity o f the prior
61
disclosure of world, it did not transform the structure of that prior disclosure in which any
notion of communication or dialogue is to be located necessarily.
By contrast—and this is the force of Heidegger’s reading o f “Since we are a
dialogue”—the active reception that takes place through hearing Holderlin’s poetry itself
opens up the disclosive space for hearing others. Moreover, the relationship between this
hearing and Dasein’s exposure to the overpowering holds open this space as the context
in which Dasein at the same time undergoes an experience of finite limitation. This in
turn allows Heidegger to recuperate how the disclosive structure of world “binds” in a
way that determines or “lets” beings appear, which then allows Heidegger to recover an
apriori or preceding structure that is the articulation of Dasein’s finite limitation as at
once mortal and historical, as at once an “I” and a “we.”
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CHAPTER TWO
“Since we are a dialogue”:
Holderlin’s Mediation o f Language
“Since we are a dialogue”
Als Ziel der Vorlesung bleibt, fur das, was Dichtung ist,
erst wieder Raum und Ort in unserem geschichtlichen
Dasein zu schaffen. Das kann nur so geschehen, dafi wir
uns in den Machtbereich einer wirklichen Dichtung
bringen und deren Wirklichkeit uns eroffiien. Warum ist
hierzu die Dichtung Holderlins gewahlt? Diese Wahl ist
keine willkiirlich getroffene Auswahl unter vorhandenen
Dichtem. Diese Wahl ist eine geschichtliche
Entscheidung. Von den wesentlichen Griinden fur diese
Entscheidung seien drei genannt: 1. Holderlin ist der
Dichter des Dichters und der Dichtung. 2. In einem
damit ist Holderlin der Dichter der Deutschen. 3. Weil
Holderlin dieses Verborgene und Schwere ist, Dichter
des Dichters als Dichter des Deutschen, deshalb ist er
noch nicht die Macht in der Geschichte unseres Volkes
geworden. Weil er das noch nicht ist, mul3 er es werden.
Hierbei mitzuhalten ist >Politik< im hochsten und
eigentlichen Sinne, so sehr, dafi wer hier etwas erwirkt,
nicht notig hat, uber das >Politische< zu reden. (GA39,
213-4)
The aim o f this lecture course remains to create anew a

space and locale in our historical Dasein for what poetry
is. Yet this can only happen insofar as we bring
ourselves into the realm o f force o f a real poetry and
open ourselves to its reality. Why is Holderlin’s poetry
chosen toward this end? This choice is not an arbitrarily
arrived at selection among available poets. This choice is
a historical decision. O f the essential reasons for this
decision three may be named: 1. Holderlin is the poet o f
the poet and o f poetry. 2. At the same time Holderlin is
the poet o f the Germans. 3. It is because Holderlin is so
concealed and difficult, the poet o f the poet as the poet
o f the Germans, that he has not yet become the force in
the history o f our people. Because he is not yet that, he
must become it. What is at issue here is ‘politics’ in its
highest and most authentic sense, to such degree that
whoever has realized something here no longer finds it
necessary to talk about the ‘political.’
64
While Heidegger’s reference in Being and Time to the existential possibilities of
poetic speech can be seen to point toward his conversation with Holderlin,1 his
privileging o f anxiety cuts him off from pursuing his own positive insight into the
relationship between language and attunement as world-opening. As we have seen in
Chapter One, ambiguity, in covering over the inaccessibility o f Dasein’s death, first
allows the loss of its individuation in the they. Dasein’s prior discovery o f world through
the referential totality of significance thus turns Dasein away from its own death as the
already previous granting o f its access to both beings and others. As I described,
Heidegger’s conception of attunement as this turning, together with his claim that “being
toward death is essentially anxiety,” reveals an inherently aporetic structure. For anxiety
can be seen to turn Dasein toward itself only by collapsing the referential totality of
significance through which Dasein is granted any access to others as being-in-the-world.
1 In his most substantive reference to poetic speech in Being and Time, Heidegger writes: “All
discourse about...which communicates in what it says has at the same time the character o f
expressing itself. In talking, Da-sein expresses itself not because it has been initially cut o ff as
‘something internal’ from something outside, but because as being-in-the-world it is already
‘outside’ when it understands. What is expressed is precisely this being outside, that is, the actual
mode o f attunement (of mood) which we showed to pertain to the full disclosedness o f being-in.
Being-in and its attunement are made known in discourse and indicated in language by
intonation, modulation, in the tempo o f the talk, ‘in the way o f speaking.’ The communication o f
the existential possibilities o f attunement, that is, the disclosing o f existence, can become the true
aim o f ‘poetic’ speech” (SZ 162; BT 152). My claim is that such “being outside” anticipates
Heidegger’s understanding o f Holderlin as exposed, an exposure he founds in resonating structure
(Schwingsgejtige) o f attunement, that is, precisely “in the way [melody] o f speaking.”
65
Though Heidegger, to be sure, understands this collapse to disclose Dasein’s very
possibility as being-in-the-world, the distinctiveness of anxiety as a fundamental
attunement lies in the way it lets beings and others appear as inaccessible: Anxiety
empties out the meaningful structures of world in order to reveal it as world. And while
such emptying out takes Dasein back from the loss of its individuation in the they, the
undoing of a previously inauthentic access does not on its own constitute the granting of
an authentic access to others capable o f being realized only within the disclosive space of
world. Indeed, this is the problem presented by Heidegger’s analysis of the relationship
between individual fate and common destiny in §74 of Being and Time—he proceeds as
though the realization of such authentic access is indeed possible without clarifying just
how such access is to be realized in “communication and battle.”
To the extent that my interpretation of the aporia between death and community
in Being and Time is situated by Heidegger’s revision of destiny in the »Germanien« und
»Der Rhein« course, I want now to show how Heidegger addresses that aporia through
his radical repositioning of language rather than death as original. In other words, I want
to now turn to the elaboration of the phrase “original community” introduced in the
epigraph to Chapter One and further taken up here in order to pursue how Holderlin’s
founding invention of the German language inaugurates that community as the condition
for and context through which Dasein realizes its individuation. It is my contention that
the ambiguity of Holderlin’s poetry—conceived here as a creative projection— enables
Heidegger to address the way in which idle talk was seen to undermine the possibility of
authentic discourse together with community in Being and Time. Instead of necessitating
the collapse of world, the redoubling o f ambiguity allows for its disclosive
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transformation, which is to take place in the »Germanien« und »Der R heim course in the
active reception o f Holderlin’s poetry through an exemplary act of hearing.
Needless to say, the notion of an “original community” inaugurated by the work
of art indicates an important shift in how Heidegger understands Dasein’s finitude to be
disclosed. Thus, although the experience of individuation that takes place in §74 of Being
and Time as the confrontation with the overpowering remains central to Heidegger’s
interpretation, Dasein is no longer granted direct access to death, as the distinctive and
exceptional possibility, through anxiety. Rather, it is Holderlin’s founding (stiffen) of the
hinting language of the gods through the founding of attunement that determines how
beings as a whole are disclosed.
The intimate relation between the hinting language of the gods and the language
of the poet is critical for following out how Heidegger escapes the solipsism o f anxiety
while at the same time continuing to locate Dasein’s individuation in the experience of its
own mortality. For beginning with the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course, the
possibility of Dasein’s death as a possibility comes to be situated historically in terms of
the flight of the gods and the “upheaval” or “revolt” (Aufruhr) of the distinction between
the human and the divine: The confrontation with the overpowering occurs as the
confrontation with the overpowering violence of the divine as Dasein is abandoned to the
limits of its finitude in undergoing the difference between gods and human beings. In
contrast then to Being and Time, attunement does not directly arise from out of Dasein’s
being-in-the-world, but is instead mediated by Holderlin’s founding of the hinting
language of the gods, who— even in their flight—come to appear in how the structure of
appearance is itself disclosed.
67
To clarify Heidegger’s reconceptualization of language and attunement, I want to
suggest that what is primarily at issue in Heidegger’s “Preliminary Remarks” to the
»Germanien« und »Der Rheim course is the articulation of what I term a chain o f
mediation. Where anxiety undoes Dasein’s always previous access to world by collapsing
the referential totality of significance, at issue in this chain of mediation is the creation of
a right access as such access is enacted through the dialogue between the three creative
forces of poet, thinker, and statesman. In opening up what Heidegger repeatedly
characterizes as the “historical-spiritual space” of Holderlin’s poetry, the conversation
between creators itself allows for the dialogue “we” are where the “we” is not already
given as an essential identity—is not already given as nation or as race—but is instead
enacted through the active reception o f Holderlin’s poetry as the undergoing of the
disclosive possibilities of the German language.2 It is through such reception, through the
way it simultaneously exposes and transposes and so binds together in the space of
appearance of world, that Heidegger comes to locate the notion of an “original
community.”
Although ‘mediation,’ used in a philosophical context, inevitably evokes Hegel
and thereby a dialectical movement with a very different destinal-historical trajectory,
what is important here is the relationship between mediation and the paired notions of
2 Robert Bemasconi offers a sustained treatment o f Heidegger’s position on race in “Heidegger’s

Alleged Challenge to the Nazi Concept o f Race” in Appropriating Heidegger, eds. James E.
Faucloner and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 50-67. Though
Bemasconi’s focus is on Heidegger’s relation to Geist in connection with his rejection o f
Nietzsche’s biologism, most important for the present context are Bemasconi’s references to the
1934 Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, in which Heidegger links the capacity o f
blood to “vibrate” (schwingen) with fundamental attunement (G A 38,153). Heidegger’s
interpretation o f holy affliction in GA39 can be seen to further take up this point.
68
right access and active reception.3 As I later address in my analysis of the poet as
demigod, the term ‘mediation’ does not imply a teleological movement generated through
negation, but an originating betweenness that first allows the possibility of relation
between the human and the divine, at the same time as it depends both on the poet’s
proper reception of the gods and the people’s reception of the poet for the completion of
its own occurrence. As such, this reception remains irreducibly vulnerable in requiring
transformation as the condition for reception. In this, Heidegger in following Holderlin is
the heir of Pindar, who in his epinikia or “Victory Odes” mediates between the Olympic
victor and the community by establishing the limits that are themselves the context for a
proper or fitting relation, a proper or fitting relationship that grants the context through
which what is being related comes into its own.4
To approach this chain of mediation, I first turn to an analysis of how Heidegger
understands Holderlin’s poetry to “grasp” the hinting language o f the gods in language.
As the covering over of an excessive proximity, this veiling allows the possibility of
community through a movement of exposure and transposure that allows beings to be
held in common through the happening of manifestation that takes place as language.
3 In contrast to my use o f mediation, it is worth noting that Heidegger rarely uses this term.
Indeed, he can be seen to studiously avoid it, no doubt because o f both its Hegelian and
Christological connotations. As Heidegger’s subsequent analysis o f the poet as demigod and
between (ein Zwischen) indicates, the term “mediation” should be understood as originating or
inaugurating relation.
4 In his chapter “Poetry and Agon," William Fitzgerald describes how the Olympic victor
undergoes a krisis or separation in asserting him self in the athletic contest. While this allows
him to escape what Fitzgerald describes as the “helpless silence to which the untested
individual is relegated” (11), it nonetheless introduces an imbalance between the victor and
the community that it is the job o f the poet to heal. (See William Fitzgerald, Agonistic
Poetry: The Pindaric M ode in Pindar, Horace, Holderlin an d the English Ode," (Berkeley:
University o f California Press, 1987). In Heidegger’s interpretation, however, it is the poet
who tests limits and therefore risks disorder and exile from the community. Heidegger’s most
philosophically substantive references to Pindar can be found in An Introduction to
Metaphysics, EM 108, 112; IM 101, 113, on becoming who you are and on daring (tolm a)
and limitation respectively.
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However, the poet’s protective mediation allows for the possibility of a still further
veiling through which Holderlin’s poetry “declines” or “falls” (verfallt) prior to the
completion of its own occurrence. The disclosive redoubling of ambiguity is thus tied to
what Heidegger takes up as Holderlin’s necessary untimeliness. Focusing on his analysis
of the decisive line “Since we are a dialogue” (“Conciliator, you that no longer believed
in ...” IV. 339-43),5 1 show how Heidegger mediates hearing Holderlin’s poetry through
which the “we” of an original community is enacted precisely through the completion of
language’s own happening.
Holderlin As Mediator
Before he actually turns to his analysis of the “Germania” and “The Rhine”
hymns, Heidegger begins GA39 with a series of prefatory remarks on the relationship
between poetry and language.6 As the urgent tonality of these remarks makes clear—the
5 Because Heidegger makes philosophical claims based on a particular version o f a poem (even as
he modifies poems to accord with Holderlin’s revisions in other versions), I follow him in citing
from Norbert von Hellingrath’s critical-historical edition o f Holderlin’s collected works, which
was completed by Friedrich Seebass and Ludwig von Pigenot after von Hellingrath’s death.
Holderlin, Samtliche Werke. Zweite Auflage. (Berlin, 1923).
6 Heidegger goes on to rework his “Preparatory Meditation” to the »Germ anien« und »Der
Rhein« lecture course as “Holderlin and the Essence o f Poetry” (EHD 33-48; EHP 51-65),
which he first delivered as a lecture in Rome in 1936 and then later published in the journal
“Das innere Reich.” See Elucidations o f H olderlin ’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst,
NY: Humanity Books, 2000). “Holderlin and the Essence o f Poetry” relies heavily on
Heidegger’s analysis o f the dangerousness o f language in GA39 even as he goes on to further
develop his interpretation o f this danger in terms o f poetic dwelling. Heidegger divides his
analysis into “five key verses”: Verse One, “Composing Poems: ‘This most innocent o f
occupations’” corresponds to GA39, §4e “Its Everyday Appearance [Anschein] and the Being
o f Poetry”; Verse Two, “ That is why language, the most dangerous o f goods, has been given
to m an...so that he may bear witness to what he is...” corresponds to GA39, §7a “Language
as the Most Dangerous o f Goods” and §7b, “The Decline o f Language. The Essence and N on
essence o f Language”; Verse Three, “ ‘Much has man experienced./Named many o f the
heavenly ones,/Since we are a dialogue/And can hear one another’” corresponds to GA39,
§7f, “ The Being o f Human Being as Dialogue. Being Able to Hear and Speak.” The last two
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course opens with a reference to the Fatherland and the demand to place “ourselves and
those coming under the measure o f [Holderlin]” (GA39, 4)—at issue in the lectures is not
a philosophy professor’s critical interpretation of an at once esteemed and abused poet.
Rather, Heidegger conceives of the “working passage through” Holderlin’s poetry as a
test (Prufung): It is a self-confrontation whose execution is transformative in allowing
Dasein to become who, paradoxically, it already will have been. As such, it deeply
implicates the interpretive presuppositions through which poetry first becomes accessible.
These include not only its reception as an aesthetic artifact, but the understanding of
poetic works as the expression of subjective feeling (Erlebnis-Ausdruck), which in
limiting the poet to the articulation of his own “I” exactly precludes the transformation of
the “I” hearing the poem. It is this presupposition that poetry is in the end subjective that
most impedes our following Heidegger’s claim that Holderlin is a destiny. Thus after
detailing what he characterizes as our everyday attitude toward poetic works (poetry is
turned to in boredom, spiritual need, and as an object of research interchangeable with the
investigation of seahorses and earthworms), Heidegger writes: “In each case we do what
we want with the poem. Yet it should, by contrast, be poetry that holds sway over us such
that our Dasein becomes the living bearer [Lebenstrdger] of the force o f poetry” (GA39,
19). The “test” is not what we do with poetry, but how poetry can be understood to
inaugurate the “we” in what Heidegger takes to be a privileged sense; it is what poetry
does with “us.”
“verses” o f “Holderlin and the Essence o f Poetry” synthesize insights taken from throughout
the »Germ anien« und »Der Rhein« course. For a comprehensive reading o f “Holderlin and
the Essence o f Poetry” see David Halliburton’s chapter, “ The Essence o f Poetry: Holderlin”
in P oetic Thinking: An A pproach to H eidegger (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press,
1981), 77-112.
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How then to effect a transformation in the interpretation of poetry itself, where
that transformation not only allows for but itself enacts the transformation o f the “we”
into an event of language—into a dialogue?
To open the possibility of what is more than simply a different interpretive
framework, Heidegger turns to Holderlin’s own understanding of the poet’s vocation as
this comes to be articulated in his poems, letters, and fragments. Focusing in particular on
those passages in which Holderlin remarks on the figure of the poet or on himself as poet,
Heidegger traces out Holderlin’s conception of the poet’s vocation in terms of his
exemplary relationship to the gods by whom he has been struck (geschlagen). As
Heidegger claims, at stake in such methodology is not literary history but what he instead
characterizes as “the poetic Dasein of the poet” as he stands in “violent relations” (the
phrase is taken from Holderlin’s “Notes to Oedipus”) through his own relationship to
language.7 Holderlin’s self-reflexive commentary on the figure o f the poet thus offers a
crucially different point of access. For in contrast to the interpretation o f poetry as
Erlebnis-Ausdruck, Heidegger emphasizes Holderlin’s own understanding of the poet as
exposed (ausgesetzt) to the divine through the enactment o f mediation that takes place in
his poems.
This interpretation of the poet as exposed emerges most clearly in Heidegger’s
analysis of Holderlin’s unfinished hymn, “As on a holiday.. in which Holderlin calls
7 Though his commentary is not extensive, Heidegger refers to both Holderlin’s “Notes on
Oedipus” and his “Notes on Antigone” (GA39, 65-7). Elaborating on what he develops as the
“dangerousness o f language,” violence here is to be understood as the violence o f being placed
under the claim o f the divine and so under the claim o f language. This violence takes place in
language as the struggle between Beyng and Not-Being (Nichtsein), evident for Heidegger in how
Holderlin’s founding o f language necessarily appears common and everyday.
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attention to the nature of his own activity as a “veil[ing] in song.”8 In mediating the
relation between the gods and the people, the poet risks an excessive exposure to the
divine, which is figured in the hymn’s central reference to the myth o f Semele. Incited by
the ever jealous Hera, Semele asks to see Zeus undisguised—Holderlin uses the word
“sichtbar,” “in person” or “visible”—and is consumed by the brightness of his lightening
flash. Zeus rescues from Semele’s womb the unborn Dionysus, who, in having survived
his encounter with the overpowering immediacy of the divine, in turn becomes
Holderlin’s model for a successful mediation. I cite “As on a holiday...” beginning with
the line that precedes Heidegger’s own quotation, which introduces the theme of danger
in contrasting mortals’ mediated reception of the divine through Bacchus’ wine with the
poets’ own unmediated exposure to the thunderstorms o f the gods.9 This reference to
“danger” will later be important for following out Heidegger’s analysis of ambiguity:
[Und daher trinken himmlisches Feuer jezt

Die Erdensohne ohne Gefahr.]
Doch uns gebiihrt es, unter Gottes Gewittem,
Ihr Dichter! mit entblosstem Haupte zu stehen,
Des Vaters Stral, ihn selbst, mit eigner Hand
Zu fassen und dem Volk ins Lied
Gehullt die himmlische Gaabe zu reichen. (GA39, 30)
[And hence it is that without danger now

The sons o f the Earth drink heavenly fire.]
Yet it behooves us, to stand beneath god’s thunderstorms
You poets! with bared heads
To grasp the Father’s ray, it itself, with our very own hands
And to the people in song veiled
Offer the heavenly gift.
8 Fitzgerald offers an interpretation o f “As on a holiday...” that explores how “Holderlin’s

poem breaks down com pletely under the strain o f the contradictions o f the p oet’s calling”
(37). Fitzgerald’s analysis o f these contradictions informs my understanding o f the double
bind inherent in the p oet’s double-reception o f the gods and by the people. See the chapter
entitled “ The Poetry o f Reception” in Agonistic Poetry, pp. 37-47.
9 Heidegger goes on to offer a much more detailed analysis o f this same passage in his 1939
interpretation “As on a holiday....” See EHD 69-72; EHP 92-93.
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Citing Holderlin’s hymn “Rousseau,” Heidegger interprets the “god’s
thunderstorms” and “the Father’s rays” as the language of the gods, who signal their
presence as a hinting ( Winken). As his reference to the gesture of waving indicates
(“wm&ew” means both “to hint” and “to wave”), Heidegger interprets the overpowering
immediacy of the divine as relations of nearness (Nahe) and remoteness (Entfemung)
through which the god’s presence is indicated but is never itself capable o f being directly
undergone: “The waving one [der Winkende] does not simply make ‘him self noticeable
as he who stands in and at a place and is to be reached there, but taking the example of
departure, hinting is the holding fast in nearness with growing remoteness. The reverse is
true for arrival as the making manifest of a still prevailing remoteness in a gladdening
nearness. Yet the gods hint simply insofar as they are” (GA39, 32).
According to Heidegger’s analysis of “As on a holiday.. the poet compels the
god’s hints into the word, building those hints into the language of the people as its very
foundation without, however, the people’s initially intimating this (GA39, 33).10 The
lightening and thundering language of the gods speaking through the language of the poet
occurs for Heidegger as attunement, which by letting the manifestness of beings happen
10 Jean-Franfois Courtine addresses this passage at the conclusion o f his article “ The
Destruction o f Logic” in The Presocratics after H eidegger, ed. David C. Jacobs (Albany: State
University o f New York Press, 1999) pp. 25-53. Though Courtine’s focus is Heidegger’s
interpretation o f Heraclitus, he turns to Holderlin as evidence o f Heidegger’s effort to think
through “those who let appear, in its flashing light and power o f nomination, language in its
essence” (41). While Courtine accuses Heidegger o f “ontologizing” Holderlin in referring to
his poetry as “Dichtung,” his insight into the connection between the letting appear o f
language in its essence and Holderlin’s self-reflexivity is helpful in elaborating the p oet’s
outsideness. He writes: “If poetry is thus assigned a decisive import in the inception o f being
and the world, it is not because it would permit us to go back up to an entreaty o f subjective
brilliance, but it is more so because the poet finds him self immediately placed in the position
o f mediation between the gods and humans, or between god and the p eop le....If the mediation
concerning [the] poetic speech o f Holderlin plays such a role in the destruction o f logic and
o f the propositional regime elaborated upon the model o f legein ti kata, it is at first because
the poetic speech does not let itself be interpreted as an expression o f the state o f the soul,
nor any longer as ‘objectivation.’ The only ‘object’ o f the Dichtung, is the poetical (das
Gedichtete)” (42-43).
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(geschehen) in turn discloses beings in their proximity and remoteness. Holderlin’s
mediation of the divine takes place then as the mediation of language through which he
attempts to both capture and structure the immediacy o f his own exposure through the
founding of fundamental attunement as disclosive of beings as a whole. As we will see,
the happening of manifestation as simultaneously exposing and transposing allows beings
to be held in common as Dasein is granted authentic access to others through language.
The poet’s mediation of the gods’ hinting has a double-aspect important for
understanding the tension between the interpretation of poetry as, on the one hand, an
occurrence of exposure and, on the other, the expression of subjective feeling. As
indicated by Holderlin’s reference to the poets’ “bared heads” and their “grasping with
their very own hands,” the poets hazard the overpowering immediacy of the divine,
which Heidegger articulates “as the most extreme outside of naked exposure to the
thunderstorms [das aufierste Draufien der nackten Ausgesetztheit den Gewittem]”
(GA39, 31). Here more Semele than Dionysus, the poets risk the danger o f an excessive
immediacy precisely through their relationship to language: it is poetry as the enactment
of mediation that first exposes the poets to the overpowering nearness of the divine while
at the same time protecting the people from an unendurable proximity. Like Bacchus’
wine, the poets’ “veil[ing] in song” enables the people to encounter their gods “without
danger”; it grants access without thereby succumbing to the poets’ own excess.
For Heidegger, however, this apparent lack of danger includes within it the
possibility of a still different danger, and it is this that will prove key for understanding
the disclosivity of language as well as its ambiguity. In concealing the underlying risk of
language through which beings first become manifest, the poets’ veiling places them into
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a double-bind in the immediacy of their reception of the gods and in the protective
mediation enacted through the poem itself, which precisely covers over that immediacy.
Instead o f granting the right kind of access, this concealment enables the possibility o f a
reception without exposure, that is to say, a reception that neither transforms the “I”
hearing the poem nor transposes it. According to Heidegger’s interpretation, this covering
over of the inherent danger of language in relation to the overpowering allows poetry to
“decline” (verfallen) into idle talk even prior to the completion of its own event. As a
consequence, the success o f the poet’s song depends not only on his proper reception of
the gods (something clearly at issue for Holderlin, to which Heidegger only briefly
alludes11), but also on the people’s reception of the poet as in fact receiving the divine.
Without such reception by the people, the poet’s mediation of language remains
incomplete as the poet is exiled from—and so still differently placed “outside”—the
community that he understands his poetry to have nonetheless made possible.12
While Heidegger on one level understands himself to mediate the relationship
between Holderlin and the people (or at least Holderlin and the state-creator), his
interpretation of the poet as exposed implicates the relationship to language that takes
11 While Heidegger does not address in detail the problem o f presumption in GA39, he does so in
his analysis o f Scheu in the 1942 Holderlins Hymne »Andenken« (GA52, §58). In contrast to its
definition as fearfulness or timidity, Heidegger interprets Scheu as a kind o f hesitation (Zdgerung)
that possesses intonations o f both patience and forbearance. As Heidegger writes, “Hesitation is
as the original steadfast abiding in itself before that which it hesitates at the same time the most
intimate drawing close [Zuneigung] to this” (171). In GA39 Heidegger’s suggests Scheu is
connected veiling/unveiling that reveals the secret (GA39, 119).
12 Maurice Blanchot com m ents on the p oet’s placelessness in his essay “ The ‘Sacred’ Speech
o f Holderlin” in The Work o f Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 195),' 111-131. Articulating the impossible contradiction that inheres in the poetic
project itself, Blanchot writes: “...the poet must exist as a presentiment o f himself, as the
future o f his existence. He does not exist, but he has to be already what he will be later, in a
‘not y e t’ that constitutes the essential part o f his grief, his misery, and also his great wealth”
(117). Blanchot’s remarks here also point towards what Heidegger develops as the necessary
untimeliness o f the poetic project.
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place in the initial reception of Holderlin’s poems. For essential to this reception is
Holderlin’s self-reflexive referencing to his own bared status in relation to the divine.
Heidegger thus characterizes poetry as a “hinting faifaei’XWeiterwinkeri), where the poet
gestures toward—and thereby hints at—his own activity as itself the enactment of a
happening of exposure. Referring here to the Greek word deiknumi, Heidegger defines
poetry as a self-disclosive “pointing” that at the same time can be seen to point back
toward itself: “[Deiknumi] means to point, to make something visible, manifest, and not
in general but in the way of its own showing” (GA39, 29).
The peculiar reflexivity through which Holderlin reveals the poet’s song as
“veiled” thus opens the possibility of what I earlier termed Holderlin’s “right reception.”
In the self-disclosure of his pointing toward his own song, Holderlin makes manifest
through language his own relationship to language as the site in which the people
encounter the divine. Heidegger therefore claims that the poet’s “hinting further”
corresponds (entspricht) to the hinting language o f the gods: Holderlin unveils his
language as a veiling—a veiling that does not simply cover over but is itself the medium
for the unveiling of an overpowering proximity undergone through the transformation of
the poem from Gedicht to Dichtung. I will return to this point in addressing how
Heidegger conceives this transformation as “language-happening.”
“The Most Double-edged and Most Ambiguous”
Heidegger’s analysis of Holderlin’s mediation o f the gods’ hinting coincides with
his reinterpretation o f the disclosive redoubling of ambiguity in Being and Time. Where
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ambiguity was situated by Dasein’s always prior discovery of beings in accordance with
the referential totality of significance, in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course it is
to be understood in terms of Holderlin’s founding invention of the German language. As
such statements like “ambiguity is history” indicate, ambiguity is no longer conceived as
inauthentically disclosive but is instead bound to the projective creativity of the work of
art as simultaneously world-opening and disordered or ‘out-of-joint.’ At once Gedicht
and Dichtung, the ambiguity of Holderlin’s poetry allows for the transformation of
Dasein’s previous access at the same time it undermines the possibility of that
transformation by appearing alternately unintelligible and everyday.
To follow out how ambiguity as a kind of creative excess implicates Heidegger’s
own interpretive position, it is first necessary to understand how Heidegger takes up
Holderlin’s reference to his activity as a “veil[ing] in song” in order to reappropriate
Heidegger’s own insight in Being and Time into the double-possibility o f language as a
discovery and covering over. Quoting from a fragment that describes the attestive
dimension of language through which Dasein is the “meaning of the earth” (“ .. .language
has been given to man so that, creating, destroying, and perishing, and returning to the
ever living, to the mistress and mother, he may bear witness to what he is to have
inherited, learned from her, her the most divine, all-sustaining love”13), Heidegger turns
to the elucidation of Holderlin’s statement that language is “the most dangerous of
goods.” Notably, Heidegger understands this danger as both the threatening of Being and
its forfeiture ( Verlust) as language deviates from itself and declines into the appearance
of its own happening. Heidegger writes:
13 I am using Keith Hoeller’s translation o f this fragment from “Holderlin and the Essence o f
Language” in Elucidations o f H olderlin’s Poetry, p. 53-4.
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Wohl nicht zufallig steht in der Handschrifitenfolge unmittelbar vorher das Gedicht »Wie
Wenn am Feiertage...« (vgl. S. 30). In diesem Zusammenhang fallt das Wort von der
Sprache, sie sei »der Guter Gefahrlichstes«. In ihr erreicht oder besser: hat von Grand aus
das Dasein des Menschen seine hochste Gefahr. Denn in der Sprache wagt sich der
Mensch am weitesten vor, er wagt sich mit ihr als solcher iiberhaupt erst hinaus in das
Sein. In der Sprache geschieht die Offenbarang des Seienden, nicht erst ein
nachdracklicher Ausdrack des Enthullten, sondem die ursprangliche Enthullung selbst,
aber eben deshalb auch die Verhiillung und deren vorherrschende Abart, der Schein.
(GA39, 61-2)
It is probably no accident that in the sequence o f hand-written texts the poem “As on a
holiday...” (see p. 30) immediately precedes this fragment. It is in this context that the
statement that language is “the most dangerous o f goods” is to be found. In language the
Dasein o f human beings achieves-or better, has as its very basis— the most extreme
danger. For in language human beings venture forth into that which is most expansive,
with language as such they venture out into Being for the first time. The manifesting o f
beings in language does not happen in an expression first expressed after something has
been unveiled, but rather language itself is the original unveiling. But for that reason, this
original unveiling is also a veiling, the dominant derivation o f which is semblance.
As the reference in the above quotation to “As on a holiday.. suggests, the
dangerousness of language lies for Heidegger in its status as an “original unveiling”
through which it is connected to daring (wagen) and thereby to the possibility of
exposure. In contrast to the representational conception of language, which presupposes
the accessibility o f beings as already objectively present, Heidegger conceives this
unveiling in terms of the way beings first come to be manifest in Holderlin’s poetry
through the happening o f fundamental attunement. Heidegger thus relocates the
disclosivity o f language from the correspondence between sign and signified to the
happening o f this manifesting. The distinction is between a disclosure in language that
happens, as Heidegger suggests, “after” beings have come to appear and one that is
“original” to the event o f appearance itself in determining how beings are literally opened
up or made manifest (er-offnen) in their openness through which they first become
accessible as what they are. As we will see, this conception o f language as an “original
unveiling” directly informs Heidegger’s notion of an “original community” through
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which Dasein is bound to others in corresponding to the claim of the divine through the
happening o f language as itself dialogue.
Heidegger’s reinterpretation o f language as an unveiling that veils is clearly
influenced by the double-bind of the poets’ mediation, and in particular by Holderlin’s
sensitivity toward a veiling whose concealment undermines the happening of exposure it
is supposed to allow. Accordingly, the dangerousness of language comes to be situated
not primarily in terms of the danger posed by what Heidegger later refers to as the
“violence of Beyng” (GA39, 293),14 but in the self-endangering of language’s capacity to
strike and make manifest beings by way of its own disclosive structure. In other words, it
is precisely by virtue of its originality—in the venturing making a way into Being for the
first time15—that language is understood to veil. Holderlin’s mediation o f the hinting
language o f the gods thus not only serves as the context through which Dasein is exposed
to the overpowering, but the veiling that constitutes its own happening allows for the
possibility of a deviation (Abart) through which the protective concealment o f language
is further redoubled in covering itself over. This in turn puts Holderlin’s poetry at risk in
foreclosing the possibility of an authentic access by concealing Holderlin’s poetry as the
site of exposure, a point to which I will return.
Though Heidegger’s interpretation of ambiguity in the »Germanien« und »Der
Rhein« course retains similarities to his analysis in Being and Time, it remains crucially
14 William McNeill takes up this connection in his article, “Porosity: Violence and the Question
o f Politics in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal
vol. 14, no. 2-vol. 15, no. 1 (1991): 183-4.
15 Heidegger makes explicit the internal connection between daring and the making o f a way
in first in his interpretation o f deinon in the second choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone in
the 1935 Introduction into Metaphysics, and later in the 1946 essay on Rilke, “What Are
Poets For?” (“ The word Wage in the sense o f risk and as the name o f the apparatus, comes
from wdgen, wegen, to make a way, that is, to go, to be in m otion” H 279; PLT 103).
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different with respect to how the redoubling of ambiguity is conceived in relation to the
space of appearance of world. As became evident in the previous chapter, Heidegger
interprets ambiguity in Being and Time in terms of Dasein’s always already having taken
up the prior disclosure of world through the projective structure of understanding. It is
through this prior disclosure that Dasein is granted access to both beings and others in
accordance with the “as”-structure. However the underlying difficulty of this
interpretation is to be found in Heidegger’s understanding o f Dasein’s initial access to
beings as inauthentic, an initial access that in turn requires for its resolution the collapse
of world together with the emptying out of the structures of relevance. For given how that
prior disclosure has already been taken up in language, there is no way for Dasein to
distinguish between authentic discourse and idle talk, which is to say, there is no way for
discourse to authentically hold open the disclosive space o f world.
While this to a certain extent also describes the problem Heidegger encounters in
the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course, the difference is to be found in Heidegger’s
privileging o f Holderlin’s poetry as world-opening—an insight whose disclosive
structure Heidegger further develops in “The Origin o f the Work of Art.”16 Ambiguity,
rather than undermining Dasein’s authenticity, instead becomes the transition for the
opening up of the possibility of an authentic access to beings and others. Essential to this
is Heidegger’s reinterpretation of the double possibility of language as a discovery and a
16 Heidegger concludes “ The Origin o f the Work o f Art” by turning to poetry, claiming “all
art...is, as such, in essence p o etry” (UK 82; OWA 184). Heidegger connects this to how
language in preserving the strife between Earth and world opens up and preserves the “as”-
structure: “Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to
appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their Being from out o f their Being. Such
saying is a projecting o f lighting, in which announcement is made o f what it is that beings
come into the open as. Projecting is the release o f a throw by which unconcealedness submits
and infuses itself into beings as such” (UK 84; OWA 185).
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covering over. Where Heidegger in Being and Time understood this possibility in terms
of the tension between unconcealment and concealment, as his analysis o f the “original
unveiling” of language indicates he has since become more circumspect about the
concealment internal to unconcealment, which always includes within it the possibility of
errancy. Unlike Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, the veiling o f veiling that occurs
as language deviates is here taken to be essential to the disclosive structure o f language
itself: To speak with transporting force, language must expose Dasein to the possibility of
excess in order to protect it from that same possibility. Significantly, this includes not
only the excess of an overpowering proximity, but also the excess internal to language
itself as it covers over the veiling that constitutes its own happening. In contrast to Being
and Time, the problem of ambiguity comes to be situated not in terms of a prior
discoveredness that is also a distortion, but in a covering over that, by securing
language’s own happening, is itself the context for the disclosure of the overpowering as
the very site of Dasein’s transformation. As Heidegger later suggests in “The Question
Concerning Technology,” it is this dimension of concealment that allows danger to save.
The further implications o f Heidegger’s reinterpretation of ambiguity as essential
to the happening of language are evident in his relocation of the “as”-structure to the
work of art. Although Dasein in its everydayness has always already taken up the prior
disclosure of world, poetry as the happening of the manifesting o f beings allows for the
opening up anew of the disclosive space o f world. And it is perhaps this more than
anything else that reveals the priority Heidegger accords to language even over death. As
I shall later discuss in detail in my interpretation of Holderlin as demigod and destiny,
this relocation of the “as”-structure to the work of art marks a significant departure in
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how Heidegger understands Dasein’s possibilities to be disclosed. In the context of Being
and Time, the way Dasein projects possibilities has always already been determined by
the disclosive structure of understanding, which requires that a possibility be intelligible
in order to even appear as a possibility. The way Dasein projects possibilities is thereby
delimited in advance by how beings have been made accessible as what they are by way
of the always prior disclosure of the “as”-structure through which beings are made
accessible in accordance with the referential totality o f significance. Yet beginning with
the 1929/30 The Fundamental Concepts o f Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, the
projective disclosivity of understanding comes to be displaced by the figure of the creator
as a privileged “between” (Zwischen). Understood as a “rupture” or “breach” (Bresche)
—language I will go on to clarify—the creator first opens up the “as”-structure precisely
as the “as”-structure. Instead, then, of collapsing world, the projective creativity of the
work of art inaugurates world as world in a manner that relationally implicates Dasein by
binding it into the happening of disclosure that here takes place through Holderlin’s
mediation of language.
Although Heidegger in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course does not
elaborate in detail the world-opening dimension of Holderlin’s founding of attunement in
relation to the “as”-structure,17 it is nonetheless implicit in his cursory remarks on the
“shattering” or “breaking into pieces” (scheitem) o f Holderlin’s poetry against the
17 The context in which the “as”-structure is most directly referenced in the »Germanien« und
»Der Rhein« course can be found in Heidegger’s discussion o f Holderlin and Heraclitus (§ 1Oca).
Connecting Holderlin’s use o f the terms “innig” and “InnigkeiF with what Heraclitus means by
polemos, Heidegger writes: “There are no gods in themselves and no masters or bondsmen in
themselves that, because they are, then come into conflict or harmony, but rather the reverse:
battle first creates the possibility o f the decision for life and death. In being preserved in its truth
in such and such a way a being first becomes what and how it is, and this ‘is’— Being— presences
only as such being preserved” (GA39, 129).
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conditions of its initial reception, a “shattering” that Heidegger understands to demand
his own creative mediation as thinker.18 In its status as an original unveiling, Holderlin’s
founding of the gods’ hints in language opens up the “as”-structure through which beings
first become accessible in their being. However, that creative projection stands in a
temporally disjunctive relationship with respect to its own accessibility, and it is here that
the tension between Being and semblance indicated in the previous quotation comes into
play. For as a creative projection, the work of art exceeds all prior access through which
it could become accessible (whence Heidegger’s repeated statements that Holderlin’s
poetry supplies its own “measure”). Consequently, Holderlin’s poetry is unable to ground
the happening of its own founding and so remains peculiarly latent or unfulfilled with
regard to its being.
Here it is helpful to refer to Heidegger’s analysis of techne in his 1935
interpretation of the second choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone in An Introduction to
Metaphysics, which in its elaboration o f the ambiguity of the Greek word deinon as
violent (das Gewaltige, das Uberwaltigende) should be understood as a further
meditation on creative excess. In contrast to its dominant interpretation as manufacture or
making, Heidegger conceives techne as a kind of knowledge that sees out beyond
(Hinaussehen) what is given in its objective presence (EM 168; IM 159). Indeed, such
seeing out beyond distinguishes the deinotic human being as uncanny (das Unheimliche)
or out-of-place. (For that reason Heidegger explicitly connects it to Holderlin’s
characterization of Oedipus as having an “eye too many.”) In their violent excess, the
18 See David Krell’s discussion o f scheitern in Daimon Life: Heidegger andLife-Philosophy

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 173-9. Though Krell does not address scheitern
in the context o f the »Germanien« und »Der R heim course, his treatment o f it in Being and Time
explicitly places it in the context o f the tension between Schicksal and Geschick addressed in
Chapter One.
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creators set Being into work in beings by forcing into appearance how beings come to
appear. As Heidegger writes in his commentary on the ode, “The breaking out, breaking
up, capturing and taming is itself the first opening up of beings as sea, as earth, as
animal” (EM 166; IM 157). As his repeated emphasis on the word “as” indicates, it is
only through the enactment of creative transgression that beings are first made to appear
in their appearance as they are violently asserted and thereby actively brought into their
limits, through which they first become accessible as what they are. Heidegger returns to
this point when he states, “It is through the work of art as the Being immanent in beings
that everything else that appears and is to be found is first confirmed in its place and
made accessible, explicable, and understandable as being or non-being.” (EM 168; IM
159).
Although the projective disclosivity of the work of art first gives beings their
“look” in opening up the “as”-structure, Heidegger’s analysis of the alternating
contestation between techne and dike also reveals it to be radically disordered. In forcing
into appearance the way in which beings come to appear, the work of art cannot secure its
status with respect to its own access and thereby runs up against the limit o f the
prevailing order {dike). Heidegger thus comments in his characterization of the creators
as apolis that they are “without ordinance and limit, without structure and order [Fug]
because they as creators must first ground all this” (EM 162; IM 152). In attempting to
force Being into appearance, the work of art cannot secure the conditions of its own
appearance through which it first becomes accessible as world-opening. Consequently,
the work of art is itself out-of-order or me kalon; in failing to effect Being in beings, it
therefore breaks apart in its own status as non-being— it is fallen, declined, derivative.
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While I return to the further analysis of this disorderedness in my discussion of
Heidegger’s creative mediation, the deviation of Holderlin’s founding work of language
has significant implications for poetry. In this way the danger of ambiguity directly
comes to bear on the interpretive presuppositions that grant or foreclose access to
Holderlin as a destiny. According to Heidegger’s analysis, the deviation inherent in the
happening of language is projected back onto how language itself is understood. Indeed,
this is evident in the interpretation o f language as sign and signified, which in passing
over the disclosivity of language as the enactment of a happening allows the instrumental
conception o f language as something “we” take up and use.19 Playing on the tension
between the subjective and objective genitive, Heidegger describes language as the “most
double-edged and most ambiguous,” and “the danger of dangers” (die Gefahr der
Gefahren): Language must veil its essential danger—must put itself at risk as the site of
divine encounter—in order to unveil itself as dangerous.20
19 In an otherwise nuanced interpretation, Christopher Fynsk reverts to the language o f sign and
signified at the conclusion o f his chapter “Noise at the Threshold,” asserting that the danger
Heidegger describes here is part o f the “material conditions” o f language that “make it possible
for the sign to function as sign.” See Language and Relation: ...that there is language (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996), 36-7. It is important to make clear that ambiguity is inherent in
the happening o f language as exposure. Ambiguity thus concerns not the material conditions o f
language per se, but its disclosive eventfulness as this specifically relates to hearing through
which Dasein undergoes the claim o f the overpowering.
20 Heidegger more clearly elaborates the tension between the objective and subjective genitive in
“Holderlin and the Essence o f Language,” where he writes: “But in what sense is language ‘the
most dangerous good’? It is the danger o f all dangers because it first creates the possibility o f a
danger. Danger is the threat that beings pose to being itself. But it is only by virtue o f language at
all that man is exposed to something manifest: beings which press upon him and inflame in his
existence, or nonbeings which deceive and disappoint him. Language first creates the manifest
place o f this threat to being, and the confusion and thus the possibility even o f the loss o f being—
that is danger. But language is not only the danger o f dangers; rather, it necessarily shelters
within itself a continual danger to itself. Language is charged with the task o f making beings
manifest and preserving them as such— in the linguistic work. Language gives expression to what
is most pure and most concealed, as well as to what is confused and common. Indeed, even the
essential word, if it is to be understood and so become the common possession o f all, must make
itself common” (EHD 36-37; EHP 55).
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Ambiguity and Overhearing
The latent political dimensions of the double-edgedness o f language emerge when
considering the relation between ambiguity and the possibility of Holderlin’s initial
reception. According to Heidegger’s analysis, the deviation in the veiling that constitutes
language’s own disclosive happening directly bears on the people’s capacity to actively
receive Holderlin’s poetry, through which his mediation of the hinting language o f the
gods is completed as Dasein is exposed to the overpowering. This tension emerges in
Heidegger’s persistent concern throughout the Holderlin volumes with the theme of
sacrifice (Opfer). Although sacrifice has been interpreted in the secondary literature
primarily in terms of Holderlin’s madness (which Heidegger attributes to a too immediate
relation to the divine), in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course Heidegger makes
clear that it is instead connected with the inevitability o f Holderlin’s being overheard
(;uberhort). Heidegger’s analysis of original community as the enactment of hearing is
thus intimately bound to the way ambiguity does not simply allow fo r but in fact
necessitates overhearing. For as we have seen, in first opening up the “as”-structure, the
projective disclosivity of Holderlin’s poetry runs up against the conditions o f the
possibility of its own accessibility. And it is precisely at this juncture—entering into the
context that projectively transforms access by way of a mediation or right access—that
Heidegger relocates the problem o f ambiguity in a manner that enables Dasein to
overcome the prior disclosure of its everydayness. In this way the ambiguity of
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Holderlin’s poetry serves as a “test” through which the people prove who they are, a
proof simultaneous with the people’s becoming who they authentically are.
Heidegger explores the sense of sacrifice implicit in Holderlin’s being overheard
in his analysis of a fragment whose plaintive shifts in voice from “I” to “you” to “they”
render it almost untranslatable, as Holderlin communes in his isolation in contrasting his
relationship to the gods with his effort to deliver song to mortals:
Aber die Sprache—

Im Gewitter spricht der Gott.
Ofters hab’ ich die Sprache
Ofters hab ich Gesang versucht, aber sie horten dich nicht.
... (GA39, 62-3)
Yet language—
The god speaks in thunderstorms.
Often times I have language
[...]
Often times I have tried song, but they did not hear you
In contrast to his interpretation o f “As on a holiday.. Heidegger emphasizes not
Holderlin’s exposure to the gods, but his own failure to be heard, a motif to which
Holderlin subsequently returns:
Du sprachest zur Gottheit, aber diss habt ihr all vergessen, dass immer die Erstlinge
Sterblichen nicht, dass sie den Gottem gehoren. Gemeiner muss, alltaglicher muss die
Fmcht erst werden, dann wird sie den Sterblichen eigen. (GA39, 63)
You spoke to the divinity, but you all have forgotten this, that always the first bom
belong, not mortals, but to the gods. The fruit must first become more common, more
everyday, then it can become mortals’ own.
In his commentary on this fragment, Heidegger calls attention to the inseparability
between Holderlin’s founding of language and its deviation as it veils its own veiling.
According to Heidegger’s interpretation, Holderlin’s attempt to secure the terms of his
own reception by making his song “more common, more everyday” in fact undermines
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the possibility o f that reception by allowing his poetry to appear as already accessible.
Heidegger writes,
Wesentlich ist fur unseren Zusammenhang das letzte Stuck und hier die Unterscheidung
zwischen den »Erstlingen« der Sprache, d.h. dem schopferischen, stiftenden Sagen des
Dichters, und dem »Gemeiner«- Alltaglicherwerden des Gesagten als ein
Unentrinnbarkeit im Bereich des menschlichen Daseins. Die hochste Begliickung des
ersten stiftenden Sagens ist zugleich der tiefste Schmerz des Verlustes; denn Erstlinge
werden geopfert. Die ursprunglich das Seyn begriindende Sprache steht im Verhangnis
des notwendigen Verfalls, der Verflachung in das abgegriffene Gerede, dem sich nichts
zu entziehen vermag, eben weil es den Schein erweckt, als sei in seiner Art des Sagens,
wenn es nur ein Sagen sei, das Seiende getroffen und gefaBt. Ein wesentliches Wort
sagen, heiBt in sich dieses Wort auch schon ausliefem in den Bereich der MiBdeutung,
des MiBbrauchs und der Tauschung, in die Gefahrlichkeit der unmittelbarsten
gegenteiligen Auswirkung seiner Bestimmung. Jegliches, das Reinste und Verborgenste
wie das Gemeinste and Platteste, kann abgefangenwerden in eine gangbare Redensart.
(GA39, 63)
Essential for our present context is the last part, and here the distinction between the “first
bom” o f language, that is, the creative, founding saying o f the poet and the becoming
“more common” and everyday o f what is said as something inescapable in the realm o f
human Dasein. The highest happiness o f the first founding saying is at the same time the
deepest pain o f loss, for the first-bom are sacrificed. The language that originally grounds
Beyng stands in the ill-fatedness o f necessary decline, o f flattening out into the cliches o f
idle talk from which nothing is able to withdraw precisely because it seems in its manner
o f saying, if only it were a saying, to have stmck upon and grasped beings. To say an
essential word in itself means to have already delivered this word over to the realm o f
misinterpretation, o f misuse and delusion, into the dangerousness o f the most immediate
opposite effect o f its determination. Everything, the purest and most concealed as well as
the most common and uninspired, can get caught up into a hackneyed idiom.
What is important to emphasize about this quotation is Heidegger’s
characterization of the decline of language into idle talk as “necessary.” Though
Heidegger goes on to claim that poetry as the original language (Ursprache) of the people
is “then” flattened out into mere prose (GA39, 218), his use o f the word “VerfalF is in
fact misleading. For in its founding, poetic language as an original unveiling undoes
itself, and indeed must continue to undo itself in order to secure the possibility o f its own
happening. In contrast then to Being and Time, language does not so much wear out from
use as fail to achieve its proper use—a proper use learned only through the active
reception o f Holderlin’s mediation o f the divine. Ironically, then, the everyday
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accessibility through which Holderlin attempts to secure his own being heard undermines
the need for such active reception precisely in the way it appears to have “struck upon
and grasped beings.” Holderlin’s language, rather than being received as dangerous in
“grasping” the hints of the gods, immediately comes to appear as cliched. We will see
how exactly this works through the way Heidegger initially stages misreading the line
“Since we are a dialogue.”
The overhearing that attaches to Holderlin’s poetry as it declines into idle talk can
also be seen to be connected to Heidegger’s analysis of Holderlin’s “untimeliness.”
While the more than one hundred year interval between Holderlin’s writing o f the
vaterlandische Gesdnge and their collection into a first edition by Norbert von
Hellingrath marks a heroic instance o f hearing in first making Holderlin’s poetry
materially accessible to the Germans, on its own such accessibility does not guarantee
that this poetry has “happened.”21 Just the opposite. As historically projective,
Holderlin’s poetry exceeds any interpretative framework that would make it accessible
while at the same time as it appears common and everyday.
Heidegger’s analysis of the “necessary decline” of language into idle talk at
exactly that moment in which it “succeeds” places into question the possibility of the
people’s active reception of Holderlin’s poetry. Even as the self-reflexivity of Holderlin’s
pointing toward himself provides the opening for such reception (and this poignantly
includes his pointing toward his own sacrifice), Holderlin in his time was in fact not
heard. And this premonition of his own later untimeliness in part structures Heidegger’s
21Heidegger in the Holderlin volumes repeatedly conflates the heroism o f von Hellingrath’s first
Holderlin edition with his death at Verdun, chastising the German youth for their failure to
appreciate these two ultimately interchangeable sacrifices/offerings. See for example GA39, 9
and GA53, 2; HHI 2.
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interpretive address. This is evident not only in Heidegger’s larger attempt to secure
Holderlin as the destiny of the Germans, but in his line-by-line readings o f Holderlin’s
poetry, which incorporate decisions about Holderlin’s word choice in alternate versions
that often violate editorial discretion. In his rejection of literary criticism as derivative in
being “about” poetry (an “about” whose interpretative position must cover over its
transformative disclosivity as a happening of exposure), Heidegger understands his task
as thinker as enabling the people to hear the attunement o f Holderlin’s poetry through
which Holderlin’s founding invention of the German language is completed. Thus rather
than mediating directly between the gods and the people, the poetic work’s breaking apart
against the conditions through which it first becomes accessible requires a still further
mediation.
Significantly, given Heidegger’s later analysis of the line, “Since we are a
dialogue,” the possibility of such reception is first opened through the dialogue between
the three creative forces of poet, thinker, and statesman, who establish what I term a
chain of mediation with respect to fundamental attunement. Where Holderlin mediates
the hinting language of the gods through the founding of attunement in language,
Heidegger as thinker understands himself to structure {fugen) this founding, which is then
realized or made efficacious (er-wirkt) for the people by the state-creator.22 Heidegger
outlines these “assignments” in the following quotation:
22 The Etymologisches Worterbuch des Deutschen defines “fugen” as “to put together in a fitting
way” and “to bind together.” In the context o f building construction “fugen ” connotes joining as
the fitting together o f the pieces that belong together, and in the context o f justice or right (“mit
Fug and Recht”), appropriateness or propriety (Schicklichkeit). This latter meaning ties “fugen” to
destiny as fitting relation. In the 1935 An Introduction into Metaphysics Heidegger will translate
dike with Fug, calling attention to it in the sense o f an ordering as dispensation that techne
actively transgresses.
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Die Grundstimmung, und das heifit die Wahrheit des Daseins eines Volkes, wird
urspriinglich gestiftet durch den Dichter. Das so enthullte Seyn des Seienden aber wird
als Seyn begriffen and gefiigt und damit erst eroffnet durch den Denker, und das so
begriffene Seyn wird in den letzten und ersten Ernst des Seienden, d.h. in die be-stimmte
geschichtliche Wahrheit gestellt dadurch, dal3 das Volk zu sich selbst als Volk gebracht
wird. Das geschieht durch die Schaffung des seinem Wesen zu-bestimmten Staates durch
den Staatsschopfter. (GA39, 144)
Fundamental attunement, which is to say, the truth o f the Dasein o f a people, is originally
founded by the poet. However the Beyng o f beings thus unveiled is conceptualized and
put in order and thereby first opened up as Beyng by the thinker, and Beyng so
conceptualized is placed into the last and first earnestness o f beings, that is, into de
terminate historical truth through the people’s being brought to itself as a people. That
happens through the creation o f the state for its essence by the state-creator.
While Heidegger in a nearly three hundred page lecture course refers to the state-
creator only six times—and this includes one reference to the leader (Fuhrer) as demigod
and instantiation of “finite Beyng” (GA39, 210)—to follow out Heidegger’s inaugural
insights into poetic dwelling as the locus o f his politics such references need to be placed
within the structure of address that positions his interpretation as the creative enactment
of dialogue. The decontextualized focus on single lines has tended to elide the internal
and urgent relationship between Heidegger’s understanding of Holderlin’s poetry as the
site of divine encounter and his relocation of an original community precisely in terms of
the manifestation of the overpowering, an internal and urgent relationship more
provocative and more disturbing in its own exposure to the possibility o f excess. Indeed,
it is only by considering the relationship between the structure of that address and the
details of Heidegger’s interpretation of Holderlin’s poems that the internal connection
between Heidegger’s thinking and what Heidegger himself means by ‘“ politics’”
emerges.
As his analysis o f Holderlin as “the first bom of language” indicates, the structure
of this address is determined for Heidegger by the ambiguity of the poetic work in its
untimeliness. Thus although Holderlin grasps in language his own exposure in relation to
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the divine, in its projective disclosivity the poetic work remains out-of-order: In opening
up the possibility of a new access to beings, Holderlin’s founding of “holy affliction,
mourning yet readied” exceeds the prior disclosure of the everyday and is therefore
temporally unbeatable in terms of it even as it appears everyday. Given this necessary
untimeliness, the task of the thinker is, according to Heidegger, to make explicit the
poet’s mediation of the divine through which the people enter into a “knowing” (Wisseri)
relation to the poetic work. As we will see, in creating the historical-spiritual space for
Holderlin’s poetry to happen, the conversation between creators is itself temporalizing,
and it is in its status as a mediation that Heidegger understands this conversation to enact
“politics” in its authentic sense.
While the entirety of the »Germanien« und »Der Rheim course can be seen as the
structuring of the people’s access to Holderlin as a destiny, Heidegger’s interpretive
position as ordering what is initially out-of-order is first suggested by what he terms “the
resonating structure of the saying” (das Schwingungsgefuge des Sagens). As the
expression of the poet’s outsideness, the oscillation (schwingen) of fundamental
attunement between mourning and readiness is voiced not in the content of what is said
but in what Heidegger characterized in Being and Time as the “way of speaking”—in
intonation, modulation, and tempo (SZ 162; BT 152). Understood in this manner, the
structure of Holderlin’s exposure is to be found primarily in word placement through
which the immediacy o f Holderlin’s relation to the divine literally comes to be
‘articulated’ (is ordered and enjoined) as parataxis, enjambment, and the idiosyncratic use
of connectives and particles. As the literal articulation o f Holderlin’s outsideness, the
joints of the Schwingunggefuge are language at its deepest possible level— language as
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the rhythm or ordering o f Beyng through which beings as a whole are originally enjoined
in a fitting or proper relation. To clarify how Heidegger’s interpretation can be seen to
“structure” by making explicit the disclosive ordering implied in Holderlin’s founding of
language I want to now turn to Heidegger’s interpretation of the line “Since we are a
dialogue.”
Dialogue As Correspondence
After his introductory comments on poetry, Heidegger turns to the interpretation
of a passage from the hymn “Conciliator, you that no longer believed in ...” (GA39, 68).
This interpretation seeks to make explicit poetry as a privileged or distinguished event of
language and its relationship to the people as historical. It thereby allows Heidegger to
connect the different aspects of his analysis by enabling him to explicitly pose the
question, “Who are we?,” where the “who” is this time to be understood in terms of
Holderlin’s mediation of the hinting language of the gods as the language o f the people.23
Essential however for following out this connection is the manner in which Heidegger
stages reading the conjunction “Since” (Seit) as the structural jointure that makes possible
the right access for undergoing the “we” as a dialogue. Heidegger’s reading o f the word
“Since” allows him to locate the notion of an original community not in what might be
loosely termed “conversational exchange,” which he claims presupposes the manifestness
23 Veronique Foti also highlights this connection in her translation o f Gesprdch as “destinal
interlocution.” See Heidegger and the Poets: Poiesis/Sophia/Techne (New Jersey: Humanities
Press, 1995) xv.
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o f beings, but precisely in the hearing of Holderlin’s poetry through which beings first
become manifest so as to be held in common.24 This passage reads:
Viel hat erfahren der Mensch.

Der Himmlischen viele genannt,
Seit ein Gesprach wir sind
Und horen konnen voneinander. (GA39, 68)
Much has man experienced.

Named many o f the heavenly ones,
Since we are a dialogue
And are able to hear from one another.
Immediately after this citation, Heidegger suggests that the line “Since we are a
dialogue” is exceedingly dangerous. If, as Heidegger indicates, his interpretation of
poetry and language has been driving toward the question of the “who,” this danger is to
be specifically located in the ambiguity of what itself constitutes a dialogue as a
happening of language. Similar then to Heidegger’s analysis of the statement “one dies”
in Being and Time, “Since we are a dialogue” possesses a kind of tempting everydayness
that veils or covers over by allowing for the substitution of the already available
interpretation of dialogue as conversational exchange for dialogue as language-
happening. Whence its extreme danger: The disclosive redoubling of ambiguity not only
threatens to conceal, but threatens to conceal what Heidegger takes to be Holderlin’s
fundamental insight into the nature of language itself.
When he turns to the elucidation of this line, Heidegger thus initially extracts it
from its context, leaving out the conjunction “Since,” and restructures it into an assertion,
24 In the chapter “Homeland: Poetic Dwelling” political theorist James F. Ward helpfully remarks,
“What many interpreters criticize as Heidegger’s ‘misreading’ o f Holderlin (and other poets) I
want to characterize as political readings; in my view such readings are integral to Heidegger’s
reflections on the relations o f poetry and thinking. ‘Holderlin’ names, among other matters, the
political pedagogy, the paideia, o f the Germans” (206). See the chapter “Poetic Dwelling:
Homeland” in H eidegger’s Political Thinking (Amherst: University o f Massachusetts Press,
1995), 205-259.
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stating emphatically, “We are a dialogue.” He then proceeds to ask what this is supposed
to mean, answering that it in fact sounds like a response to the question, “Who are we?”
(GA39, 70). Heidegger continues, ‘“ We are a dialogue,’? But we do not speak
continually. Our Dasein is not exhausted by talking.” According to Heidegger’s
interpretation, the tempting danger of this passage lies in hearing it in the same manner as
the statement “A straight line is the shortest distance between two points”—both are
definitions. This reduces dialogue to a traditionally metaphysical statement that posits
language as an attribute human beings possess rather than the context through which they
become who they are as determinative o f their being ( Wesen). As such, it assumes that
there is a “who” prior to dialogue when in fact the opposite is at stake for Heidegger: “A
dialogue” does not answer the question, “Who are we?” as an act o f definition, rather
dialogue originally enacts this “we” as Dasein is exposed to the overpowering proximity
of the divine through the happening of Holderlin’s poetry.
In contrast to interpreting “We are a dialogue” as a definition, Heidegger
recommends that it be understood “literally” (wortlich).25 Thus after exhausting the
possibility o f a certain kind of misreading, he restores the conjunction “Since” to his
elucidation o f the passage. This in turn allows him to call attention to its role as a
structural jointure that reveals the “wesenseinig”—the “essential unity”—between
dialogue and hearing. Rather than interpreting the “since” instrumentally such that
25 It is precisely on the grounds o f such literalism that Heidegger is so often charged in the
secondary literature with interpretive violence or the ‘ontologization’ o f Holderlin’s poetry. In
“Heidegger’s Exegeses o f Holderlin” Paul deMan writes, for example, “With Holderlin, there is
never any critical dialogue. There is nothing in his work, no erasure, no obscurity, no ambiguity,
that is not absolutely and totally willed by Being itself’ (251). Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed.
(Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1971), 246-266. Similarly, Veronique Foti concurs
with Beda Alleman in objecting to Heidegger’s singling out o f “significant words” to fit his own
totalizing purposes. See Foti in Heidegger and the Poets, 62.
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hearing is understood as a consequence of dialogue, hearing instead becomes a decision
about time,26 that is to say, it instead becomes a decision about hearing Holderlin’s
poetry:
Zunachst steht nicht da: >seit...und wir deshalb...<— mit Hilfe dieses Mittels — uns
verstandigen konnen, sondem: seitdem wir ein Gesprach sind, seit derselben Zeit konnen
wir voneinander horen. Sagen und Horenkonnen sind zum mindesten gleichurspriinglich.
Das HorenkGnnen ist auch gar nicht die Folge des Miteinandersprechens, sondem eher
die Bedingung dafur. (GA39, 71).
First, the passage does not read “since... we therefore”— with the help o f these means—
make ourselves understood, but instead since when we are a dialogue, since that very
time we can hear from one another. Saying and being able to hear at the very least spring
up co-originally. Being able to hear is also not the consequence o f speaking with one
another, but rather the condition for it.
The co-originality of speaking and hearing is directly tied for Heidegger to the original
unveiling of language as the happening of the manifesting of beings through which the
space of appearance of world is first opened up. In entering into dialogue with
Holderlin’s poetry as Dichtung, Heidegger emphasizes that “we” are placed under the
claim (Anspruch) of the divine, who “bring us to language” (GA39, 70). Thus although
Holderlin’s mediation brings the people to the gods, the gods enable that language to
speak, for it is only by corresponding to the claim o f the divine that Dasein is able to
bring beings to language; in granting priority to the divine, the “Since” transforms
dialogue into language-happening as Dasein is brought to language by the gods in order
26 William McNeill develops this point in a more detailed way than what I present here in his
discussion o f the inaugural time o f this conversation in “Holderlin and the Essence o f
Poetry” (140-1). See “Ethos and Poetic Dwelling: Inaugural Time in Heidegger’s Dialogue
with Holderlin,” The Time o f Life: H eidegger an d Ethos (Albany: State University o f New
York Press, 2006), 133-152. Robert Bernasconi also picks up on this point in “ ‘Poet o f
Poets. Poet o f the Germans.’ Holderlin and the Dialogue between Poets and Thinkers” in
commenting on the “paradoxical temporality o f the constitution o f the people.” As he
writes: “It is not the poet who, with the thinker, founds a people simply. It needs a people to
prove the poet to be a poet in the operative sense and to prove the thinker a thinker. It is in
the coming community o f a people that the community o f the poet and thinker will have
been established” (148). See H eidegger in Question: The Art o f Existing (New Jersey:
Humanities, 1993), 135-148.
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to bring beings to language through Holderlin’s poetry. The transformation from dialogue
as exchange to dialogue as language-happening effects an overturning in the instrumental
conception of language as something “we” use into an experience of limitation as Dasein
is exposed to the claim of the gods, an exposure that, as we will see, marks Dasein’s
simultaneous transposure into the being of others.
It is in the context of this analysis of hearing that Heidegger elaborates on the
notion of original community first raised in his brief “Introduction” to the »Germanien«
und »Der Rhein« course (GA39, 8). Understood as the happening of the manifesting of
beings, Holderlin’s poetry first opens up the space of appearance through which beings
become accessible as what they are. Significantly, it is through the happening of
fundamental attunement as exposure that Dasein is implicated in the event of
manifestation through which it is bound into the way beings as a whole come to appear.
In a passage critical for making this point Heidegger elaborates:
Seit ein Gesprach wir sind, sind wir ausgesetzt in das sich eroffnende Seiende, seitdem
kann iiberhaupt erst das Sein des Seienden als solches uns begegnen und bestimmen.
Dieses aber, daB das Seiende fur jeden von uns zuvor in seinem Sein offenbar ist, das ist
die Voraussetzung dafur, daB einer von dem anderen etwas, d.h. fiber Seiendes, horen
kann, mag dieses Seiende solches sein, das wir nicht sind— Natur— oder das wir selbst
sind— Geschichte. Das Horenkonnen schafft nicht erst die Beziehung des einen zum
anderen, die Gemeinschaft, sondem setzt sie voraus. Diese urspriingliche Gemeinschaft
ensteht nicht erst durch das Aufhehmen gegenseitiger Beziehung— so entsteht nur
Gesellschaft— , sondem Gemeinschaft ist durch die vorgangige B indung yWe.? Einzelnen
an das, was jeden Einzelnen tiberhohend bindet und bestimmt. Solches muB offenbar
sein, was weder der Einzelne fur sich noch die Gemeinschaft als solche ist. (GA39, 72)
Since we are a dialogue we are exposed to the manifesting o f beings, only because o f that
can the Being o f beings as such be encountered and determined by us. Yet that beings are
for each o f us already manifest in their being, that is the presupposition for the fact that
someone can hear something from the other, which is to say, about beings, whether this
being is o f the Being we are not— Nature— or o f that Being we ourselves are— history.
Being able to hear does not first create a relationship between one person and another, but
community, rather presupposes it. This original community does not first come about by
the taking up o f a reciprocal relationship— so arises only society— but rather community
is only through the preceding bond o f each individual to that which binds and determines
each individual in a manner that exceeds them. Something must be manifest that is
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neither the individual by himself nor the community as such.
In understanding dialogue as a happening of exposure opened up by Holderlin’s
mediation of the divine, Heidegger moves community away from statements made about
beings into language itself as the happening of the manifesting of beings. The original
unveiling of language thereby comes to constitute original community as beings for
Heidegger come to appear in such a way as to already be held in common.
This is evident in the above quotation in Heidegger’s use of the word
“presuppose”: The ability to hear statements about beings presupposes the manifestness
of beings, and the manifestness of beings presupposes (rather than “creates”) the
relationship between individuals that enables such hearing. As such, the manifesting of
beings through language comprises what Heidegger in the above terms a “preceding
bond”—a “preceding bond” through which Dasein is bound into the opening up of the
disclosive space of world that takes place through Holderlin’s poetry. For in exceeding
the individual and the community, this preceding bond is prior to both at the same time as
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it is the condition for each in its possibility.
Although the way Heidegger negotiates the tension between Dasein’s
individuation and what he subsequently characterizes as its transposure ( Versetztsein)
into the being of others will not fully become clear until his interpretation of the Earth, it
is nonetheless helpful to sketch out the contrast with the problem o f hearing presented in
Being and Time. As became clear in Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk, what enabled the
27 In his reading o f this passage, Hans-Georg Gadamer asks: “But what kind o f conversation is
this? Is it the conversation o f humans with the gods or o f humans? The poem wants to tell us that
we cannot separate and distinguish in this way. What we must try to do in our given situation is
go beyond ourselves, whether it be in listening to the other person or in seeking somehow to
correspond with what is completely other than human” (162). See “Thinking and Poetizing in
Heidegger and in Holderlin’s ‘Andenken’” in Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays o f the Work o f
the 1930s, ed. James Risser (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 145-162.
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covering over of the disclosive space of world in Being and Time was the way hearing
“had already attached itself beforehand” to what was spoken about. As a consequence,
authentic discourse was unable to bring the hearer toward what was spoken about in
language in such a way that it was able to hold open the disclosive space of world. In
allowing beings to appear as always already accessible, the projective disclosivity of
understanding was interpreted to “leap in” in a manner that foreclosed the possibility of
challenging Dasein’s prior access to both beings and others. The existential solipsism of
anxiety can be understood as Heidegger’s attempt to open up anew the possibility of
hearing finally evident in §74 in Heidegger’s interpretation of communication as battle or
contestation. However the insufficiency of anxiety lies precisely in the way it remains
self-enclosed: The existential identity of anxiety cannot be sustained in the transition
back into language and so carried through within the context of world in which Dasein
realizes its authentic possibilities always already in relation to others.
By contrast, Heidegger in the »Germanien« und »Der Rheim course attempts to
resolve this problem not by starting with Dasein, but by starting with the disclosive space
of world as enacted through a privileged happening of language. As a creative project,
Holderlin’s founding invention of the German language allows for the opening up anew
of the disclosive space of world through which Dasein is simultaneously exposed to the
divine as it is transposed into the being o f others. As the above quotation makes clear,
Dasein is able to hear and thus also able to speak because of the preceding bond that
takes place not just through, but also importantly as the open space o f world. Unlike
Being and Time, however, what allows the efficaciousness of this bond is precisely
Holderlin’s mediation of the gods’ hinting: It is the privileged relationship between the
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gods and the poet that holds open the disclosive space of world in allowing language to
speak in a way that manifests beings. According to Heidegger, hearing Holderlin’s poetry
as the enactment of a happening of exposure in turn opens up the possibility of hearing
one another and in so doing enacts the “we.”
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CHAPTER THREE SYNOPSIS
Holy Affliction and Fidelity to the Earth:
Mourning, Community, Possibility
Chapter Two considered Heidegger’s reconceptualization of language by way of
Holderlin’s mediation of the gods’ hinting through his founding o f fundamental
attunement. This chapter seeks to extend that analysis by offering a close reading of
Heidegger’s interpretation of “holy affliction, mourning yet readied” as this is developed
in Holderlin’s “Germania” hymn. It is therefore concerned with both Heidegger’s
reinterpretation of the ecstatic disclosivity of attunement as a movement o f exposure and
transposure (this was pointed to but not developed in Chapter Two), as well as the
specific disclosivity of holy affliction as opening up the horizon of possibility that allows
the Germans to become who they are. As such, the chapter can also be seen to respond to
Heidegger’s analysis o f anxiety in Being and Time in the way it calls into question the
ahistoricality of Dasein’s relationship to death and—internally related to this—the
positing of an existential identity that secures Dasein’s individuation at the same time as
it precludes the possibility of Dasein’s own further disclosive transformation.
The maimer in which this chapter extends and develops structural insights
introduced in the previous chapters offers an additional perspective on how the
»Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course resolves the aporetic tension between language
and death by this time focusing on Holderlin’s founding of fundamental attunement.
Thus, where Holderlin’s mediation of the gods’ hinting allows the possibility of an
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Chapter Three Synopsis
authentic access to others through language, Heidegger’s specific analysis o f holy
affliction shows how the attunement of mourning individuates by abandoning Dasein to
the Earth. Given however Heidegger’s nascent conception of the Earth as self-concealing
withdrawal (which is in fact first put forward in this lecture course), Dasein’s being
abandoned to mourning enables the dissolution of the “I” in a way that gives rise to a
“we” who readies the Earth for the coming arrival of the gods. The ecstatically disclosive
structure of holy affliction in relation to both the gods and the Earth allows me to make
two claims essential for the movement of this chapter and for the dissertation as a whole:
First, mourning, in taking up the disclosive structure of attunement as a “letting,” allows
for a reciprocal transformation that makes possible the reattunement of the “I” as a “we,”
and, second, the disclosure of the Earth that happens through the oscillation of holy
affliction as it swings between mourning the flight of the old gods and readying for the
arrival of the new gods becomes the basis for the realization of both Dasein’s mortality
and an original community.
To follow out the relation to the Earth at stake in the specific disclosivity of holy
affliction, it is first necessary to understand how Heidegger takes up and reinterprets the
way attunement discloses beings in their totality (this includes innerworldly beings,
others and Dasein). While the notion of attunement as the opening up o f beings as a
whole was indicated in Being and Time, Heidegger’s conception of attunement as a
bivalent turning prevented him from positively developing this insight. What
distinguished anxiety as a fundamental attunement was the way it collapsed the relational
nexus of world in order to reveal it as world. By contrast, Heidegger in the »Germanien«
und »Der Rheim course understands fundamental attunement to be world-opening in the
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way it discloses and binds Dasein into a relational totality precisely through its openness
to that totality—whence Heidegger’s statement in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein«
course that “Dasein is exposure in the midst o f beings as a whole.”
The holistic disclosivity of attunement as world-opening is essential for both
following out what Heidegger means by the term “holy,” as well as for clarifying the
internal connection between such holiness and fundamental attunement as grounding.
Although the secondary literature has emphasized the relation between the holy and
mourning, interpreting it primarily as the sacred, I contend that the holy is primarily to be
understood as the “whole” and so implies a deeper structural insight into how attunement
discloses “beings as a whole” in a manner that binds Dasein into that totality through its
exposure to it. This is how, for Heidegger, attunement is understood to expose and
transpose simultaneously.
Heidegger’s terse analysis of Holderlin’s theoretical essay, “On the Operations of
the Poetic Spirit,” provides evidence for this interpretation. In his commentary on this
piece Heidegger outlines the structure of sentiment as a harmonic opposition in which the
subject stands open to the object by placing itself back before it. According to
Heidegger’s interpretation, this placing back creates a relation in which both subject and
object are freed in a way that allows each to come into its own through the happening of
relation, which is here conceived as a giving way or letting. As a result o f such letting,
which Heidegger describes as a kind o f “unselfishness,” both subject and object are
completed or made whole through the happening of relation. It is important to emphasize
that this holism does not efface difference, but instead intensifies it through the active
gathering into relation as the context in which each term comes into its own.
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This same structure is evident in Heidegger’s analysis of the relation between the
gods and the Earth as this is specifically elaborated in Heidegger’s reading of key
jointures of the “Germania” hymn. In his overview of the ecstatic disclosivity of
attunement, Heidegger states that Dasein is transported into relation to the divine in being
transported away from the gods and into the Earth. This ecstatic movement of exposure-
transposure opens up the disclosive space in which Dasein first experiences its belonging
to the Earth. As Heidegger elaborates by way of key passages from Holderlin’s poetic
corpus, the gods on their own cannot reach into the abyss the Earth bears—in
Heidegger’s later analysis of the “Rhine” hymn the Earth becomes the self-enclosedness
of “birth” as the site of emergent possibility—but instead require the mediation of human
mortality. Dasein’s receptivity to the claim of the divine thus creates the context in which
it undergoes the experience of its own mortality through which Dasein, the gods, and the
Earth each come into their own as the human being “dwells poetically upon the Earth.”
This configuration reveals an important contrast with Heidegger’s subsequent analysis in
the “Origin of the Work of Art”: Strife here is located not in the tension between Earth
and world, but between the gods and the Earth who first enter into relation through the
world-opening disclosivity of holy affliction. World, then, is the context in which Dasein
experiences its mortality as this is determined by and determinative o/'Dasein’s finite
historical possibilities.
The overview of the ecstatic disclosivity of holy affliction provides a helpful
framework for following out what is at stake in Heidegger’s analysis o f the first two
strophes of the “Germania” hymn, which trace out in detail the transition from the “I” to
the “we.” While Heidegger emphasizes the unity of holy affliction as it oscillates between
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mourning the flight of the old gods and readying for the arrival of the new gods, I focus
on the transformative power of mourning as it relates to this transition. Here I am
concerned with how the experience o f abandonment that takes place in mourning
individuates but also allows the dissolution of that individuation as the “I” is transported
into the Earth. It is this dissolution that allows for the “we” o f an original community.
To follow out the transformative power of mourning, it is first necessary to
understand what Heidegger identifies as its creativity in at once allowing for and
preserving the experience of absence. Key for this is Heidegger’s complicated analysis of
the opening lines of the “Germania” hymn in which the “I” of the poem is understood to
renounce not the old gods but its calling to them. According to Heidegger’s
interpretation, the renunciation of calling takes up the flight of the old gods by giving
way or letting go. The “I” thereby bereaves itself from what Heidegger describes as a
false proximity. As the enactment of separation, renunciation allows the possibility of a
different experience of nearness, namely, the nearness o f absence undergone in pain.
Significantly, Heidegger claims that this different experience of proximity preserves the
divinity o f the old gods as distinct from their particular historical instantiation. The
temporality of such preserving—which “tears forward” the having been of the old gods—
allows them to come from out of the future as new gods as the attunement of mourning
changes over into readiness.
Recalling the ecstatic disclosivity of holy affliction as a movement o f exposure-
transposure, Dasein’s being abandoned by the old gods occurs contemporaneously with
its transposure into the lamenting waters o f the homeland, which Heidegger claims have
lost their direction since the flight of the divine. (These “waters” will be tied to the
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demigod Rhine river and to Holderlin as himself demigod and river.) It is in the context
of lamenting “together with” the rivers of the homeland that the “I” first experiences
itself as belonging to the Earth.
Dasein’s being abandoned is essential for highlighting a contrast with the
experience of individuation disclosed through anxiety in Being and Time. Thus, while
§74 of Being and Time emphasizes Dasein’s surrender to the overpowering of death, this
takes place non-relationally through the disclosure of an existential identity; Dasein is
individuated precisely in being abandoned to death as its own highest possibility. By
contrast, in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« lecture course the experience of
belonging disclosed through the “Fs” transposition into the Earth is relational, albeit in a
distinctive way. For this transposition individuates Dasein at the same time it allows for
the dissolution of that individuation through the self-withdrawal of the Earth, which
Heidegger claims undoes everything individual and all grounds.
Heidegger’s careful reading o f the first two strophes o f the “Germania” hymn is
important for demonstrating how the dissolution of the “I” occurs together with the
downgoing of the disclosive structures o f world. In Heidegger’s analysis, the “I” not only
takes up the flight of the gods as the decision to undergo the distress of godlessness, the
“I” also explicitly takes up this decision by abiding in mourning in remaining “with” or
“alongside” the lamenting waters of the homeland. Heidegger, however, indicates that
this decision to abide is not to be understood as an act o f will, but rather as an expression
of love that lets the beloved be what it is, that is to say, lets the old gods be dead.
Recalling Heidegger’s definition of the holy as what is unselfish, the resoluteness implicit
in abiding is understood as a letting; as a giving way it is thus implicitly middle-voiced.
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According to my analysis, such letting is essential for understanding how
mourning is transformative in a way that enables the reciprocal transformation o f the “I”
and the disclosive structure of appearance to which the “I” corresponds as attuned. Here
mourning is unique in the way it takes up the disclosive letting of attunement itself and
therefore transforms how Dasein is already implicated or bound into the prior disclosure
of beings as a whole, which have determined in advance its own possibilities for being.
This underscores the significance of the creative-attestive dimension o f mourning, which
both takes up the flight of the gods but also preserves the nearness of an absence in which
the possibility of new gods is temporalized.
This reciprocal transformation is apparent in Heidegger’s analysis o f the way the
dissolution of the “I” occurs simultaneously with the dissolution o f the ordered structures
of relation that themselves comprise world. The undoing of everything individual as the
“I” abides on the Earth thereby includes both the “I” and the particular configuration of
historical possibility that has determined it. Notably, the dissolution of the “I” together
with the dissolution of world happens as the oscillation of attunement intensifies
immediately before it changes over into readiness. This is an essential juncture in
Heidegger’s analysis as he claims that with the dissolution of the “I” emerges a
representative saying for all. This representative saying is, of course, Holderlin’s poetry.
While Heidegger goes on to elaborate the change of attunement from mourning to
readiness by way of a turn in temporality, more important for my analysis is Heidegger’s
cursory remarks on the abyss that the Earth bears as the locus of emergent possibility.
Thus although the Earth as self-concealing withdrawal undoes everything individual,
Heidegger also asserts that it gives rise to all new becoming. In revealing the abyssal or
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contingent nature of all grounding, historical founding binds itself to the abyss as the
assertion of both form and limitation.
The fidelity to the Earth that takes place as Dasein abides in mourning thus at the
same time allows for an act of self-grounding as Dasein, through its mortality, reaches
into the abyss that the Earth bears. However this self-grounding needs to be understood
non-metaphysically, which is to say, as a relational event in which the gods, the Earth,
and mortals are brought into their proper limits through a contingent or abyssal
configuration of possibility. As such, the self-withdrawal of the Earth undoes Dasein’s
individuation at the same time its unboundedness calls for a free binding that, through the
“we,” gives rise to a new configuration o f historical possibility as the founding of an
original community. This is how Heidegger understands the movement of destiny as a
becoming.
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CHAPTER THREE
Holy Affliction and Fidelity to the Earth:
Mourning, Community, Possibility
Holy Affliction and Fidelity to the Earth
So ist die Grundstimmung der heilig trauemden, bereiten

Bedrangnis, aus der nicht mehr ein >ich< spricht,
sondem ein >wir<, ein wahrhaftes Bewahren der
entflohenen Himmlischen und damit ein Erharren des
neuen drohenden Himmels gerade deshalb, weil sie
>irdish< ist. Irdisch heifit nicht, von einem Schopfergott
geschaffen, sondem ungeschaffener Abgmnd, in dem
alles heraufkommende Geschehen erzittert und gehalten
bleibt. (GA39, 107)
Thus the fundamental attunement o f holy mourning,

readied affliction from out o f which an “I” no longer
speaks but instead a “we,” is a tme preserving o f the
flown heavenly ones and therefore a persisting o f the
new threatening sky exactly because this attunement is
“Earthly.” Earthly does not mean created by a creator
god, but rather the uncreated abyss in which all emergent
happening quivers and remains held.
Ill
What does it mean to say that the fundamental attunement o f holy affliction is, as
Heidegger writes, “Earthly”? How is this related to the “we” already touched on in the
notion of an original community? Still more precisely, how does the “we’s” preserving of
the uncreated abyss ground the movement o f its own becoming through the holding open
of emergent possibility, which includes the necessity of overcoming its own previous
historical forms? Why for Heidegger can this take place only through mourning the flight
of the old gods?
While Chapter Two argued for understanding Holderlin’s founding of
fundamental attunement as the enactment of his mediation of the divine, this chapter
takes up Heidegger’s detailed analysis of holy affliction, mourning yet readied, in the
attempt to show the intimate and intimately conflicted relationship between the gods and
the Earth that first opens up through that mediation. Thus while Chapter Two can be read
as a kind of methodology chapter intended to show the implicit politics of hearing
Holderlin’s poetry, this chapter follows out how Heidegger understands that politics to be
projectively disclosed in the “Germania” hymn through the ecstatic oscillation of holy
affliction, which temporalizes the “time o f the people” in hovering between mourning the
having been of the old gods and preparing for the arrival of the new gods.
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Although the significance of Heidegger’s understanding of attunement as
exposure to the divine has already been indicated, what emerges through his detailed
analysis of this oscillation is the internal relationship between the underlying excess of
that exposure and the opening up of a space of appearance into which Dasein is
transposed and bound in its being located “upon the Earth.”1 It is thus only in mourning
the flight of the old gods that Dasein’s relationship to the Earth is disclosed, and
disclosed through the experience o f homelessness, through which the abyssal ground of
Dasein’s dwelling first emerges.
In the critical literature available on the “Germania” hymn there has been the
tendency to understand Heidegger’s analysis o f holy affliction incompletely, which both
descries the impossibility of mourning (which dooms Heidegger to nostalgia and an
irreducible provincialism), and fails to see that the experiences of abandonment and
absence are intimately bound up with the possible arrival of new gods. Both positions
importantly elide what can be seen to be most at stake for Heidegger in his analysis of
mourning, which is exactly its creativity in allowing for the possibility of Dasein’s
transformation and thus for the becoming o f new possibilities reserved and preserved in
how the uncreated abyss of the Earth undoes all grounds.
1 For a nuanced and sustained discussion o f the Earth in Heidegger’s thinking see Michel Haar’s
The Song o f the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds o f the History o f Being trans. Reginald Lily
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Haar’s discussion o f the “Four Senses o f Earth”
(57-64) and the chapter “Earth and the Work o f Art and in the Poem” (94-119) have been
formative for me. It is important to note however that the »Germanien« und »D er Rhein« course
predates and informs “The Origin o f the Work o f Art,” on which Haar heavily relies for some o f
his most rich and basic insights. Notably, Heidegger revises how he conceives o f strife, shifting it
from the conflict between the gods and the Earth in GA39 (this is how Heidegger remains caught
in Nietzsche’s configuration o f the Apollonian and Dionysian) to the conflict between the Earth
and world in “The Origin o f the Work o f Art.” This in fact constitutes a significant structural
revision that transforms the issue o f access developed in Chapter One as this concerns the
placement o f the divine. This merits it own separate treatment and therefore remains under the
heading o f “Further Work.”
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In order to show the movement of this transformation, which is realized through a
“turn in temporality,” I first offer an analysis of what Heidegger means by the term
“holy” in relation to the ecstatic oscillation of attunement. While the term heilig
accommodates the notion of the sacred, within the context of Heidegger’s reading of the
“Germania” hymn it more literally means what is ‘whole’ or ‘complete.’ This is
importantly tied to how the movement of attunement as an exposure and transposure
“lets” the manifestness of beings happen—a disclosive letting that is explicitly taken up
in how mourning “lets go” or “gives way.” I next turn to Heidegger’s analysis of
mourning in the first two strophes of the “Germania” hymn, emphasizing its creativity as
the undergoing of an absence that allows for the possibility of a reciprocal
transformation as the “I” is first abandoned to the Earth and then dissolved in its
individuation in abiding in mourning. Finally I consider how Dasein’s fidelity to the
Earth allows the possibility of what Heidegger terms an “always dawning new becoming”
in which the realization of Dasein’s mortality implies the inauguration of a historical
community grounded upon the Earth as homeland, but a historical community
simultaneously revealed to be radically contingent.
The Holistic Disclosivity o f Attunement
As we have seen in his analysis o f Holderlin’s mediation of the gods’ hinting,
Heidegger understands fundamental attunement in relation to the overpowering o f the
divine to whom Dasein is exposed through the happening of language. Though this
insight into Dasein as exposure is arguably implicit in the way attunement was
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understood in Being and Time to deliver Dasein over to itself in its sheer “thereness”
(one thinks in particular of how anxiety reveals Dasein’s “naked uncanniness”), the
intimate relationship between the gods and the structure of appearance transforms the
way Heidegger conceives attunement to be originally disclosive. In contrast to his earlier
analysis, this original disclosivity derives from Heidegger’s conception of the divine as
uniquely bound up with the event o f manifestation, especially as it pertains to the
temporality of the “always already.” The way moods were understood to “seize” or
“befall” (uberfallen) Dasein in Being and Time—to transport as the opening up o f how
beings come to appear—is explicitly reinterpreted in the »Germanien« und »Der R heim
course in terms o f the disclosure of the overpowering proximity o f the gods, who, as we
have seen, transpose as they expose.
This is essential for following out the way Dasein is opened up and
simultaneously placed into relation with beings in a manner that is primarily receptive
and therefore itself vulnerable to the disclosure of the overpowering. As Heidegger’s
characterization of Stimmung with words that emphasize openness indicates {eroffnen,
Offenbarkeit, offenbar, offenbarmachen), there is an internal connection between the way
attunement is understood to open up Dasein and the way beings come to be manifest in
their openness through which they come to appear “as though for the first time.” As I will
go onto address, the temporality of the “already” vouchsafes the possibility of the new. In
his effort to move beyond the conception o f mood as finally subjective, Heidegger thus
claims that “attunement as attunement lets the manifestness o f beings happen” (GA39,
92). According to Heidegger’s interpretation, such letting is a happening of relation in
which the opening up o f Dasein to beings corresponds to how beings come to appear
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through attunement. Indeed, this was suggested by Heidegger’s analysis of dialogue as
correspondence to the divine through which Dasein “is exposed in advance to the
proximity and remoteness of the essence of things” (GA39, 73). Instead then o f being
given as objectively present, the letting happen of attunement determines how beings
come to appear in a way that implicates or binds Dasein into that happening of
manifestation precisely through how it is opened up to it; it is as exposure that Dasein
receives the imprint of Beyng (Geprage des Seyns).
The letting happen of the manifestness of beings points to a significant evolution
in the way Heidegger understands attunement to disclose the totality o f beings, and is
critical for following out how attunement opens up and binds Dasein into the disclosive
space of world. Significantly, the whole or ‘holism’ implied in the notion of a totality was
already indicated in Being and Time as the second fundamental feature of attunement. In
delivering Dasein over to its There as being-in-the-world, attunement was understood to
open up Dasein to itself, others, and innerworldly beings, which in turn allowed for the
possibility of encounter (the third fundamental feature of Stimmung). As Heidegger
writes in a passage already commented upon in Chapter One, “Mood has always already
disclosed being-in-the-world as a whole andfirst makes possible directing oneself toward
something... .It is a fundamental existential mode of being of the equiprimordial
disclosedness of world, being-there-with, and existence because this disclosure itself is
essentially being-in-the-world” (SZ 137; BT 129). In what becomes apparent as the
peculiar circularity of this statement, the original disclosivity of attunement situates
Dasein within the totality o f beings as part of that totality. At the same time, however, the
way attunement opens up Dasein by delivering it over to itself distinguishes it as the
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disclosure of that totality. In other words, the ‘in-ness’ that locates Dasein as being-in-
the-world implies an outsideness or dislocation that, in opening up Dasein, is originating
in the way it has already placed Dasein into relation (this as the contrast to the uncanny
suspense of anxiety). Heidegger, of course, thematizes this in Being and Time as the
disclosive totality of the worldliness o f world, which “lets” or “frees” beings into their
appearance (“[World] means letting what shows itself in the ‘beings’ within the world be
seen” (SZ 63; BT 59)), and so is directly tied to the “as”-structure.
Although Heidegger in Being and Time was unable to positively follow out on the
world-opening dimension of attunement because of the inauthenticity o f Dasein’s already
initial discovery of world, he returns in the »Germanien« und »Der R heim course to this
idea of a disclosive whole as the context through which Dasein is granted an original
access to innerworldly beings and others. Accordingly, Dasein’s initial access to beings
does not need to be emptied out in order to be retrieved as authentic so much as explicitly
taken up and endured in the exhaustion of its disclosive possibilities through which the
entire relational structure of that access — and this includes the “I”— is transformed.
Notably, this takes place through the modification o f the experience of the long time that
occurs in boredom (die Langeweile) to readied awaiting that prepares the Earth for the
possible arrival of new gods.2 Thus while Heidegger in the »Germanien« und »Der
1 Heidegger offers a sustained analysis o f the different forms o f boredom in the 1929/30 course
The Fundamental Concepts o f Metaphysics. Similar to holy affliction, profound boredom (die
tiefe Langeweile) is understood by Heidegger to disclose beings in their totality, which
distinguishes it as a fundamental attunement or Grundstimmung. Essential to Heidegger’s
analysis is the experience o f the stretching o f time that occurs in boredom. The »Germanien« und
»Der Rheim course can be interpreted as Heidegger’s attempt to transform the experience o f
waiting implicit in boredom to the experience o f awaiting implied in the readiness for the arrival
o f the gods. It would interesting to give a topological analysis o f the forms o f waiting in
Heidegger beginning with his with discussion o f expectation in Paul’s “First Letter to the
Thessalonians” in The Phenomenology o f Religious Life (GA60), to the experience o f awaiting in
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Rheim course is even more urgently concerned with the question of an authentic
becoming, this is no longer situated within the binary opposition between authenticity
and inauthenticity. Rather, it is exactly reinterpreted in terms of the always prior event of
relation as the opening up of a space o f appearance that lets or allows beings—together
with the “I”—to come into their own in a manner that gives rise to a “we.”
To clarify this distinction, it is first necessary to elaborate how Heidegger
conceives the term “heilig.” For in contrast to most secondary literature on the
»Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course, which has focused primarily on the holy as
descriptive of mourning (the word heilig appears five times in the “Germania” hymn, first
in the compound “heiligtrauemde,” 1.6, and twice to describe the earth, V.75, VII.97),
Heidegger uses the term to apply to the structural poles of mourning and readiness in
their unity between which attunement “oscillates” or “swings” (schwingt).4 Hence
Being and Time (which Heidegger ties to the temporality o f care and thus to transcendence
(§69a)), to the temporally undifferentiated waiting o f boredom in GA29/30, to the experience o f
awaiting in GA39 in which the future arrival o f the coming gods it prepared for (if not in some
way also realized) in readiness.
3 For a much more comprehensive discussion o f the holy see Ben Vedder’s recent article, “A
Philosophical Understanding o f Heidegger’s Notion o f the Holy,” Epoche vol. 10, no. 1 (Fall
2005): 141-154. In this article Vedder explores the notion o f the holy “as Heidegger’s entrance to
the religious.” Though he touches on Heidegger’s analysis o f the “holy” in the context o f the
“Germania” hymn he misleadingly identifies unselfishness with indifference rather than as a
“placing itself back,” which I understand to literally open up the space for intimacy (Innigkeit).
See pgs. 146-48.
4 The notion o f “swinging” or “oscillation” implies the ecstatic disclosure o f time-space.
Heidegger is thus explicit in later connecting attunement to temporalizing o f time as an “original
movedness.” Notably, Heidegger first uses the word schwingen in this sense in his 1928 The
Metaphysical Foundations o f Logic where it is essential to Heidegger’s reconceptualization o f the
structure o f thrownness and projection and thus the unified disclosure o f world. Heidegger writes:
“This ecstemic unity o f the horizon o f temporality is nothing other than the temporal condition
for the possibility o f w orld and o f world’s essential belonging to transcendence. For
transcendence has its possibility in the unity o f ecstatic momentum. This oscillation [schwingen]
o f the self-temporalizing is, as such, the upswing regarded as [swinging] toward all possible
beings that can factically enter there into a world. The ecstemic temporalizes itself, oscillating as
a worlding [Weiten]. World entry happens only insofar as something like ecstatic oscillation
temporalizes itself as a particular temporality” (GA24, 263; MFL 208-209). Heidegger first
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Heidegger’s consistent use of the phrase “holy affliction, mourning yet readied” (die
heilig trauerenden, aber bereiten Bedrangnis) in the later phases of his analysis o f the
“Germania” hymn.5 As will become evident in Heidegger’s elucidation of the first two
strophes, the specific way Dasein is exposed to the divine determines how it is
transposed, and it is through such transposure that Dasein is individuated and then
“dissolved” in being abandoned to the Earth or—as happens as mood changes over—
reattuned as a “we” who cultivates the Earth as homeland. Heidegger thus initially
privileges mourning because it allows for its own disclosive transformation.
Heidegger offers a dense and schematic analysis of the term “holy” in his
interpretation of Holderlin’s 1800 treatise, “On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit”
(GA39, 83-86).6 In this work Holderlin attempts to capture what he describes as the
unifying dimension of “beautiful, holy, godlike sentiment [.Empfindung]” as the harmonic
opposition (Harmonischenentgegengesezte) between subject and object.7 (Significantly,
makes the connection between the oscillation o f attunement, temporality, and “world entry” in his
extended analysis o f fundamental attunement o f profound boredom in 1929/30 The Fundamental
Concepts o f Metaphysics.
5 The secondary literature on Heidegger’s interpretation o f the “Germania” hymn tends to refer
almost exclusively to “holy mourning”— an incomplete interpretation that Heidegger’s phrasing
at certain points seems to support. However by the conclusion o f his interpretation the first two
strophes, Heidegger consistently refers to this attunement as heilige Bedrangnis, commenting at
one point that “the fundamental attunement o f abandonment [which is tied specifically to
mourning] can so little disappear and be displaced by a persisting [which is tied to readiness] as it
is precisely persisting that oscillates in abandonment and so lets it becomes affliction” (GA39,
103). In other words, the oscillation o f attunement between mourning and readiness is internally
related to its disclosive letting, which changes back-and-forth through which Dasein is exposed
and transposed, individuated and related. Further, the connotation o f affliction better
accommodates how for Heidegger the openness o f attunement is “something spiritual [etwas
Geistiges]” in its connection at once to the divine, and then through the divine, to the experience
o f pain (GA39, 82).
6 See the translation by Thomas Pfau in Friedrich Holderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory
(Albany: State University o f New York Press, 1988) 62-82.
7 See also David Krell’s provocative treatment o f “On the Operations o f the Poetic Spirit” in
relation to the significance o f the word Innigkeit for Holderlin and how the »Germanien« und
»Der Rhein« course can be read as a sustained meditation on Innigkeit. “Stuff • Thread • Point •
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Heidegger will return to this notion in his extended and provocative treatment of the
connections between Heraclitus, Holderlin and Hegel.) Calling attention to Holderlin’s
repeated characterization of the different sides of this relation as uneigennutzig
(unselfish), Heidegger goes on to define the holy as what is completed (vollendet), which
he further and negatively elaborates as a “not one-sided unselfishness [nicht einseitige
Uneigenniitzigkeit]” (GA39, 86).
Although Heidegger remains somewhat constrained by the way talk of “sides”
would seem to reiterate the distinction between subject and object as already given, the
movement of the piece in terms of a series of statements that read “but
neither.. .nor.. .nor...” to finally culminate in a “but rather at the same time” attempts to
performatively capture the opposition between subject and object as a unified and
unifying happening of relation. In his paraphrase of the treatise Heidegger thus identifies
what he calls the “inner ground” of unselfishness as a “resting-in-itself, a mode of
genuine independence.” (I will later connect the standing-in-itself of that independence to
the theme o f “abiding” [.standhalten] that emerges at key junctures in Heidegger’s
reading of the “Germania” hymn.) He then goes on to elaborate the relationship to objects
as such, and here Heidegger writes that, “it [unselfishness] is open and surrendered to
these [the objects] and thereby places itself back.” Finally, Heidegger turns to the relation
qua relation between subject and object.
According to Heidegger’s interpretation, the completed but not one-sided
unselfishness of the holy emerges precisely in this relation qua relation as the context in
which subject and object each first come into their own. It is thus by resting in itself that
Fire” in Lunar Voices: O f Tragedy, Poetry, Fiction, and Thought (Chicago: University o f
Chicago Press, 1995), 40-45.
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the inner ground stands open to the object, its unselfishness apparent in the surrender
through which it places itself back and so gives space for the object through its own
openness to it. In the oppositional play of this surrendering to and placing itself back,
Heidegger claims that the inner ground is “secured.” In other words, only by being drawn
out into the openness of the object is the subject able to assert the independence that
establishes it not simply as ground but as grounding. This same sense is also implied for
Heidegger in the term Grundstimmung. On the ‘other side’ of this relation, the
independence of the subject simultaneously “promotes” the object by, as Heidegger
writes, “increasing and freeing it to its own goodness and its own essence” (GA39, 87).8
As Holderlin’s repetition of the word eigen suggests, it is first through the relationship to
the subject that the object comes into its own by allowing what the object properly is to
flourish. The unselfishness of the subject thereby frees the object to its own completion at
the same time that the object’s own completion signals the subject’s own completion as a
resting-in-itself that gives open—that lets happen.
This movement is most readily apparent in Heidegger’s interpretation of
mourning as a “letting be” or “giving (a)way.” By contrast, one-sided unselfishness
occurs when the inner ground becomes rigid and subsumes the object under itself, or
loses itself in the object by entirely entering into it—this might be seen as the contrast
between a selfishness that is self-willed or eigenmachtig and a selfishness that is selfless-
-o r hovers in an indeterminate relation that “fails to take [the object] into its care”
(G A 39, 87). H eidegger’s interpretation o f the h oly as an unselfishness that “frees” or
“com pletes” what it relates is key for understanding the ecstatic transport o f attunement
traced out in the structural jointures o f the “Germania” hymn. Though the gods play an
8 “Goodness” should be understood in its archaic meaning o f “right” or “well-suited,” geeignet.
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essential but asymmetrical role in this transport, the holy in Heidegger’s analysis
ultimately designates the disclosive space of world as a unified totality. As such, it is the
context in which the gods and the Earth come into their own through a happening of
relation that disappropriates as it appropriates.9 In contrast then to the bivalent turning
toward/turning away from in Being and Time, the back-and-forth oscillation of
attunement as a harmonic opposition—and in particular the way it “places back”—allows
for a relationality whose ecstatic structure can itself be seen to “hold open” the disclosive
space of world. Or, more accurately, is the disclosive space of world in the sense later
parsed by Heidegger with the phrase “the world worlds.”
This emerges in a passage that serves as the summation of the ecstatic oscillation
of attunement enacted in the resonating jointure of the “Germania” hymn tracked out by
Heidegger in the transformations of the “who” of the poem. While Heidegger in his
discussion of this oscillation as temporalizing asserts that “our being as such is ein
entrucktes” (GA39, 109), he conceives the back-and-forth movement of this transport as
an “out o f ’ and “into” that opens up and binds Dasein into the manifestness of beings.
Die Grandstimmung der heilig trauemden, aber bereiten Bedrangnis, und nur sie, stellt
uns zumal vor das Fliehen, das Ausbleiben und Ankommen der Gotter, aber nicht so, als
werde in der Stimmung das genannte Sein der Gotter vor-gestellt. Die Stimmung stellt
nicht etwas vor, sondem sie entriickt unser Dasein in den gestimmten Bezug zu den
Gottem in ihrem So-und-so-sein. Sofem aber die Gotter das geschichtliche Dasein und
das Seiende im Ganzen durchherrschen, riickt uns die Stimmung aus der Entriickung
zugleich eigens ein in die gewachsenen Bezuge zur Erde, Landschaft und Heimat. Die
Gmndstimmung ist demnach entruckend zu den Gottem und e/nriickend in die Erde
zugleich. Indem sie solchergestalt stimmt, eroffnet sie iiberhaupt das Seiende als ein
solches, und zwar ist diese Eroffhung der Offenbarkeit des Seienden so ursprunglich, dab
9 Heidegger’s analysis o f unselfishness here could be profitably compared to his treatment o f the
mirror-play o f the fourfold in “The Thing” in which Heidegger attempts to radically rethink
identity and difference as world. Essential to such mirroring is how it simultaneously binds and
frees by allowing Earth and sky, divinities and mortals to come into their own through an event o f
relation in which each is freed into its own through the enactment o f difference. Significantly,
Heidegger conceives o f this in terms o f a “letting” that again recuperates the possibility o f what is
near being able to approach.
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wir kraft der Stimmung in das eroffnete Seiende eingefugt und eingebunden bleiben. Das
will sagen: Wir haben nicht erst irgendwoher Vorstellungen von den Gottem, welches
Vorgestellte und Vorstellen wird dann mit Affekten und Gefuhlen versehen, sondem die
Stimmung als entruckend-einriickend erdffnet den Bezirk, innerhalb dessen erst etwas
eigens vor-gestellt werden kann. (GA39, 140)
The fundamental attunement o f holy affliction, mourning yet readied, and only it, places
us at once before the fleeing, remaining away and coming arrival o f the gods. This
however does not take place as though the Being o f the gods named above were re
presented in attunement. Attunement does not representationally place something before
us, but instead transports our Dasein into the attuned relation to the gods in their being in
such and such a way. Yet insofar as the gods prevail through historical Dasein and beings
in their totality, attunement, from out o f this transport, transports us at the same time
specifically transporting us into the growing relations to the Earth, landscape and
homeland. Accordingly, fundamental attunement is simultaneously a transporting toward
the gods and a transporting into the Earth. Only by attuning in this manner does it at all
open up the being as such a being, and indeed this opening up o f the manifestness o f
beings is so original that it is by virtue o f the power o f attunement that we remain
enjoined and bound into the beings opened up. That is to say: We do not have
representations o f gods from out o f wherever whose representedness and representing we
then equip with affects and feelings, but rather attunement as a transporting toward-
transporting into opens up the realm within which something particular can first be
represented.
Although the gods in their peculiar excess can be seen to initiate the ecstatic
transport of attunement, ultimately at stake for Heidegger is the opening up of a space of
appearance that enables the gods and the Earth to come into their own through the event
of relation that takes place as the happening o f the manifesting of beings. In his later
recapitulation of this analysis, Heidegger claims that fundamental attunement “opens up
beings in their totality as a realm prevailed through [einen durchwalteten Bereich], as the
unity of a world” (GA39, 223). What however needs to be stressed is the relationship
between that unity and the originality of attunement, which is evident not only in its
priority, but in how that priority “reigns” or “prevails through” (durchherrschen,
durchwalten) an openness in which Dasein is at once implicated and fo r which it is
uniquely the site. Similar then to the formulation Heidegger falls back on in Being and
Time, the originality o f attunement emerges in the circularity or movement of ‘folding
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back on itself through which Dasein is implicated “in” (or “in the midst o f ’) the
disclosive totality of world. To review: Dasein’s being transported toward the gods and
into the Earth is the opening up of the manifestness o f beings as world. However the
opening up of the manifestness of beings as world is the context through which the gods
and the Earth first enter into relation with one another as themselves part o f the totality of
beings. Yet Dasein’s receptive vulnerability to the claim of the overpowering is what first
enables it to be opened up to the openness of beings as the happening of their
manifesting.
At this point it is helpful to recall the relation qua relation between subject and
object in Heidegger’s discussion of the holy, where what emerges is the significance of
“the between the two” of that relation (GA39, 87). For as Heidegger goes on to address in
his analysis of the demigod, the between originates relation in first creating the space that
allows beings to come into their own as what they properly are. Significantly, this
emerges in the above cited quotation in the way fundamental attunement opens up beings
“as such” where the “as” signals the structure o f disclosive implication through which,
Heidegger writes, Dasein “remains bound and enjoined into” the manifesting o f beings.
This is to say that attunement lets the manifestness o f beings happen precisely in the way
it lets beings come to appear “as such.” Counter to how anxiety was understood to
disclose the “as”-structure only by collapsing Dasein’s already having taken up the prior
disclosure of world, here Heidegger interprets the originating dimension of that prior
disclosure as world-opening: The coming to be manifest o f beings “as such” corresponds
to the way Dasein is opened up to the happening of that manifestness through attunement.
Furthermore, the way the “as” lets beings appear binds Dasein into a relational totality in
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a manner that implicates it in that totality, but also simultaneously exceeds it in rendering
it vulnerably open to that totality as a totality. Indeed, it is through such “binding and
enjoining” that the originality of Grundstimmung folds back on itself in a manner that
distinguishes it as grounding.
Dasein’s prior binding into a space of appearance is essential for following out the
notion of an original community, and thus for how Dasein’s exposure to the totality of
beings can already be seen to imply a transposure. In a passage that directly echoes his
earlier definition of original community in terms of a “preceding bond,” Heidegger
affirms, “A w orld.. .is what is originally and properly primordially opened up in advance
[das urspriingliche und ureigene im voraus Offenbare] within which first this and that
can be encountered by us” (GA39, 140-41). Here the originality of attunement is once
again indicated by Heidegger’s use of the word “in advance” to describe the structure of
disclosive implication through which Dasein is exposed to the opening up of the
manifestness of beings. However Dasein’s exposure is this time understood not in terms
o f an exclusive relation to the divine (though it is how the gods “prevail through” the
totality of beings), but is instead understood to characterize the essence of the human
being as attuned: “By virtue of the power of attunement, the Dasein of the human being is
according to its essence exposure in the midst of the openness of beings as a whole”
(GA39, 141).
In what is revealed as a significant shift from his conception of thrownness in
Being and Time, Heidegger claims that Dasein is delivered over to (iiberantwortet)
“beings as such.” While “beings,” of course, includes Dasein itself, the emphasis no
longer lies on the existentiality of Dasein’s facticity, but instead on the structure of
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implication through which Dasein will have already taken up the prior disclosure o f the
totality o f beings. The accent accordingly lies on the specific configuration (or “imprint”)
of Dasein’s exposure in the midst of beings as a whole, which will have determined in
advance Dasein’s own possibilities for disclosure by delimiting how beings can come to
appear.10 Though similar to Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, such prior
disclosure is not coincident with Dasein’s being turned away from its own death and
thereby the granting o f its absorbed access in the they. Rather, Dasein in corresponding to
how beings come to appear to it through attunement is “tasked” (aufgegeben) with the
explicit taking upon itself of its exposure through which it bears out the disclosive
possibilities of a given world. As we will see, Heidegger is interested in how such taking
up as the taking upon itself of a downgoing gives rise to a new becoming.
Heidegger’s reinterpretation of thrownness from the facticity o f Dasein’s There to
its exposure in the midst of beings as a whole enables Heidegger to positively follow out
how attunement grants an original access to others. Playing on the resonance between the
German words “aussetzen” and “versetzen,” the way Dasein is opened up and thereby
10 In a recent article exploring the connections between the »Germanien« und » D er R heim
course and Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) Tracy Colony also calls
attention to the transformative power o f fundamental attunement in relation to the reshaping
(Umpragung) o f being. He writes, “Referring to the inability o f Holderlin’s grounding attunement
to be captured in a word Heidegger states: ‘Already the fact that we cannot and may not directly
name the grounding attunement with one word means that the attunement in itself—as attuning-
attuned— [stimmend, gestimmte] is reciprocal in a sense o f being moved which is all is own
[ureigene]” (GA39, 107). The movement that takes place in this attunement is not describable in
advance because the way in which Dasein is attuned is understood to reciprocally transform its
capacity for further attunement.... This dynamic character o f transport at the core o f this
attunement was understood by Heidegger as a movement o f growing preparedness [Bereitschaft],
Heidegger describes Holderlin’s grounding attunement as, in itself, a figure o f transition, a
movement o f turning transformation which allowed attunement by the absence o f divinity to
cultivate and prepare the receptivity o f human being for the possibility o f re-opening a site o f the
mediation between the humans and the divine.” “Attunement and Transition: Holderlin and
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning),” Proceedings o f the 40th Annual North American
Heidegger Conference (Boston University, May 2006) 199.
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exposed to the manifesting of beings through attunement implies a movement of
transposure through which Dasein is simultaneously placed into relation with others
within the context of the totality of beings as a whole. Heidegger writes, “In attunement
the opening up exposure into beings happens. It is simultaneously implied that the Dasein
of the human being is in itself already transposed into the being of others, that is, only is
how it is in being together with others” (GA39, 143). Recalling Heidegger’s analysis of
sadness in the 1929/30 The Fundamental Concepts o f Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude in which attunements were understood to come over both beings and Dasein “at
once,” key here is the relationality implied by the “with” as Dasein is transported into the
unity of a disclosive whole. Dasein’s exposure to beings as a whole thus already places it
into relation with how beings come to appear as such within the disclosive totality of
world.
Abiding In Mourning
Having laid out the ecstatic movement o f attunement I want to now show how it
operates in Heidegger’s elucidation of the first two and a half strophes of the
“Germania” hymn. Returning to his sketch of the turbulence of language evident in the
successive transformations of the “who” of the poem, it is my contention that
Heidegger’s analysis of the mourning “I” is to be understood as the reinterpretation of
Dasein’s individuation in relation to its own mortality. Similar to Heidegger’s analysis in
§74 of Being and Time, Dasein is individuated in undergoing the experience of
abandonment, which this time takes place in its abiding “upon the Earth.” Though there is
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a corresponding falling away of the structures of Dasein’s prior disclosure, the key
difference is in the dissolution of the “I” in its individuation as it literally loses itself in
mourning—Dasein is not cast back on to itself but into the Earth, which, as Heidegger
reiterates, undoes all individuation. This signals a shift in where Heidegger understands
possibilities to come from (G A 39,105). To follow out this movement it is first necessary
to show how Heidegger attempts to transpose the hearer into the metaphysical locale of
the “Germania” hymn by initially suggesting that its opening word “Not them” is a denial
of the old gods only to reverse the sense of negation into an act of renunciation or refusal.
As a wanting to have but having to surrender, the conflict internal to renunciation first
opens the space for mourning by explicitly taking up the disclosivity of attunement as a
letting.
Before Heidegger even begins with his elucidation of the “Germania” hymn he is
confronted with the difficulty of not simply challenging the metaphysical conception of
mood as subjective, but of hearing Holderlin’s announcement of the flight of the gods
from a purely externalized perspective. Thus rather than a “saying along with” Holderlin
through which the individual comes to place himself into the Gewitterraum of the poem
—this initial act of transport that Heidegger himself mediates becomes the precondition
for the community that Heidegger understands Holderlin’s poetry to enact—there is the
temptation to treat the death of the gods as one would any other event. Significantly, this
comes to inflect the interpretation o f the hymn’s opening two words, “Nicht sie [Not
them]” (“Germania” 1.1), which Heidegger initially suggests are a denial or even a
repudiation (Absage) o f the old gods. In a line that introduces the key temporal
assumptions that his analysis will go on to challenge, Heidegger asserts: “That presence
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of the gods is gone [Jene Gegenwart der Gotter ist gewesen]” (GA39, 80). As a
consequence, the hymn’s opening and emphatic negation is understood as a “pushing
away” and “no-longer-wanting-to-know.”
Yet as Heidegger proceeds to elaborate (his analysis here operates in a manner
similar to his reading o f “Since we are a dialogue”), this interpretation of the “Not them”
as a denial confuses the establishment of a historical fact with the need to undergo the
distress of godlessness through which the “having been” of the old gods is brought to
bear in the experience of abandonment and the attendant dissolution of world. In a move
essential for his entire interpretation, Heidegger claims that the “Not them” is to be heard
not as a denial of the old gods, but instead as the renunciation ( Verzicht) of calling to
them. In contrast to a “not-wanting-to-know,” the negation implied in renunciation is
structured in terms of the opposition between a wanting to have and a having to give up
that retains what is surrendered through the pain and suffering that first opens up through
that tension. The way renunciation takes up by taking upon itself the absence of the
already flown gods lets that absence become available to it as an experience in the way it
first lets it be an absence.11 Thus rather than pushing the old gods away, the “I’s” calling
out o f the renunciation of calling bereaves itself from what Holderlin describes as a
“deadly-driven [tddtlichY’’ desire to “awaken the dead” (“Germania” 1.16) and what
Heidegger characterizes as “a disingenuous, ungodly proximity” (GA39, 94).
Though I address the temporality o f attunement in detail in the next section, this
bereavement as the enactment of separation takes place through the transposition o f the
11 In his article, “Heidegger’s Turn to Germanien— A Sigetic Gesture” Wilhelm S. Wurzer also
addresses renunciation, linking it the larger thematic o f refusal (both o f Being and by Being) and
silence. See Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work o f the 1930s, ed. James Risser
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 187-207.
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spatio-temporal relations of nearness and remoteness that are themselves how Heidegger
understands the gods to presence. In the conflict intoned in the calling out of a
renunciation of calling, the “I” of the poem “places [the old gods] into the distance as
something still remote in order to at the same time miss their nearness” (GA39, 81). The
false proximity created by calling to the flown gods is thereby displaced by a proximity
that is the undergoing of the experience of loss as the nearness of an absence— as the
default of what is no longer fulfilled. It is at this juncture that Holderlin’s characterization
of the flown gods as gewesen begins to emerge as essential to Heidegger’s interpretation
(“ .. .he feels/The shadows of those who have been [Die Schatten derer, so gerwesen
sind\!The old ones newly visiting the Earth”: (“Germania” 11.28-29). For in placing the
old gods into the distance in order to miss their proximity, the act of renunciation “creates
and maintains” the “being in having been [Gewesensein]'’ of the old gods. Heidegger
therefore claims that renunciation is “creative-attestive” (GA39, 94): As the enactment of
a separation, renunciation literally opens up the space for mourning by creating the
context in which the absence of the gods is undergone.
Recalling the ecstatic transport of attunement, the creative-attestive dimension of
renunciation is apparent in the further transformation of the experience of proximity as
the “I” is cast into the presencing of the absence of the old gods through mourning. This
is a key point: Renunciation opens up the space for mourning. According to Heidegger’s
analysis, such transformation takes place in the way renunciation can be seen to preserve
(bewahren) the divinity of the old gods by bringing it into its truth as something no
longer fulfilled. Heidegger however is careful to distinguish between ‘preserving’ as a
form of “hanging-onto-the-other”—which exactly betrays the dead—with a sense of
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mourning whose creativity is middle-voiced in the explicit taking up of an undergoing or
having to bear (ertragen).
This emerges most clearly in the way Heidegger understands mourning to be a
letting go and giving (a)way that nonetheless retains the relationship to the old gods
through the self-reflected relationality of its own activity. Here Heidegger’s interpretation
of the unselfishness of the holy serves as an important clue: In placing the old gods into
the distance in order to miss their proximity, renunciation does not let the old gods go in
an indeterminate manner, but rather actively gives the old gods way through a self
withholding that, as Heidegger comments, “lets them be the dead” (GA39, 94). In order
then to give way, the renouncing “I” has to hold itself back, and this holding back is the
activity of a letting go that holds to the absence of the old gods without thereby hanging
onto them—or ultimately onto itself—in their specific historical instantiation. This is
essential for following out the implicit creativity of mourning. For it is the combination
of restraint and vulnerability of this letting go, which itself can be seen to take up the
disclosive “letting” of attunement, that opens up the space for reciprocal transformation
as the “I” is abandoned to itself in mourning— is abandoned and undone.12
As Heidegger goes on to elaborate, the manner in which mourning gives way is
therefore to be understood as a receiving— ein Empfangen—whose structural
configuration bears within itself the possibility o f the arrival of new gods. (It is important
to highlight the meaning of Empfangen as “conception” given that what is arguably at
12 Although she does not address Heidegger’s treatment o f mourning in the »Germanian« und
»Der Rhein« course, Veronique Foti would object to the kind o f interpretation I put forward here,
which sets aside Holderlin’s attention to the ‘love’ or ‘tenderness’ that poetry captures as the
“pure differentiation within which what is given here and now can in every way be attended to”
(77). It is precisely this possibility o f interpretation that Heidegger’s destinal-historicalism sets
aside. See the chapter entitled “Mnemosyne’s Death, the Failure o f Mourning” in Heidegger and
the Poets: Poiesis/Sophia/Techne (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992), 60-77.
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stake in Heidegger’s analysis is “bringing a new life to the dead,” a “new life” that holds
the potential of return, reception and celebratory consummation as the gods “while” on
the Earth.) This is evident in Heidegger’s interpretation in a shift away from the old gods
to the undergoing of the experience of their divinity (Gottlichkeit) as something apart
from their historical form. As Heidegger writes,
Die heilige Trauer ist entschlossen zum Verzichten auf die alten Gotter, aber— was will
dabei das trauemde Herz als: im Weggeben der Gotter deren Gottlichkeit unangetastet zu
bewahren und sich so gerade im bewahrenden Verzicht auf die femen Gotter in der Nahe
ihrer Gottlichkeit zu halten. (GA39, 95)
Holy mourning is resolved to renounce the old gods, yet— what else does the mourning
heart want than: to preserve undi mini shed their divinity in giving away the gods and so to
hold itself in the proximity o f their divinity precisely in the preserving renunciation o f the
remote gods.
As indicated in the above quotation, the way renunciation bereaves itself from a
false proximity opens up the possibility of a different experience of nearness. It is at this
juncture that the force of Heidegger’s use of the word bewahren first becomes clear: The
act of renunciation lets the old gods be in their having been. This letting be in having
been in turn brings the divinity of the old gods into its truth by allowing it to presence as
no longer fulfilled. “That the gods have flown does not mean that divinity has also
disappeared from out of the Dasein of human beings,” Heidegger claims, “but rather it
means here exactly that it prevails, but prevails as a divinity no longer fulfilled, as a
divinity in its twilight, dark but still powerful” (ibid.). In preserving the divinity of the old
gods, renunciation holds itself in a nearness whose presencing paradoxically takes place
as the undergoing of the absence of nearness. While this absence is further revealed in the
experience o f remoteness that occurs as the “I” is abandoned, it at the same time opens up
the disclosive time-space that allows for the possibility of approach—the possibility of a
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coming arrival—in which the relations of proximity and remoteness undergo a still
further reversal as the gods pass-by.
Notably, the “I” is transported into the absence of the old gods through the
specific way it is transported into the Earth, which takes place for Heidegger through its
transposure into the waters of the homeland with which it laments:
Sie darf ich ja nicht rufen mehr, wenn aber

Ihr heimatlichen Wasser! Jezt mit euch
Des Herzens Liebe klagt, was will es anders
Das Heiligtrauemde?...” (“Germania” 1.3-6)
Not them, they I may no longer call, but if

You waters o f the homeland! Now with you
The love o f my heart laments, what else does it want in
Holy mourning?...
Consistent with his interpretation of the holistic disclosivity of attunement, Heidegger
understands Holderlin’s use of the phrase “with you” to signal Dasein’s “co-original”
transposure into attunement together with beings, “[saying] poetically something
fundamentally essential about Beyng per se” (GA39, 90). In this transposition the “I” is
opened up to hearing the lamenting waters of the homeland, and it is through its
attunement to their suffering that it experiences itself as belonging to the Earth:
Das >ich<, das da sagt, klagt mit der Heimat, weil dieses Ich-selbst, sofem es in sich
steht, sich gerade erfarht als zur Heimat gehorig. Heimat— nicht als der bloBe Geburtsort,
auch nicht als nur vertraute Landschaft, sondem als die Macht der Erde, auf der der
Mensch jeweils, je nach seinem geschichtlichen Dasein »dichterisch wohnet«. Diese
Heimat hat es gar nicht erst notig, daB Stimmungen in sie verlegt werden, weil sie gerade
stimmt, und um so unmittelbarer und standiger stimmt, als der Mensch in einer
Grundstimmung dem Seienden von Grand aus offen steht. Das In-sich-selbst-stehen der
Trauer ist ein Offenstehen dem Walten dessen, was den Menschen durchstimmt und
umfangt. Das Land liegt voller Erwartung unter dem Gewitterhimmel, die ganze
heimatliche Nature liegt in dieser herabgesenkten Umschattung. In solcher Heimat erfahrt
sich der Mensch erst als zugehorig der Erde, die er nicht einfuhlungsmaBig seinen
Stimmung dienstbar macht, sondem umgekehrt: aus der ihm erst erfahrbar wird, daB es
mit der vereinzelten Ichheit, die sich zuerst allem gegeniiberstellt, um es nur als
Gegenstand von seinen Gnaden zu nehmen und seine Erlebnisse einzufuhlen, nichts ist
(GA39, 86).
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The “I” who speaks here laments with the homeland because this ‘T ’-self, to the extent it
abides in itself, precisely experiences itself as belonging to the homeland. Homeland—
not as mere place o f birth and also not as an only familiar landscape, but rather as the
pow er o f the Earth upon which human beings ever according to their historical Dasein
“poetically dwell.” This homeland does not at all need attunements to be placed into it
precisely because it attunes, and attunes all the more immediately and enduringly when
the human being stands open to beings from the ground up in a fundamental attunement.
The abiding-in-itself o f mourning is a standing open to the prevailing o f that which
thoroughly determines and encompasses human beings. In such a homeland the human
being first experiences him self as belonging to the Earth, which it does not place in the
service o f its moods according to its feelings o f empathy but rather the reverse: from out
o f the Earth the human being first experiences that he with his individual I-ness, which he
chiefly places over against everything only to take it as an object o f his favor and to feel
his way into his experiences, is nothing.
Although the key notions o f ground and abyss are first thematically developed in
Heidegger’s later treatment of the Earth in the change over from mourning to readiness,
they are nonetheless implicit in the experience of belonging that first opens up as Dasein
comes to be abandoned by the old gods.13 The transport as transposition that takes place
as the “I” undergoes this abandonment attunes it to the revolt of the Earth disclosed in the
lamenting waters of the homeland—the rivers Rhine, Danube, Neckar poetized in
Holderlin’s great river hymns—which Heidegger claims has become “pathless [weglos]"
with the flight of the gods (GA39, 93). The “I ’s” belonging to the homeland and to the
Earth is thus disclosed only in the peculiar withholding of ground undergone in the
13 Miguel de Beistigui also highlights this connection between the gods and the Earth when he
writes: “The Grundstimmung can be said to reveal something about the poem as a whole, not as
an object o f literary investigation, but as the site in which a historical awr/destinal configuration
comes to gather itself. Specifically this gathering is twofold: spatial, first o f all, in that the flight
o f the gods has forced upon man a different relation to the earth, to his dwelling upon it, and
hence to what is called the Heimat and the Vaterland (the homeland and the nation), in which
man’s historical dwelling finds its particular existence; temporal, also, in that the Grundstimmung
that emanates from the poem is the expression o f more than just a duration o f a mood, or even o f
a life-time disposition: it comes from before the actual ‘I’ o f the poet o f its hymn and points far
beyond the time o f its own existence” (99). However in addressing only mourning, de Beistigui
fails to carry through on the way holy affliction is fully realized only in the experience o f a
readied awaiting through which the twofold spatial and temporal gathering touched on above
undergo a still further transformation as the change over in attunement inaugurates the “w e.” See
“The Free Use o f the National” in Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias (London: Routledge,
1998)94-100.
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experience of homelessness as the Earth becomes the site of mere habitation or temporary
settlement (Siedlung).14 Curiously, then, the self-withdrawal of the Earth later developed
by Heidegger as the locus of inexhaustible possibility withdraws itself into the
dimensionless availability of what is essentially rootless.
The experience of belonging that comes to the fore through the withholding of
ground is important for understanding Heidegger’s reiteration of words having to do with
“standing” or “abiding” (standhalten): the “I” abides in mourning, in this abiding it
stands open to beings “from the ground up,” and finally such abiding-in-itself is its
standing open to the prevailing that constitutes it as human. Though the “I’s” belonging
to the homeland is initially revealed in its homelessness, its standing open creates the
disclosive space in which a new grounding—and consequently a new binding and
enjoining of a world—first becomes possible.
This emerges in the internal connection between the “I’s” abiding in mourning
and its fidelity to the Earth as Heidegger turns to Holderlin’s next use of the word “I” in
the “Germania” hymn. For coincident with its transposition into the lamenting rivers, the
“I” is cast into a landscape that appears hypersaturated and “sunken down as in hot days”
(“Germania” 1.8). In the excess indicated by Holderlin’s enjambed repetition of the word
“full” (the land lies “full of expectation,” and is encircled by the shadows of a sky “full of
intimation” and “full of promises”), the gods prevail in a foreboding through which the
14 Michael Zimmerman includes a helpful discussion o f the Earth, tying it into both Heidegger’s
references to physis in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course and “The Origin o f the Work of
Art.” As Zimmerman writes, “The second meaning o f earth, the ‘native ground’ o f a historical
Volk, also pertains to the issue o f whether the work o f art, specifically poetry, ‘uncovers’ the
shapes o f things or ‘fashions’ those shapes. ...This native ground, in Heidegger’s view, contains
the ‘destiny’ o f a people. Earth involves what a Volk can become” (123). See the chapter
“Holderlin and the Saving Power of Art” in H eidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity:
Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 113-33.
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Earth comes to be manifest as uncannily threatening in its desolation. Significantly, the
“I” undergoes this threat as the temptation to flee backwards to the past and to the old
gods, which it resists in its decision to abide by the waters of the homeland: “yet I will
remain [bleiben] by them” (“Germania” 1.11). Here the “I” can be seen to take up not the
absence of the old gods, but its own decision to let go and give way; it remains by the
rivers and so upon the Earth precisely by abiding in mourning.
As a consequence, the “I’s” remaining is to be understood as a kind o f self-
grounding, but a self-grounding that allows the giving way of its own ground as the “I” is
transported into the Earth. Directly parallel to the way the originality o f attunement was
seen to fold back onto itself, such self-grounding takes place as the opening up o f a
context of relation. Referring here to the pathlessness of the Earth, Heidegger claims that
the lamenting rivers “tear the entire land toward [entgegenreifien] the awaited gods,” an
insight further articulated in the statement that the determinacy of mourning “grasps a
footing in the land [fafit Boden im Land] and places this awaitingly under the threatening
sky” (GA39, 93). It is thus only through the “I ’s” remaining that the gods and the Earth
are drawn into relation with one another. Or better, come to “counter” one another in the
opening up of a space o f encounter into which Dasein is bound in its dwelling poetically
upon the Earth.
In what proves a critical transition point in Heidegger’s analysis, the “F s”
decision to remain beside the lamenting waters is further expressed in what this time
emerges as the “I’s” apparent indeterminacy in which it “will” neither deny the flight of
the old gods nor bid the arrival o f the new ones (“Germania” 11.19). (Heidegger’s
tracking o f the word “will” here as the underlying tension o f a self-restraint that “lets” or
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“allows” for a self-transformation should be read as preliminary to his later meditation on
Gelassenheit.) Significantly, the “I’s” affirmation of its decision to abide in mourning is
announced at the beginning of the second strophe not in the taking hold of a new ground
but in the dissolution of the communal structures that enjoin and order world:
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. (“Germania” 11.19-22)
For when its over, and the day extinguished

The priest is the first to be struck, but lovingly
The temple and the image and also his cult
Follow him to the dark land and none o f them may now shine.
According to Heidegger, it is in this passing away o f world that the “I” undergoes its
“most profound abandonment” as it literally comes to lose itself in mourning. The “I ’s”
apparent indeterminacy thus heralds its own imminent redetermination as the oscillation
of attunement intensifies immediately prior to changing over from the modalities of
awaiting and persisting to an active readying that prepares the Earth for the arrival of the
new gods.
Suggestive of the disclosive structure of ambiguity whose happening relies on a
peculiar redoubling, Heidegger interprets this abandonment in reference to “us doubters
{uns Zweifelnden]” who are doubly-oriented in being situated between the having been of
the old gods and the possible arrival of the new gods. It is important to stress that the
sense of doubt here is in no way aligned with an epistemologically motivated skepticism,
but is instead to be understood as a moment o f suspense or even caesura as the disclosive
unity that has determined the “I” comes undone. This is apparent in Holderlin’s sudden
shift to an “us” through which the dissolution of world can be seen to coincide with the
further transformation of the who of the poem as Dasein is exposed and transposed anew
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through the change of attunement. In what I interpret as one of the key junctures for
following out the larger stakes of his analysis o f the “Germania” hymn, Heidegger writes:
Im Zweifeln wird die tiefste Verlassenheit ausgedauert, und in ihr gerade kommt der
Einzelne als Einzelner mit seiner Sonder- und Eigennot zum Verschwinden. Je
ursprunglicher die Fragwiirdigkeit des Daseins erfahren und gesagt wird, um so echter ist
es ein stellvertretendes Sagen fu.r alle. Jetzt, wo auch der Einzelne in seinem bestimmten
Bezug zu bestimmten Gottem verlassen ist, wo nur noch das Bewahren der Gottlichkeit
der entflohenen Gotter bleibt, da versinkt das >ich<, und das Sagen ist ein Wort des
>wir<. (GA39, 101)
The most profound abandonment is endured in doubt, and it is precisely in doubt that the
special and idiosyncratic needs o f the individual as an individual come to disappear. The
more originally the questionability o f Dasein is experienced and said, the more genuinely
does it become a representative saying for all. Now, where the individual is abandoned in
the determinacy o f its particular relation to particular gods, where what only remains is
the preserving o f the divinity o f the flown gods, there the “I” sinks away and the saying is
a word o f the “we.”
As the above quotation indicates, there is a paradoxical relationship between the
experience of individuation that takes place as the “I” is abandoned and the undoing of
that individuation. On the one hand, the “I’s” taking the flight of the old gods upon itself
in renunciation enacts a separation through which the “I” bereaves itself o f a false
proximity. In releasing the old gods the “I” is abandoned to itself precisely in being left to
mourn their absence. On the other hand, however, this same letting also allows the “I” to
take leave of itself in preserving the divinity o f the old gods. It is thus not only abandoned
to itself but abandons itself in the resoluteness through which it gives way to the giving
way of mourning as the undoing of ground. (Interestingly, one of the idiomatic uses of
the verb “versinken” used in the above quotation is to be “submerged in grief.”)
Consequently, in letting go of its attachment to the old gods the “I” at the same time lets
go of the attachments that have determined its specific configuration as an “I.”
Here it is helpful to draw out this difference with Heidegger’s analysis of
Dasein’s relinquishment (Uberlassenheit) to the overpowering of death in §74 of Being
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and Time (SZ 384; BT 351-2). For although the “I ’s” experience of abandonment
individuates it in a manner that once again excludes “chance elements” in the passing
away of a world, in the context o f the »Germanien« und »Der Rheim course such
individuation occasions the “I ’s” own dissolution as it is transposed into the Earth. This is
evident in Heidegger’s revision of the originality of death and is essential for
understanding how Heidegger addresses the aporia between death and community—
individual fate and common destiny—in Being and Time. Instead then of being cast back
onto itself through the collapse of the always prior disclosure of world, Dasein is
transported into the Earth, which as Heidegger emphasizes, undoes everything individual
through its own self-withdrawal—whence the “I’s” experience of its “individual I-ness”
as “nothing.” In letting go of the determinate relations through which the old gods
prevail, the “I” thus at the same time lets go of the structures of disclosive implication
that have determined it as an “I.”
This marks a significant departure from Heidegger’s conception of the non-
relationality of death, and is essential for understanding how he addresses the aporia
between death and community through the emergence of what he here terms a
“representative saying.” As Heidegger’s reconceptualization of the structure of Dasein’s
thrownness indicates, the experience of Dasein’s mortality is not strictly speaking non
relational. Rather, it takes place precisely through the experience of Dasein’s belonging
to the Earth as it laments “with” the rivers, even as that belonging is configured in terms
of the withdrawal of ground and consequently the “I’s” own vanishing. Returning to the
notion of relation implied by a disclosive totality, it is important to stress what is at stake
here. For the “I” is transported into the Earth as the context in which it experiences its
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mortality in mourning the flight of the gods. In contrast to Being and Time, the
overpowering in the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course is configured specifically in
terms of the divine, and it is precisely in mourning the death of the gods that Dasein is
first placed upon the Earth as the context in which it undergoes the experience of its own
mortality. The experience of individuation that occurs as the “I” is abandoned is the
precondition for the undoing of that individuation through which the “I” is reattuned as a
“we.” Let us now turn to how Dasein is transported anew into the divine through the
change over of attunement.
Readiness and the Turn in Temporality
While the temporal dimension of the gods’ presencing was intimated in
Heidegger’s analysis of mourning, it is first thematized in the change of attunement
revealed through the transformation of the “I” into a “we.” The transposition into the
other announced by the phrase “us doubters” is thus further expressed in the shift in tone
from lament to the pressingness of an imminent arrival that, curiously, already seems to
have occurred. As Holderlin writes:
...Erffihlt
Die Schatten derer, so gewesen sind,
Die Alten, so die Erde neubesuchen.
Denn die da kommen sollen, drangen uns, (“Germania” 11.27-30)
...H e feels
The shadows o f those who have been,
The old ones, visiting the Earth anew
For those who are to come, press on us,
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In what emerges as a pivotal line for understanding the anachronistic temporality of
original community already touched on, Heidegger asserts that the change in attunement
is announced in the turning around of temporality (die Umkehrung der Zeitlichkeit) as
mourning oscillates and finally swings into readiness. In this turn around, the having been
of the old gods comes toward “us” from out o f the future as “already pressing” (GA39,
103).15 Though the old gods “visiting anew” is in one sense a return, it is a return that
within the context of this temporal reversal precedes and conditions the reception of the
old gods as new—as the coming of new gods. The gods’ coming again thus takes place
proleptically as a coming before that in turn—literally, as the articulation of this very
turning—precedes and conditions the “we” as a “we.”
To clarify this point it is necessary once more to highlight the creativity at issue in
how mourning preserves the having been of the old gods. As Heidegger explains, the turn
in temporality is prepared for—but not thereby effected—in the persistence with which
the “I” abides in mourning. Directly parallel to how it tears the land against the sky,
Heidegger understands the “Fs” abiding to “bear forward [nach vom e tragen]” the
divinity of the old gods where this “bearing forward” projects their having been into the
future. The enactment of separation that occurs as the “I” bereaves itself thus not only
15 Though he suggestively points to it rather than developing it in detail, Dominque Janicaud is

explicit in connecting Heidegger’s destinal-historicalism to what he also terms the “politics o f
expectancy”: “Destinal historicalism has two sides: setting-into-work and the reserved future. Our
understanding o f it would be incomplete, and in a way stunted, if we did not take into view its
ultimate and most secretive feature which animates it from within: the expectancy o f the god.
Initially the link between the expectancy o f the god and the political question seems inexistent.
But a more careful examination reveals, on the contrary, that here fundamental thought leads to a
renewed meditation on time as well as on the historicality o f the German people and the entire
Western world” (94). See The Shadow o f That Thought trans. Michael Gendre (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1996), 94-98. The connection between expectancy and what,
following Heidegger, I develop as a turn in temporality needs to be elaborated in a more thorough
manner than what I do here.
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allows the presence of the old gods to be missed, but simultaneously opens up the space
for their possible approach as the coming arrival of new gods. Consequently, the way
mourning preserves the divinity of the old gods as unfulfilled allows them to presence as
the coming toward of what has been from out o f the future.
This is evident in the further transformation of the spatio-temporal relations of
nearness and remoteness. Thus where mourning first opens up the space for absence by
bereaving itself of a false proximity, the nearness that occurs in readiness encroaches or
“presses.” It is thus distinguished by its experience as an “already” or “in advance” in
which the traditionally metaphysical causal sequence of cause followed by effect is
reversed or “turned around” as Dasein is situated between the having been of the old gods
and the future arrival of the new gods. Understood as a happening, presencing is thus not
static but rather the back-and-forth movement of an oscillation in which (to track this out
also graphically)
the absent nearness of what has truly been is reversed into

the pressing remoteness of what is yet to come is reversed into
the coming of what has just been missed is reversed into
the departure of what has only now arrived.
In what Heidegger delineates as “original time” (GA39, 109), these chiasmic reversals
allow for the possibility of return where—reminiscent o f Nietzsche’s gateway o f the
Moment in Thus Spoke Zarathustra—return implies an always returning anew.
While Heidegger can no doubt be seen here to be reworking the temporal ecstases
of Being and Time, and in particular the structure of destiny as the coming o f what has
been from out of the future, the internal relation between the gods’ excess and the ecstatic
transport of attunement complicates this analysis. For as the example o f the poets shows,
the overpowering proximity of the gods cannot be undergone in its full presence. As a
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consequence, it is registered precisely in the moment o f temporal reversal, which is to
say, precisely in the moment in which mourning changes over into readiness as
attunement befalls or overtakes Dasein.
Anticipating his analysis of the “last god” in the Contributions to Philosophy
(From Enowning), Heidegger conceives this reversal in terms of a passing-by, which is
revealed as the sudden revelation of “a moment” whose presence is signaled temporally
in the experience of its just having passed. Citing the line from the hymn, “Conciliator,
you that no longer believed in ...,” “But when a time is past [vorbei], they know it”
(GA39, 111), Heidegger writes: “Passing does not mean here: perishing, but rather
passing-by, not remaining, not enduringly standing there in its presencing, but instead
according to the matter at hand: presencing as coming to have been, coming to be present
in a coming pressure” (GA39, 111). As Heidegger’s language indicates—passing-by is a
“not remaining,” a “not standing there” (my emphasis)—the fleeting transitoriness of the
turn in temporality as “a scarcely graspable hint” is to be specifically placed against the
way Dasein remains and abides in bearing out the ecstatic oscillation o f attunement,
which is here understood to temporalize.
To return to what I earlier referred to as the proleptic aspect of this temporal
reversal, the “I’s” bearing forward of the having been o f the old gods creates the context
in which the “I”/“we” first comes to be situated in time. Indicative o f the root meaning of
prolepsis as a “receiving beforehand,” this takes place namely in the anticipatory
dimension of readying as it remains and thereby stands open to the coming to pass of
what has been, a coming to pass that also implies a historical downgoing as Dasein bears
out the ecstatic back-and-forth oscillation of attunement. However, this coming to pass is
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indicated in Heidegger’s analysis in the disclosive structure of the “already”— or what
Heidegger will refer to as the “always new”—in which the normal causal sequence of a
“before” followed by an after is transposed. Hence the meaning of prolepsis in rhetorical
analysis as a type of anachronism; the “after” thereby comes to precede the before in the
opening up o f the disclosive space of the “in advance,” which both conditions and
enables precisely in the way it “lets.”
This temporal transposition is evident in Heidegger’s analysis of the beginning of
the third strophe of the “Germania” hymn in which the “we’s” transposition into the
Earth appears in the already greening fields of the homeland:
Schon griinet ja, im Vorspiel rauherer Zeit

Fur sie erzogen das Feld, bereitet ist die Gaabe
Zum Opfermal... (“Germania” III.33-5)
Already, in the prelude o f a rougher time

Cultivated for them, the field grows green, prepared
Are offerings...
Thus, where the mourning “I” is transported into the gods in being transported away from
them and into the lamenting waters of the homeland, in the change over of attunement the
“we” is transported into the Earth, which it “cultivates” and “readies” as a sacrifice for
the coming gods. Here it is helpful to recall a line from Holderlin’s “The Ister” hymn,
“The rock needs cuts/and the Earth needs furrows.” Similar to how the coursing of a river
scores the Earth, the act of cultivation makes the paths that become the context for a
uniquely human dwelling—paths that have been effaced or withdrawn with the flight of
the gods. While Heidegger reiterates a series of points that restate structural insights
developed in his analysis of mourning—readiness “abides” (standhalt) in the pressure of
the pressing gods, as a fundamental attunement it “prevails and thoroughly determines”
beings in their totality (GA39, 103)— his interpretation o f the Earth as homeland is
144
notably expanded, especially as it pertains to what it means for Dasein to “stand open to
beings from the ground up.”
Anticipating Heidegger’s analysis of the 7?z/?-structure in the “Origin of the Work
of Art,” this is evident in the way Dasein’s remaining tears the gods and the Earth into
relation. Thus where the “I ’s” abiding in mourning is understood to tear the land against
the gods, the “we’s” abiding in readiness creates the context in which the gods tear into
the Earth through the cuts and furrows that create time as history. (My claim, then, is that
the “I’s” belonging to the Earth initially appears in the withdrawal of ground.) What is
significant here is the shift from the withdrawal of ground to the role the abyss (Abgrund)
plays in the event of grounding. As Heidegger writes, “Insofar as the Earth becomes
homeland, it opens up the power of the gods. Both are the same and include a third
aspect: That the Earth itself is tom open [wird aufgerissen] in its ground and abysses in
the storm of the gods” (GA39, 105). Although Heidegger does not fully develop this
point—it is in fact formative for his interpretation of the betweenness of the demigods—
it is this “third aspect” that first gives open the relation between the gods and the Earth.
Citing “Mnemosyne” (“ .. .Not capable/of everything are the Heavenly Ones. It is namely
mortals/Who reach into the abyss. Thus it turns [es wendet\FW\ih these ones” (IV.225)),
Heidegger claims that Dasein’s belonging to the Earth is to be understood specifically as
its belonging to the abyss that the Earth bears.16 The temporal turning that is to mark the
new becoming of the German people is thus grounded—though in a sense revealed to be
16 Although the “Germania” hymn refers to the Earth as the “Mother o f all” and as the “hidden”
or “obscure one” (die Verborgene) bearing the abyss (V: 76-77), Heidegger does not really
develop Holderlin’s language here until he offers his topology o f the origin in his reading o f the
“Rhine” hymn. In that analysis “Mother Earth” is identified as the “unbounded abyss” and as
“birth.” See §19a) and b).
145
radically contingent—in how the abyss becomes available only through the mediation of
human mortality.
As Heidegger elaborates in his analysis o f the “Rhine” hymn, the Earth as the
“grounding abyss” is to be understood as “concealment in its original sense, closedness of
the womb that lets [everything] sink away” (GA39, 242). Consequently, the abyss that
the Earth bears is understood by Heidegger in his topology of the origin as “birth.” As a
withholding or concealment, this birth does not itself bear but instead gives birth as the
quivering (erzittem)— or more aptly, the quickening—of possibilities. As such, it is
persistently characterized by Heidegger in terms of its darkness, confusion, and, most
importantly, its being unbound (ungebunden). In cultivating the Earth (Holderlin’s use of
the word erzeugen here is important as it suggests both a witnessing and an engendering
captured by Heidegger in statements such as the human being is “the witness [Zeuge] o f
Beyng” (GA39, 61)), the “we” becomes the context through which the gods can first
reach into the withdrawal of the Earth. In other words, it is human beings’ belonging to
the abyss in their mortality that allows both the power of the gods and the Earth to open
up; it is in the “we’s” bearing the abyss that the gods and the Earth come into their own in
the way they stand open and counter to one another.
The notion of a ground, and in particular a historical ground, is essential to this.
For the oxymoronic formulation of a ‘grounding abyss’ implies the acknowledgement of
the contingency of ground, which, in contrast to Being and Time, is interpreted in terms
of the withdrawal of the Earth as the site o f all emergent possibility. The act of binding
that takes place as Dasein is enjoined and bound into the space of appearance of world is
thus not an act of self-grounding that becomes reified in its abiding, but is rather
146
constantly tom into the experience of its mortal finitude, which, as Heidegger makes
clear, is evident precisely in the sinking away of ground as this gives rise to an “always
dawning new becoming” (GA39, 105-06). In contrast then to the withdrawal o f ground
that characterized mourning, Dasein’s abiding is a relational happening that first allows it
to come into its own as historical, but binds Dasein to a ground whose own contingency
constantly comes to the fore in the enactment of that grounding.
While Heidegger’s analysis of holy affliction is intended to set up Holderlin’s
reception of the eagle’s sending o f language and therefore serves as the “internal hinge”
that organizes Holderlin’s poetry and other writings around the prophetic vision
articulated in the “Germania” hymn, his analysis more narrowly lays out what he calls the
“time of the people.”17 Thus while Heidegger’s language of a passing away-passing by
that gives rise to a new becoming may initially seem Hegelian, it is important to locate
the sense of dissolution or vanishing with respect to the ecstatic transport of attunement
in relation to both the gods and the Earth. In contrast then to a reversal that cancels out as
it takes up, Heidegger claims that the experience of abandonment undergone in mourning
“can as little disappear and be replaced” as the persistent awaiting already intoned in
renunciation (GA39, 103).
This is helpful for understanding what Heidegger means by the phrase “holy
affliction,” for it is in the tensed and intensifying temporal oscillation of attunement that
Dasein comes to be uniquely located within time. In what Heidegger characterizes as the
“original movedness of attunement” (ureigene Bewegtheit der Grundstimmung), Dasein
17 Following out this moment exceeds the scope o f what I’m doing here. It is in fact clear,
however, that Heidegger’s interpretation o f the “Germania” hymn is building toward the eagle’s
giving to Germania the “flower o f the mouth”— language— which is taking place as “the man” is
looking toward the wide-open valleys and rivers o f the homeland. “The man” is, according to
Heidegger, Holderlin receiving the sending o f a destiny.
147
is cast between what has been and what is yet to come, a betweenness that is preliminary
to, yet prepares for, the reception of its destiny finally realized in the equaling out of time
between past and future. This is apparent in a series of passages that indicate that at issue
in Heidegger’s analysis is precisely the possibility of a new becoming as the people is
situated in the middle or center o f time. In the oscillation of attunement as it undergoes its
temporal reversal, Dasein is thus put into the position of the “always new”— an “always
new” that designates its openness, through which Dasein undergoes the experience of
time precisely as the movement of its own being in becoming.
Heidegger’s brief but important remarks on Holderlin’s theoretical piece,

18
“Becoming in Dissolution,” serves as an important clue in this regard. In this essay
Holderlin elaborates the “peculiar reciprocal relation” between the way in which the
downgoing of the Fatherland, nature, and the human resolves itself in reality through its
own disintegration and so builds up a “new world.” Echoing Holderlin’s terminology,
Heidegger describes such downgoing as a “historically distinctive moment,” for what is
being worked out is the structure of possibility from out of what Heidegger, directly
echoing Holderlin, refers to as the “inexhaustible.”
18 Fran^oise Dastur also calls attention to the significance o f “Becoming in Passing Away” though
in the context o f Heidegger’s 1941/42 lecture course, Holderlins Hymne »Andenken« (GA52,
§41). As Dastur writes in also commenting here on “The Anaximander Fragment,” “Indeed,
epochality characterizes ‘the essence o f time as thought in Being, ’ that is, that becoming without
a subject that Heidegger names destining, o f which we find the first mention in Holderlin’s essay
to which Heidegger alludes briefly in his course o f the summer o f 1941-41 (GA52, 119). It is
only on the basis o f what Nietzsche called the ‘innocence’ o f becoming, that is to say, on the
basis o f a conception which no longer sees the temporal realization o f the atemporal in history,
that tme eternity can be thought: it is not at all the permanence o f a subsisting being but, on the
contrary, the enigmatic constancy o f the withdrawal itself, which appears in the suddenness o f the
instant, in the sudden flash o f the coming into presence” (67). See Heidegger and the Question o f
Time trans. by F ran cis Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999) 67-
69. As I would continue, this “flash” designates the passing-by o f the gods as a “scarcely
graspable hint” that the poet preserves in language. Thus the moment o f temporal turning as the
to coming to pass o f the gods is revealed through the disclosure o f the Earth as Heimat, which is
cultivated as a sacrifice for their arrival.
148
Although Heidegger does not explicitly make this move within the context o f the
»Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course (he does so later in such works as the “Origin of
the Work of Art”), it is my contention that there is an internal connection between the
movement of downgoing and becoming and Heidegger’s characterization of the abyss of
the Earth in which all grounds disappear—a disappearance in which “everything always
finds itself in the dawning of a new becoming” (GA39, 106). In the harmonic opposition
of attunement, Dasein is located “upon the Earth” as the context in which it holds open
the very structure of emergent possibility in the radically contingent enactment of
grounding that takes place through the mediation o f its own mortality as it reaches into
the abyss. The way the ecstatic transport of attunement binds and enjoins the Earth as the
site of all emergent possibility in its self-withdrawal thereby establishes a grounding, but
a grounding that remains at root insubstantial and radically finite. It is thus the assertion
of ground against this unboundedness that allows such binding to be efficacious. This, in
turn, orders and enjoins as the becoming of possibility at the same time it reveals the
contingency of the act of grounding through the disclosure o f Dasein’s own mortal
finitude. Here it is helpful to juxtapose Heidegger’s reference to the uncreated abyss to
the polysemy of the words “unerschopft” and “unerschdpfliche,” which mean not only
“inexhaustible” but also “what is uncreated.” The sense o f self-enclosedness and
withdrawal that allows the birth o f possibility is the self-withholding of the Earth as the
very site of possibility—a withholding that lets possibilities emerge at the same time that
letting is the withholding of, as Heidegger writes, “all emergent happening.” It is in
abiding upon the Earth as the abysmal ground of Dasein’s mortality that the people
becomes who it is as historical through the disclosure of the Earth as homeland.
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CHAPTER FOUR SYNOPSIS
The Poet As Destiny
While Chapters Two and Three addressed the aporia between language and death
by considering respectively Hblderlin’s mediation of language and the Earth as the
abyssal ground o f both mortality and community, this chapter takes up more directly
what it means for Holderlin to be a destiny. Heidegger first addresses the notion of
destiny in his interpretation of the “Rhine” hymn, identifying it as a fundamental word
for Holderlin. Consistent with his use of the term in Being and Time, Heidegger defines
destiny as sovereign power that determines the way of being o f what stands under that
power. In order, however, to elaborate the notion o f destiny, Heidegger again returns to
the configuration of possibility that structures the “between.” In what emerges as a
decisive revision in how Heidegger understands Dasein’s historical possibilities to be
disclosed, the “between” in the »Germanien« und »Der R heim course is situated not by
the ends of natality and mortality but instead by the creativity of the demigod, who as
both river and poet founds the limits that allow for fitting relation. It is as demigod that
Holderlin is a destiny.
To follow out how Heidegger conceives the “between,” it is first necessary to
understand the internal connection between his interpretation of the “Germania” and the
“Rhine” hymns, a connection that later serves to establish Holderlin as demigod by
extending and further complicating Heidegger’s analysis of hearing. As is evident in his
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Chapter Four Synopsis
reading of the “Germania” hymn, Heidegger understands the mourning “I” to be
transposed into the lamenting waters of the homeland, which have become “pathless”
since the flight of the gods. Heidegger interprets this reference to the lamenting waters to
point toward Holderlin’s great river hymns, serving as the “inner hinge” between his
reading of the “Rhine” and, later, “The Ister” hymns. Significantly, Heidegger claims that
this inner connection is evident in the way that the “Rhine” hymn can be seen to further
articulate the ecstatic relation between the gods and the Earth at stake in holy affliction.
Thus where the “Germania” hymn discloses fundamental attunement by way o f a
movement of exposure as transposure, the “Rhine” hymn takes up fundamental
attunement as a “fundamental posture” through its layered meditation on such being
between the gods and the Earth, which is explored in the hymn by way of the Rhine river,
the poet, and finally the series o f transpositions that establish the river as poet and the
poet as river.
Although Heidegger in his analysis of the first strophe calls attention to different
figurations o f the between—for instance, the “I” of the poem is situated at the threshold
of the forest where he unsuspectingly apprehends “a destiny”—this fundamental posture
is expressed in Strophe X of the “Rhine” hymn with the poet’s “thinking the demigods.”
As Heidegger states, the poet thinks the demigods as himself a demigod. Moreover, such
thinking is understood not only to anticipate Heidegger’s own thinking, but to in fact
necessitate the dialogue between creators through which Holderlin’s poetry is
anticipatorily realized.
While the notion of the demigod has philosophical precedent through Plato’s
Symposium (and indeed Holderlin makes indirect reference to the Symposium in the
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“Rhine” hymn), Heidegger’s conception of the demigod’s betweenness marks a
significant departure from Plato. For the between here is situated not in terms of the
human and the divine as already given in their being, but is instead understood as a
“creative projection.” Rather than being located within the space of such difference,
Heidegger claims that the demigods’ betweenness is a “thinking in difference”; it is, in
other words, such thinking that first gives or originates difference. As a consequence,
thinking the demigods initially founds the limit between the human and the divine by
establishing the relationship between them that allows each to come into its own through
mortals’ dwelling poetically upon the Earth.
Heidegger’s characterization of the demigod as a creative projection signals not
only an important departure from the metaphysical conception of the between put
forward by Plato, but from his own conception of thrownness in Being and Time. This is
essential for further clarifying how the work of art—and poetry in particular—first opens
up the “as”-structure. In contrast to Being and Time in which attunement was directly tied
to the disclosure of Dasein’s thrownness (revealed through the “how” of Dasein’s having
already taken up this thrownness as determinative o f its possibilities), in the
»Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course Heidegger asserts that Dasein is not just
thrownness but also projection, explicitly linking these paired notions to how destiny
apportions. Key here is the displacement of the projective structure of understanding to
the projective disclosure of relation through the world-opening dimension of attunement,
as outlined in Being and Time. The creativity o f the demigod’s betweenness thus lies for
Heidegger precisely in the projective disclosure o f the “as”-structure through which
possibilities first come to appear as possibilities.
152
To highlight this contrast it is helpful to consider how in Being and Time the prior
disclosure of world delimits possibility by “letting” beings come to appear always already
in accordance with the “as”-structure. In his status as a creative projection, the demigod
first opens up the space of such accordance—understood by Heidegger in terms of
correspondence as dialogue—which in turn determines how beings as a whole come to be
manifest. Where such letting was seen to cover over the disclosive space of world in
Being and Time, the demigod as the privileged site of correspondence in difference holds
open world by founding the limits that allow beings to come to appear as what they are.
In this manner the demigod binds together beings as a whole, and binds it together in a
way that itself constitutes the unified totality of world.
This interpretation of the demigod as limit-founding guides Heidegger’s analysis
of the countertuming of the Rhine river in relation to its divine origin as it turns against
that origin. Notably, Heidegger understands such countertuming to disclose destiny as the
movement through which one becomes who one is as captured by Holderlin in the line,
“For/how you begin, so will you remain.” In its path the Rhine river can be seen to
initially rush away from its origin in the Alps before turning against the origin in an act of
hostility only to finally “rest” or “while” in building the German land.
Heidegger’s analysis of this countertuming is critical for following out the
transformation of the demigod’s relation to limits as one of errancy and transgression to a
“free binding.” To follow out this transformation and its connection to the becoming of
destiny, it is necessary to understand the relationship between the demigods and
Heidegger’s initial articulation of the structure of need and use (Brauch). This emerges in
153
Heidegger’s comparative analysis of Holderlin’s two versions of Strophe VIII of the
“Rhine” hymn in which the gods are understood to experience human suffering
vicariously. In the final version of the hymn, Holderlin writes that the gods need and use
an other—this will be the demigod—to feel something of themselves, as the gods’
blessedness closes them off from such feeling. That is to say, the gods need the
experience of pain and suffering to feel themselves as gods, which in turn opens up
Dasein to the letting manifest of beings through attunement to which it is vulnerably
exposed.
As Heidegger tracks out through his analysis of the “Rhine” hymn, the gods’ need
and use creates the context in which the demigod river actively undergoes the experience
of what it means for it to be limit-setting. This initially takes place in the Rhine river’s
errant relation to limits, which according to Heidegger’s analysis is directly tied to the
demigod’s divine endowment or heritage. Through the gods’ need and use, the demigod
is subject to a divine excess that drives it to transgress limits, ultimately compelling it to
turn against its divine origin in the attempt to undo the inequality that situates it as
between and therefore radically other in relation to both the human and the divine.
In this countertuming hostility the demigod Rhine can be seen to explicitly take
up its relation to the origin. But because such excess is itself derived from the gods,
Heidegger understands the demigods to “shatter” against the gods’ need and use, and the
gods to “smash apart” those whom they use in order to feel themselves. According to my
interpretation, the shattering and smashing of this structurally asymmetrical violence
154
reasserts the difference between the human and the divine by, on the one hand, bringing
the demigod into his limits as mortal through such use, and on the other, allowing the
gods to feel precisely through the reassertion of mortality and difference.
While such shattering and smashing creates the context in which the demigod is
first brought into his limits, Heidegger goes on to claim that the demigod first becomes
actively limit-setting in turning against his own compulsion to turn against his divine
origin. This is evident in the way the notion of discipline as an inner restriction binds
itself to what is unbounded in a way that both actively delimits it and lets the unbounded
appear as the context against which limitation is originally asserted. Such outer and inner
restriction allows the possibility of poetic dwelling through the creation of a context that
takes up the relationship to the origin in the way the river can be seen to abide alongside
the origin in both remaining in its place and flowing away—a movement through which it
thereby becomes.
Although Heidegger’s interpretation of the demigod focuses primarily on the
Rhine river, the transposition of the poet into the river through a sympathetic hearing
makes clear that his analysis is to be extended to Holderlin and even to Heidegger
himself. Through this transposition Holderlin is to be understood as demigod, river, and
destiny. It is at this juncture that Holderlin’s mediation of fundamental attunement as
language again becomes important. For it is as the enactment of this mediation that
Holderlin is used (and used up) by the gods through the founding o f an attunement whose
ecstatic disclosivity is uniquely poetic in exposing human beings to the divine in
transposing them into the Earth. The poetic hearing that situates Holderlin as a between is
thus both disclosed and concealed through Holderlin’s founding invention o f the German
155
language. Hearing Holderlin therefore implies the happening of holy affliction through
which the people is transposed into the between—upon the Earth and alongside the
origin—as the context through which they become who they are by “poetically dwelling
upon the Earth.”
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CHAPTER FOUR
The Poet as Demigod
The Poet As Demigod
Der Strom aber ist nicht ein Sinnbild fur die Halbgotter,
sondem er ist er selbst, wie er das Land als Land und als
Heimat des Volkes stiftet. Dieses Wohnen und Dasein
des Volkes aber ist, sofem es ist, dichterisch. In der
Dichtung setzt es urspriinglich seiner Geschichte Bahn
und Grenzen. Das ist das Wesen des Stromes. Dieses
Stromen ist als Entsprungensein des Ursprungs
Reinentsprungenes.
Der Strom ist Strom, der Halbgott ist Halbgott, der
Dichter ist Dichter. Aber Strom und Dichter gehoren
beide in ihrem Wesen zur Stifitung des Wohnens und
Daseins eines geschichtlichen Volkes. Strom und
Dichter sind dasselbe in urspriinglicher Zugehorigkeit
zum Wesen des Seyns, sofem es als Geschichte and
damit auch als Natur im engeren Sinne erscheint.
(GA39, 259-260)
The river is not a symbol for the demigods, but rather it

is a demigod itself in how it founds the land as land and
as homeland o f the people. However this dwelling and
Dasein o f the people is, insofar as it is, poetic. In poetry
the path and limits o f its history are originally set. That
is the essence o f the river. This streaming is as the
having sprung forth o f the origin o f what has purely
sprung forth.
The river is river, the demigod is demigod, the poet is
poet. But river and poet both belong in their essence to
the founding o f the dwelling and Dasein o f a historical
people. River and poet are the same in original
belonging together to the essence o f Beyng such that it
appears as history and with that also nature in its more
narrow sense.
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The Poet As Demigod
In her opening exchange with him in Plato’s Symposium, Diotima chides Socrates for his
inability to conceive of eros as something “in between” what is beautiful and what is ugly, what
is divine and what is human. Still untutored in the ways of desire, Socrates operates in terms of a
logic o f opposition that prevents him from understanding the nature of philosophy as something
daimonic, that is, as something itself in between the divine and human realms. Eros in Diotima’s
genealogy is not a god but a demigod: He is at once the progeny of his divine and clever father
(Poros) and his mortal and impoverished mother (Penia). This means he knows just enough to
desire immortality—just enough to desire the self-sufficiency of Being as without need or lack—
and yet is limited by the incompleteness of his existence as mortal. Such lack as the very
operation of desire guides human beings toward the divine through the ascending steps of
Diotima’s ladder, which culminate with the sudden vision o f the Beautiful. Through the
contemplation of that vision, the lover o f wisdom transcends his mortal limits by participating in
the divine and so, for a time, is completed. As Diotima remarks to the young Socrates, “if any
human being could become immortal, it would be he” (212B).1
1 Plato, Symposium. Translated with introduction and notes by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989. Heidegger does not make direct reference to the Symposium in his
reading o f the “Rhine”, though my interpretation argues that this serves as the implicit background o f his
analysis o f the demigods. In my cursory review o f the English-language scholarship on the “Rhine”
hymn, commentators have not explored this connection but have instead emphasized what has been
understood as Holderlin’s reference to Socrates in the closing scene o f the Symposium: “But a wise
man/was able/from midday well until midnight/And on until morning lit up the sky/To keep wide awake
at the banquet [Gastmahl or symposium], “The Rhine, XIV:206-09. Heidegger cites these lines toward
159
The Poet As Demigod
This is not how Holderlin sees things in his river hymn “The Rhine,” which responds in
part to the Symposium and which Heidegger takes-up in his 1934/35 lecture course, Holderlins
Hymnen »Germanien« und »Der Rheim. Contrary to the vision presented in Diotima’s speech,
mortals do not desire to transcend the limits of their mortality. Rather, it is the gods who, sated
with their immortality, need and use (braucht) human beings to feel something of themselves; it is
the gods who seek out the limit of mortality as self-difference and otherness in order to undergo
themselves as gods. Holderlin knows he’s skirting blasphemy. Indeed, Heidegger claims that with
this insight Holderlin has gone beyond metaphysics and climbed up onto the “steepest and most
isolated peak of Western thinking: Beyng” (GA39, 269). Here I take up Heidegger’s inaugural
insights into “Being’s need”2 through his reappropriation of the demigod as a between
(Zwischen). Where Platonic metaphysics regards the demigod as the site o f the transcendence of
the limit of mortality, Heidegger’s interpretation of the countertuming course o f the Rhine river
attempts to found this limit anew as the originating difference between gods and human beings.
The steps o f the ladder in Holderlin’s poetry do not lead upwards, but go always down, toward
an Earth made fecund for dwelling by paths cut by demigod rivers and poets as they inscribe the
limits that mediate divine descent. To conclude this analysis, I briefly consider how Heidegger’s
reconceptualization of the between also marks a shift in the locus of creativity from Diotima’s
the close o f the lecture course in order to position him self as the demigod thinking. See GA39, 286.
2 To the extent o f my research so far, I believe that this is Heidegger’s first reference to need in the sense
later developed in both An Introduction into Metaphysics, Holderlin's Hymn “The Ister, ” “The
Anaximander Fragment,” and What is Called Thinking?. While the connection between Heidegger’s
interpretation o f the countertuming course o f the Rhine river and the countertuming violence o f techne is
quite apparent, it would be interesting to read Heidegger’s subsequent analyses o f Being’s need against
what I articulate here.
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The Poet As Demigod
“giving birth in beauty” to the demigods’ enactment of self-limitation and otherness as disclosive
of poetic dwelling.
Divine Excess
To clarify the structure of need, it is essential to review Heidegger’s interpretation o f the
contrasting depictions of the gods as blessed (selig) in Holderlin’s two versions o f Strophe VIII
of the “Rhine” hymn:
Final version Draft
VIII Es haben aber an eigner Denn irrlos gehn, geradeblikend die

Unsterblichkeit die Gotter genug und bedtirfen Vom Anfang an zum vorbestimmten End’
Die Himmlischen eines Dings, Und immer siegerisch und immerhin ist gleich
So sinds Heroen und Menschen Die That und der Wille bei diesen.
Und Sterbliche sonst. Denn weil Drum fuhlen es die Seeligen selbst nicht,
110 Die Seeligsten nichts fuhlen von selbst, Doch ihre Freude ist
Muss wohl, wenn solches zu sagen Die Sag and die Rede der Menschen.
Erlaubt ist, in der Gotter Nahmen Unruhig geboren, sanftigen die
Theilnehmend fuhlen ein Andrer, Femahnend das Herz am Gliike der Hohen.
Den brauchen sie; jedoch ihr Gericht Diss lieben die Gotter; jedoch ihr Gericht.....
Ist, dass sein eigenes Haus
(G A 39,270)
Zerbreche der and das Liebste
Wie den Feind schelt’ und sich Vater und Kind
Begrabe unter den Trummem,
Wenn einer, wie sie, seyn will und nicht
120 Ungleiches dulden, der Schwarmer. (GA39, 268)
3 In translation, the two versions o f this strophe read:
Final version Draft
But o f their own For they proceed without straying, looking straight
Immortality the gods have had enough, and if From beginning to predetermined end [ahead
The heavenly require one thing, And ever victorious and forever hence is
It is o f heroes and human beings Deed and will the same for these ones.
And other mortals. For since Therefore the blessed ones do not themselves feel it,
The most blessed ones feel nothing o f Yet their joy is
Another, if to say such a thing [themselves, The saying and speech o f human beings,
Is permitted, must, I suppose, Bom restless, intimating from afar they soothe
Vicariously feel in the name o f the gods Their heart from the happiness o f the high ones.
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The Poet As Demigod
As Heidegger elaborates in his analysis of these two versions, Holderlin’s initial version o f the
“Rhine” portrays the gods’ blessedness as the consequence of the harmony between deed and
will. Always in accord with themselves both through time and in their actions, the gods
“therefore [drum]” do not feel (“The Rhine,” VIII: 109). They thus take joy in the restlessness of
human beings, and in particular, human speech. As Alkinous comments in Homer’s Odyssey and
whom Holderlin surely has in mind in this passage, the gods “spin” mortality as the stuff of
story.4 In this early version of the “Rhine” hymn, blessedness is the result of undifferentiated
self-relation, and insensibility or lack o f feeling is the result of blessedness. Holderlin’s
subsequent revision of these lines is interpreted by Heidegger to depict the striking
transformation of this very structure. Where the draft portrays blessedness as the consequence of
the gods’ insensibility, the final version reveals it to be the cause of their insensibility; it is
“because [we//]” the gods are blessed that they do not feel rather than the opposite. The shift
from consequence to cause points up Heidegger’s formative insight into the structure of need as
originating: No longer conceived as benign and distant, blessedness is understood as the ‘‘ground
of an extreme contrariness [Widerwendigkeit]” as the gods are compelled to use human beings in
order to feel anything at all (GA39, 271). Blessedness becomes, according to Heidegger’s
interpretation, the ground of the gods’ need.
Him they use; but their rule This the gods love; yet their rule....
Is that he shall shatter his
Own house and curse the most beloved
Like an enemy and under the rubble
Shall bury father and child,
If one wants to be like them, and not
Tolerate unequals, the fanatic.
4 As Alkinous remarks after inviting Odysseus to tell his story at the end o f Book Eight o f The Odyssey,
“That is the gods’ work, spinning threads o f death/through the lives o f mortal men,/and all to make song
for those to com e...” (VIII: 649-51). Translated by Robert Fagles with Introduction and Notes by Bernard
Knox. New York: Penguin, 1996.
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This contrariness is announced in the opening lines of the final draft o f Strophe VIII as
the gods’ having had enough (genug) of their own immortality. As the manifestation of what
Heidegger characterizes as an “excessive sufficiency” (Ubergenugen), blessedness cuts the gods
off from all relation, including relation to themselves. In contrast to Holderlin’s earlier draft of
the hymn, it is not simply that the gods do not feel, but lacking the self-difference and
incompleteness of mortality that would open them up, the gods do not feel themselves as gods.5
As Heidegger writes in comparing the two drafts, ‘The final version says it strongly and
essentially: ‘they [the gods] feel nothing of themselves.’ Indeed, overfullness closes them off
from beings. Yet this highest self-sufficiency and enclosedness from out o f overfullness is the
ground for the fact they need and use [brauchen] an other” (GA39, 271-2). Having had enough
of always being enough, the gods’ excessive sufficiency paradoxically becomes for Heidegger
the locus for the creation of difference as the gods are driven into relation with “an other” (“The
Rhine,” VIII: 113)— this will be the demigod—to mediate their own self-relation. From out of
the paradox of this reflexive excess, the gods’ blessedness literally recoils onto itself in order to
ground itself through the insufficiency of mortal existence where it undergoes a movement o f
differentiation as the demigods turn against the gods’ blessedness in an act o f hostility. I will
return to develop this point through Heidegger’s interpretation o f the countertuming course of
the Rhine river in relation to its divine origin.
Here it is helpful to draw out the contrast between Heidegger’s analysis and the
mediating force of eros in Plato’s Symposium, which is similarly derived from an insight into the
5 Heidegger makes this point still more explicit in H olderlin’s Hymn “The Ister “To the extent that they
feel, they feel themselves as gods” (GA53, 195; HHI, 199). Translated by William McNeill and Julia
Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Heidegger returns to Strophe VIII from the “Rhine”
hymn in this lecture course to contrast the two rivers’ respective relationship to the origin. Interestingly,
where the Rhine hurries southwards away from the origin, it is the Ister (Danube) that discloses the
attunement o f holy mourning in its hesitation to abandon the origin. See in particular Chapter 25.
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structure of need. Constrained by their incompleteness, mortals for Diotima desire to go beyond
the limits of their mortality toward the self-sufficiency of the divine. What mortals want is what
the gods have as their way o f being: the self-completion of immortality that, in placing the gods
beyond the limits of both death and desire, places them beyond need.6 While clearly addressing
itself to the Symposium, the final version of the “Rhine” hymn inverts the ascendingly
transcendent structure of desire in its depiction of the gods’ blessedness. Because it excludes all
relation, the gods’ self-completion amounts for Holderlin to the self-enclosure of an unbounded
surplus. What the gods lack then is precisely the experience o f lack, which would open them up
to feeling themselves through the insertion of self-difference and otherness. In this inversion, the
gods’ needlessness becomes the very basis of need, which is understood by Heidegger not as
insufficiency but as excessive sufficiency; the gods’ lack is their excess. This, I believe, marks
what Heidegger takes to be Holderlin’s radical departure from the conceptual framework of
metaphysics inaugurated by such texts as the Symposium'. The gods’ need is the articulation of
excess as it turns against itself in order to ground—or better, to gift—its overfullness through the
mediation of finite Beyng (endliches Seyn). Need as excess thereby displaces need as lack as the
vehicle or medium through which difference and relation are created.
The Demigod As Between
Where Plato’s theological prejudice assumes the difference between the human and the
divine, Heidegger’s analysis of the demigods seeks to show how this difference is enacted as a
6 As Diotima says in drawing out the sense o f eros as a guiding force, “if you don’t think you need
anything, o f course you won’t want what you don’t think you need” (Symposium 204A). She then goes on
to claim that Socrates has misunderstood love’s ‘betweeness’ in conceiving it “perfect and highly blessed
[makariston]” (ibid.).
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difference. The default of the gods in the present historical epoch thus transforms how the
demigods may be understood in the way it relocates the claim of the divine from desire to need,
that is, in the way it relocates how the difference and relation can themselves be thought. As
Heidegger remarks on what he identifies as the “Rhine” hymn’s pivotal line, “Halbgdtter denk’
ichjezt [demigods I now think]” (GA39, 163), the divine and the human are not first given as
separate, rather their difference first comes to be delimited by the demigods as a “rupture”
(Einbruch) or “breach” (Bresche). Situated always in terms of their self-difference, Heidegger
claims that the demigods are a “creative projection” (ein schdpferischer Entwurf) that first opens
the possibility of the divine and the human by disclosing the difference between them. In contrast
to Plato, the between here is not a gap to be filled in through the transcendence o f mortal
limitation, but becomes the site for the originating enactment of difference as limitation.
According to Heidegger’s analysis, the demigods’ creativity emerges in Holderlin’s
founding of a style of thinking that departs from the logic of opposition that characterizes
metaphysics. Reading the phrase “Halbgdtter denkerT transitively,7 Heidegger interprets this
thinking as the opening up of a direction of questioning that points simultaneously toward the
human and the divine: In going toward the divine, thinking demigods places into question the
nature o f human being. It thinks beyond-humans ( Ubermenschen). Yet in challenging the gods in
the self-enclosure of their blessedness—a challenge itself provoked by the gods’ need and use of
the demigod—thinking demigods falls short o f the gods’ essence as a secret (Geheimnis). It
7 Heidegger’s interpretation o f the transitivity o f this line allows him to establish that Holderlin is thinking
the demigods as himself a demigod. In hearing the Rhine’s suffering as it springs forth from the origin
into unconcealment, the poet stands in a sympathetic (Mitleiden) relationship to the demigod; he is
literally attuned to the between. (See Chapters 12d and 14b.) For a reading o f what Heidegger here terms
the “hearing o f the poet,” see Jacques Derrida’s discussion o f the “Rhine” hymn in “Heidegger’s Ear:
Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV),” translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. Reading Heidegger:
Commemorations. Edited by John Sallis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 163-218.
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thereby also thinks lesser-gods (Untergotter). As the posing of a “double-question,” the
transitivity of Halbgdtter denken relocates understanding relation from a thinking o f difference—
thinking the “o f ’ is one of Diotima’s key points to Socrates— to a thinking in difference. For
where the “o f ’ presupposes the distinction between the human and the divine in order to then
mediate between them, the “in” is concerned with the event of differentiation itself. It is, as
Heidegger writes, a “limit-founding” thinking8:
Nach den Halbgottem fragen ist das ent-scheidende Fragen im strengsten Sinne des Wortes, weil
in ihm erst die Unterscheidung von Menschen und Gottem zur Frage wird und das Denken im
Unterschied als einem solchen erst FuB faBt (Unterscheidung = Grenze stiftend). Halbgdtter
denken — solches Denken bewegt sich gerade nicht in einem Zwischenbereich mit AusschluB der
anderen Bereiche (Menschen und Gotter), sondem im Gegenteil: dieses Denken stiftet und bricht
auf den Bereich des Seyns uberhaupt. (G A 39,167)
To ask about the demigods is de-cisive questioning in the strictest sense o f the word because only
in it does the difference between human beings and gods first come into question and thinking in
difference as such first gain its foothold (difference = limit founding). Thinking demigods— such
thinking precisely does not move in a between realm to the exclusion o f other realms (human and
gods), but rather the opposite: this thinking founds and breaks open the realm o f Beyng per se.
Where Plato’s interpretation of the demigods reifies the limit between the human and the
divine by making them definitionally exclusive, Heidegger seeks to recover the creativity
implicit in the event of limitation itself. As his earlier analyses o f being-toward-death make clear,
mortality is not statically given, but needs to be taken up in its possibility through which it is
‘completed’ in a sense importantly different than what Plato intends in the Symposium. Rather
than conceive the demigods in terms of a logic of opposition, the between for Heidegger is
originating in the way it gives difference: The demigods do not exclude the human and the
divine, because they first open their possibility in the way they place them into question. Neither
8 In his article “The Telling o f Destiny: Holderlin’s ‘Der Rhein,”’ William McNeill explores how the poet
in Holderlin’s the “Rhine” hymn is positioned both spatially and temporally in an in-between or liminal
way. McNeill argues that such between opens the poet to being able to apprehend a destiny. See Poetizing
the Political eds. Helen Chapman, Will McNeill, and Anthony Phelan (Warwick: Center for Research in
Philosophy and Literature, 1993).
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divine nor human, both divine and human, Holderlin’s demigods are in between in an entirely
new way, a status that, as we shall see, makes them ontologically unlocatable.
It might be objected that while Heidegger reappropriates the structure of the demigods’
betweenness, he nonetheless presupposes the human and the divine. Which is to say that while
Heidegger understands himself to depart from metaphysics through his conversation with
Holderlin, he nonetheless succumbs to his own theological prejudice. However this objection
misses the force of what it means for the demigods to be a creative projection itself necessitated
by the flight of the gods and the attendant revolt of the Earth as the site o f human dwelling, a
point implied in GA39 in the ordering of the “Germania” and the “Rhine” hymns.9 As Heidegger
elaborates in his discussion of “making-possible” at the conclusion of the 1929-30 lecture course,
The Fundamental Concepts o f Metaphysics, the irruptive dimension of the between is to be
understood as the opening up of the possibility of possibility.10 Although projective in going
beyond both the actual and the possible narrowly defined, making-possible takes place
determinately through an “as” that restricts and freely binds it:
Aber dieser Entwurf ist nun auch— als Bildung des Unterschiedes von Moglichem und
Wirklichem in der Ermoglichung, als Einbruch in den Unterschied von Sein and Seiendem,
genauer als Aufbrechen dieses Zwischen— dasjenige Sich-beziehen, in dem das >als< entspringt.
Denn das >als< gibt dem Ausdruck, dafi iiberhaupt Seiendes in seinem Sein offenbar geworden,
jener Unterschied geschehen ist. Das >als< ist die Bezeichnung fur das Strukturmoment jenes
urspriinglich einbrechenden >Zwischen<. (GA29/30, 530-31)
Yet— as the forming o f the distinction between possible and actual in its making-possible, and as
irruption into the distinction between being and beings, or precisely as the irrupting o f this
9 Heidegger makes explicit that the “Germania” hymn is to be understood as the continuation and further
articulation o f the ecstatic relationship between the gods and the Earth opened up in the attunement o f
“holy affliction, mourning yet urgent.” Thus where the “Germania” hymn founds this attunement, the
“Rhine” hymn takes it up in the fundamental posture (Grundhaltung) o f “thinking demigods” (GA39,
164). The demigods as a creative projection emerges as a possibility only in response to the flight o f the
gods.
10 Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
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‘between’—this projection is also the relating in which the ‘as’ springs forth. For the ‘as’
expresses the fact that beings in general have become manifest in their being, that that difference
has occurred. The ‘as’ designates the structural moment of that originally irruptive ‘between.’
(FCM 365)
In opening the possibility of the distinction between the human and the divine, “thinking
demigods” relocates difference and relation to the event of disclosure in which mortals first come
to appear as mortals and gods as gods. I want to suggest that in their self-difference the
demigods are for Heidegger the site in which the “as”-structure is articulated in a privileged
sense. For in exceeding and falling short of the human and the divine simultaneously, the
originating betweenness of the demigods determines how each comes to be disclosed in its
possibility in such a way that it can be taken up as a possibility.
This projective springing forth of the “as”-structure in turn transforms the sense of
mediation at play in the between as daimonic. Where Diotima understands the demigod to be a
kind of messenger who shuttles between the human and the divine realms in conveying the
sacrifices and commands that bind the two into a whole {Symposium 203A), in Heidegger’s
interpretation the demigods’ mediation takes place through the bindingness of the “as”-structure
itself. In their betweenness, the demigods are the site in which the human and the divine co-
respond (Ent-sprechung) to one another, but co-respond to one another in how they come to
appear as different (GA39, 173-74). This is key: The sense of relation at stake in the demigods’
binding into a whole is not subsequent to the manifestation of difference, but is instead located in
it as the disclosure of beings as a whole. This is to say that the demigods’ mediation happens in
the event of disclosure itself as the projective opening up o f determinate possibility. Though
Heidegger in the larger context of the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course is undeniably
concerned with the possible arrival of new gods, he is still more concerned with the possibility of
the mortal, which is to take place in Holderlin’s poetry through the revelation of the Earth as
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Heimat, in which revelation mortality and community are realized simultaneously as the binding
condition of one another.
The relocation of the demigods’ mediation to the event o f disclosure signals Heidegger’s
attempt to think the creativity of the between non-metaphysically as what is ultimately at stake in
his analysis of the “Rhine” hymn. As those the gods need and use, the demigods are “other” in
what Heidegger characterizes as an “equivocal sense” (GA39, 280): Beyond human but less than
gods, the demigods are neither human nor divine even as they are both human and divine.
Invoking the figure of Dionysus, who in the masking play of presence and absence is the
“demigod par excellence,”11the eventful equivocality o f the demigods’ otherness grounds the
distinction between the human and the divine. Heidegger thus claims that the Beyng of the
demigods is “the suffering o f itself [Leiden seiner selbst],” is “passionate suffering [Leiden-
schaft]” (GA39, 175). As the hyphenation of the word Leiden-schaft indicates, suffering as an
experience of limitation is creative. The demigods as a between are situated always by their
difference to that other side of themselves; they are, so to speak, always other to their other. In
co-responding to both the human and the divine, the demigods actively undergo their own self-
difference as an experience of limitation. The enactment of limitation as the suffering o f self
limitation founds the difference between the human and the divine by creating the context in
which each is bound into its proper limits by way o f the demigods’ mediation. The demigods’
creativity is to be located, then, not in the transcendence of self-difference, but in the
11 The most important demigods for Holderlin are the trinity o f Dionysus, Heracles, and Christ. While
Dionysis is obviously the demigod most intimately related to the poet, Heracles is part o f Holderlin’s
inheritance o f Pindar’s victory songs. And it is Heracles who is key for understanding the exchange o f
hospitality that guides Heidegger’s interpretation o f Sophocles in H olderlin’s Hymn “The Ister. ’’ (See
§23a.) I believe that the significance Heidegger attaches to the demigods as suffering the difference
between the human and the divine prevents him from engaging the figure o f Christ in Holderlin’s poetry,
whose redemptive suffering precisely effaces this difference.
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transformative suffering of self-difference as the work o f founding limitation. I will return to this
point in my concluding remarks on poetic dwelling.
The equivocality of what Heidegger describes as the demigods’ Anderssein (otherness,
being other) creates still a new manifestation o f otherness, which goes beyond the way Socrates
is presented as atopos or “out of place” in the Symposium. The site in which the “as”-structure is
articulated, the betweenness of the demigods cannot be located in terms o f either the human or
the divine because as a creative projection the demigods first open up the possibility of this
difference. Such unlocatability is evident in Holderlin’s designation of the demigod as the
“strange one” at the conclusion of Strophe X of the “Rhine” hymn: “ .. .how shall I name the
strange one [den Fremden]T’ (GA39, 278). Heidegger understands this strangeness as an
indication of the demigods’ “lawlessness [gesezlos],” where lawless does not mean illegal but
“gesetzunbediirftig”—the demigods are not bound by the requirements o f the law but are instead
positioned uniquely outside it as limit-founding. In the unlocatablity of their creative otherness,
the demigods are sacrificed to the event of differentiation itself evident in Heidegger’s
interpretation as their ontological homelessness: The demigods cannot both ground the event of
difference that allows beings as a whole to come to appear and be accommodated within that
“as.” Put otherwise, the demigods cannot ground themselves within what they themselves are the
ground for. To more clearly elaborate the problematic nature of this founding, I want now to turn
to Heidegger’s interpretation of the demigod Rhine river, whose countertuming flow reveals the
internal connection between the gods’ need and the demigods’ otherness.
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Lack As Excess
Heidegger’s complicated analysis of the course of the Rhine traces the movement through
which the demigods are brought into their limits in an act of hostility (Feindseligkeit) directed
against the gods. In corresponding to the turns of the Rhine river, the strophes o f the “Rhine”
hymn are understood to literally enact the drama of otherness as the demigods are compelled by
what Heidegger identifies as their “divine lack” (Gottes F eh l) to exceed not only the human but
the divine. In the progression of the hymn’s opening strophes, the demigod Rhine’s lack is
thereby revealed in its errant relation to limits. As Holderlin writes in Strophe III, “yet for those
ones [the demigods] is the lack [Fehl] that they don’t know where to go” (“The Rhine,” IE: 44-
45). Referring to the line “until God’s lack helps [bis Gottes Fehl hilftY from Holderlin’s poem,
“The Poet’s Vocation,” Heidegger interprets “FehF as a kind of hamartia; it is a “missing the
mark” that Heidegger ultimately attributes to the gods’ need and use o f the demigods. The stress
thus lies not on Gottes Fehl, but on Gottes Fehl: Lack is an indication not of the god’s absence,
but is instead understood as the endowment (Mitgift) of the demigods’ divine origin:
»Fehl« heiBt nicht >Fehlen< im Sinne der Abwesenheit, Fehl heiBt auch nicht >Fehler< im Sinne
des blofien Mangels und Makels. Fehl meint Ver-fehlen. Darin liegt ein Treffenwollen und damit
die vorgreifende Bindung an das Zielgebende. Aber dieses Ver-fehlen ist kein Nichterreichen im
Sinne des Nicht-hin-kommens, des Zuriickbleibens vor dem Ziel, sondem Verfehlen im Sinne des
Uber-schieBens, des Uber-Dranges, und zwar nicht einmalig, sondem als Haltung. Der Fehl— das
Verfehlen aus Uberfiille und Uber-MaB, das von den Gottem her die Halbgotter iiberfallt. Daher
kann der Fehl genannt werden: Gottes Fehl, die tiberschieBende Verfehlung aus dem UbermaB
der von den Gottem tibertragenen Bestimmung. (GA39, 236)
“Lack” does not mean ‘lacking’ in the sense o f absence; lack also does not mean ‘mistake’ in the
sense o f simple deficiency and shortcoming. Lack means missing the mark. Therein lies the will
to strike home and with it the anticipatory being bound to what gives the goal. Yet this missing
the mark is no non-attainment in the sense o f not going forth or lagging back before the goal,
rather it is a missing the mark in the sense o f overshooting, o f overurgency, and indeed not once,
but as posture. Lack— missing the mark out o f overfullness and excess that seizes the demigods
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from the direction o f the gods. Lack can therefore be designated: God’s lack, the missing the
mark that overshoots from out o f the excess o f determination that is borne over by the gods.
As Heidegger’s repeated use of the prefix Uber- indicates, the demigods’ lack corresponds to the
gods’ excess as the expression of “overfullness.” In being placed under the claim of the divine,
the gods’ own excess is “borne over” onto the demigod Rhine where it undergoes a movement of
differentiation as the river turns against its divine origin. Through this transfer, the structure of
excess and lack that underlies the gods’ blessedness is both reduplicated and inverted: Where the
gods experience excess as lack—as the need for difference and self-limitation that allows them to
feel—the demigods experience lack as excess. They are, according to Heidegger’s interpretation,
compelled to violate limits in the attempt to become unbounded or self-same. I want to briefly
trace out the Rhine’s errant course before turning to a more detailed analysis o f this point.
According to Heidegger’s interpretation, the demigod Rhine’s compulsion to violate
limits is disclosed at each stage of its flow as it springs forth from its origin in the Alps, rushes
southwards toward Asia, only to break off at Chur, Switzerland, to return to “calmly move in the
German land” (“The Rhine,” VI: 85). Although the river at its inception is still “fettered” by its
concealment in the Earth, as what has sprung forth (das Entsprungene) it is repeatedly
characterized by its youthful impatience. The excessive pressure that allows the river to emerge
into unconcealment is thus understood by Heidegger to simultaneously drive it away from the
origin, threatening the river with the danger of desolation as it wildly streams away. Yet as
Holderlin writes in Strophe VI, a god “spares” the Rhine its “hurried life” through the imposition
of boundaries that literally “hem” it up against the Alps, which serve as the “forge” that gives the
river shape. In his rearticulation of the structure of destiny, Heidegger interprets such sparing as
an indication of how the origin has already sprung out in advance of the river’s flow by
“throwing itself against the uninhibited springing free of what has sprung forth” (GA39, 263). By
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leaping out ahead of the river, the demigod Rhine’s origin restricts the excess in its springing free
through the imposition of an external constraint that disciplines its flow. It thereby limits the
river both at its beginning and its end, and so ultimately transforms the sense of the river’s
freedom from the unboundedness of its “wanting only itself’ to the boundedness o f its creative
self-limitation. This allows the river to “build” (“The Rhine,” VI: 87).12
The imposition of an external and absolute restriction compels the redirection of the
demigod river’s excess. In what Holderlin describes as its “daring,” the demigod Rhine’s divine
lack is channeled from its hurried flowing away back toward the origin as it strives to become
“equal to the gods” (“The Rhine,” VII: 102-04). In this countertuming, the river attempts to leap
out of its restriction by leaping back into the unboundedness of the origin, a move Heidegger
identifies with the Asiatic conception of destiny that Holderlin himself works through in his
Empedocles fragments (GA39, 215). In seeking to become equal to the gods, the demigod river
attempts to undo the inequality that constitutes its own otherness. The errancy of the river’s
knowing no limits is thus here cast back onto itself in an act of hostility evident as the irruption
of a counterwill directed against the gods: “The counterwill against the origin is however the will
to transgress the limit of the original inequality. The hostility, which presences in what has
purely sprung forth itself, drives it in daring and boldness against the gods and in contempt o f the
paths of human beings. That is the Beyng of the demigods” (GA39, 267). In their divine lack, the
demigods for Heidegger are compelled not only to go beyond the limits o f human beings as
Ubermenschen, but to turn their excess against the gods themselves. They do not so much fall
121 am translating Bandigung and Unbdndigkeit in a way that emphasizes its root meaning o f “binding.”
In contemporary usage, bdndigen generally means “to tame” or “subdue.” While this translation nicely
conveys the sense o f disciplining at stake in limitation, fails to convey the sense in which limits bind.
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short of the divine, but attempt to outstrip them on the grounds that the gods themselves supply
as the equivocal endowment of an only partly divine nature. And in the unbounded excess
revealed by the errancy of their missing the mark, the demigods disclose the claim of the divine.
As Heidegger’s adoption of the term Feindseligkeit suggests, the demigod Rhine’s
hostility is directed against the gods’ Seligkeit or blessedness. In their daring, the demigods turn
against what the above quotation calls the “original inequality.” That is, they turn against the
excessive sufficiency that underlies the gods’ need, which creates the demigods as other in order
to then use this otherness to mediate the gods’ own self-relation. Anticipating the strife between
techne and dike in An Introduction to Metaphysics, the gods’ blessedness not only necessitates the
demigods, it necessitates their violent transgression o f limitation as the very context in which the
gods’ use is realized:
Die Strophe beginnt ganz erhaben— ganz Holderlin und als sei nichts vorausgegangen— mit dem
Sagen von den Gottem. Weil diese in ihrer Seligkeit nichts fuhlen von selbst, muG ein Anderer
teilnehmend fuhlen, damit iiberhaupt in solchem Fuhlen das Seiende als solches sich eroffnet.
Diese Anderen sind die Halbgdtter. Die Seligkeit der Gotter ist der verborgene Gmnd der
Notwendigkeit des Seyns der Halbgdtter. Dieses Seyn aber ist Feindseligkeit, ja Verwegenheit
gegen die Gotter. Der Ursprung dieses Aufruhrs ist die Seligkeit der Gotter. Hiermit erreicht das
Sagen des Dichters die innigste Widerwendigkeit im Wesen des Seienden im Ganzen. (GA39,
269)
The strophe [strophe VIII] begins quite sublimely— thoroughly Holderlin and as if nothing
preceded it— with the telling o f the gods. Because in their blessedness the gods do not feel
anything o f themselves, they must participate in the feeling o f an other so that in such feeling
beings as such are opened up at all. These others are the demigods. The blessedness o f the gods is
the hidden ground o f the necessity o f the Beyng o f the demigods. Yet this Beyng is hostility,
indeed daring against the gods. The origin o f this revolt is the blessedness o f the gods. At this
juncture the saying o f the poet attains the most intimate contrariness in the essence o f beings as a
whole.
As Heidegger’s analysis of the revision of Strophe VIII makes clear, the non-relationality o f the
gods’ excessive sufficiency turns counter to itself in order to ground itself through the creation of
need, which violates the gods’ nature as needless even as it allows them to feel their self
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sameness. The demigods’ hostility against the gods reveals the asymmetry implicit in this event
of self-grounding evident in Heidegger’s assertion that “the blessedness of the gods is the hidden
ground [emphasis added] of the necessity o f the Beyng of the demigods.” For in their need and
use o f the demigods to mediate their own self-relation, the gods’ excess is transferred over onto
the demigods where it is concealed in the errancy of their divine lack. In its daring, the demigod
Rhine thus turns against the way the gods’ blessedness has turned against itself in order to
differentiate its excess through the mediation of the demigods’ otherness.
This crossing-over of the demigods’ countertuming hostility with the extreme
contrariness o f the gods’ blessedness creates the context in which the demigods are actively
brought into their limits as limit-founding. While the reflexive excess of the gods’ having had
enough o f always being enough is originating in the way it necessitates the demigods, on their
own the gods cannot ground the event o f differentiation that enables them to come into their own
as gods. The gods instead “require” (bediitfen) the demigods’ transgression of the original
inequality of the divine to complete the differentiation of their excess. In what Strophe VIII
characterizes as “their rule,” the gods’ need and use compels the demigod to “shatter his own
house” (“The Rhine,” VIII: 116). In seeking to leap out of the experience of self-difference and
inequality, the demigods turn against the very nature of their mediation as equivocally other. It
is, however, through such turning against that the demigods enact their mediation. Heidegger
articulates this as a redoubled violence as the demigods and the gods undergo the event of
differentiation that brings them into their proper limits: “On account of their divine origin the
demigods must shatter [zerbrechen] in their daring, and the gods themselves must crush
[.zerschmettem] those whom they use” (GA39, 273). Though internally related, Heidegger
understands the experience of limitation to be differently inflected for the demigods than for the
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The Poet As Demigod
gods. In the hidden excess of their errancy, the demigods’ hostility recoils back onto itself as
they run up against the limit that their compulsion to violate limits is precisely the means the
gods use to differentiate their own excess. Corresponding to this, the gods encounter the limit
that their needlessness itself necessitates the demigods’ otherness in violation of their own nature
as self-complete. In the asymmetrical violence of this shattering and smashing, the gods use the
limitation of the demigods’ creativity to ground how need is itself creative in originating
difference. Through this redoubled experience of limitation, the gods’ excess undergoes for
Heidegger a movement of differentiation as the demigods are actively brought into the limits of
their otherness in falling short of the divine. The radical finitude of the demigods’ suffering their
own self-limitation allows the gods to feel themselves as gods—to feel themselves as blessed—
through the reassertion o f the original inequality between the human and divine.
Creativity As Self-limitation
The violence of the demigods’ shattering creates the context in which the demigod Rhine
learns to become actively self-limiting, and it is only through this transmutation of external
limitation into internal limitation that Heidegger understands the river itself to create limits. For
although the Rhine’s countertuming allows it to take up the prior claim of its divine origin, its
hostility remains reactive as the river seeks to leap out of the experience of inequality and self-
difference by leaping back into the origin. Indeed, the river’s desire for the unbounded simply
replicates the leap into transcendence at issue in the final step o f Diotima’s ladder. In his cursory
remarks on poetic dwelling, the demigods’ creativity emerges for Heidegger in the re-creation of
restriction from something solely coerced by the gods’ need into something freely enacted by the
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The Poet As Demigod
demigods as their “work.” Following Strophe DC, which tells of the demigod Rhine’s coming to
rest in the limits appointed to it at birth by the god, Heidegger interprets such creativity as the
demigod’s setting the limits of its own nature as self-different and radically other: “True
limitation however enduringly experiences restriction as restriction, is only what it is in the
binding together; it enjoins itself to the limit as the remaining in the unboundedness of the
origin....That is genuine limit setting” (GA39, 274). While Feindseligkeit creates the context in
which the demigods undergo the difference between gods and human beings, the attunement of
what Heidegger terms “restrained daring” (verhaltene Verwegenheit) sets limits as limits. By
holding back the urgency that compels the demigod Rhine to want to leap over the origin,
restraint turns against its own will to turn against the origin; it becomes hostile toward that
hostility that drives it to transgress limits. The reactive imposition of external restriction is
thereby countered through the creative assertion of inner restriction as the demigod Rhine takes
up the limitation of its own nature by learning to abide in—rather than shatter against—its own
othemess.
In introducing a still further countertuming movement into its flow, the self-restriction
implicit in restraint takes up the relation to the origin by allowing the river to remain alongside
(bei) the origin. As Heidegger’s repeated citation of the lines “what remains the poets found” and
“how you begin so shall you remain” indicate, such remaining alongside constitutes the very
nature of poetic dwelling. Rather than hurriedly flowing away, the demigod Rhine’s creative self
limitation allows the river to abide by the origin as it stays in place and flows away
simultaneously, the river’s errancy transformed into the river’s whiling as it “gently moves in the
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The Poet As Demigod
German land.” The free binding inherent in the demigod’s abiding in limitation in turn “builds” the
land as the ground of human dwelling:
So kommt in die Eigenkrafi des Entsprungenen die Zucht als diese bandigende Hemmung, aber
so, dafi diese Zucht selbst als eine schaffende die Grenze und das MaB und die Stetigkeit erwirkt.
.. .Der Strom schafft jetzt dem Land gepragten Raum und begrenzten Ort der Besiedelung, des
Verkehrs, dem Volk bebaubares Land und Erhaltung seines unmittelbaren Daseins. Der Strom ist
nicht ein Gewasser, das an dem Ort der Menschen nur vorbeiflieBt, sondem sein Stromen, als
landbildendes, schafft erst die Moglichkeit der Griindung der Wohnungen der Menschen. Der
Strom ist nicht nur vergleichsweise, sondem als er selbst ein Stifter und Dichter. (GA39, 264)
Thus discipline comes into the force o f what has sprung forth as this binding inhibition, but so
that this discipline as something creative effects limits and measure and constancy... .Now the
river creates for the land a configured space and the bounded place o f settlement, o f commerce, o f
arable land for the people and the preservation o f their immediate Dasein. The river is not a body
o f water that only flows past by the place o f human beings. Rather, its flowing as land-forming
first creates the possibility o f the grounding o f the dwelling o f human beings. The river is not just
by way o f comparison, but is as itself a founder and poet.
The creativity of the Rhine as the enactment of limitation is here extended to the way the river
itself creates the limits that allow for enjoined and ordered relation—that allow for measure. In
founding the distinction between gods and human beings, the demigod river founds the
possibility of dwelling on the Earth as the context in which mortals are first brought into their
limits as mortals.
While Heidegger in his interpretation o f the demigods re-appropriates the creativity
implicit in limitation as poetic dwelling, his analysis is at the same time a confrontation with the
philosopher as demigod. Interpreting Holderlin’s reference to the “wise man” in the concluding
strophe o f the “Rhine” hymn (XIV: 206-08), which has been traditionally understood to refer to
Socrates in the closing scene of the Symposium, Heidegger interprets Holderlin’s “thinking
demigods” to anticipate his own thinking: “The ring has closed. The poet demands the thinker.
The thinking of the poet—demigods I now think—grounds itself in the poetizing of the thinker”
(GA39, 286). Required by the poet, the demigod thinker is, as Heidegger suggests, “to risk and
bear out being other” by articulating the historical community founded by Holderlin through the
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creative projection o f the Heimat. What however would it mean to follow out the creative
otherness at stake in Heidegger’s positioning of himself as demigod? To what kind of excess
would we expose ourselves?
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CONCLUSION/FURTHER WORK
In his 1938/39 retrospective reflection “The Wish and the Will (On Preserving
What is Attempted)” in Mindfulness Heidegger comments that “all the lecture-courses are
historical, history-grounding, but never ‘historiographical” (GA66, 421; M, 372).
Looking back, but also looking forward to the other beginning gestured toward in the
Contributions to Philosophy (OfEreignis), Heidegger singles out the »Germanien« und
»Der Rhein« course as playing a crucial role in the preparation for that future:
Diese Vorlesung ist nach langer Besinnung ein erster Versuch zu einer Auslegung der
einzelnen »Werke« (Hymnen). Nirgends entspricht das Versuchte im geringsten dem
Werk des Dichters; zumal— und das ist das Entscheidende— Holderlin hier nicht als ein
Dichter unter anderen genommen wird— auch nicht als ein vermeintlich jetzt
zeitgemafier— , sondem als der Dichter des anderen Anfangs unserer kunftigen
Geschichte. Deshalb steht diese Vorlesung im innigsten Zusammenhang mit der
ergriffenen Aufgabe, die Wahrheit des Seins zur Frage zu machen— und nicht etwa ein
Seitenweg in eine »Philosophie der Dichtkunst« und Kunst uberhaupt.
Die Vorlesung als Vorlesung hat freilich— wie jede meiner Vorlesungen— immer
zugleich und vordergriindlich zuerst die erzieherische Absicht, zum Dichter, d.h. zu
seinem Werk hinzufiihren. Aber damit ist die verborgene Absicht, die die Wahl der
»Hymnen« und das Vorgehen bestimmt, keineswegs getroffen. (G A 66,426-7)
After long deliberation, this lecture-course became the first attempt at interpreting
Holderlin’s individual “works,” such as the Hymns. What is attempted in this lecture-
course nowhere accords in the least with the work o f the poet, especially— and this is
imperative— since in this lecture-course Holderlin is not taken as one poet among others-
-nor indeed as one who is supposedly now more timely— but rather as the poet o f the
other beginning o f our futural history. Hence, this lecture-course is intimately connected
to the task, already taken up, o f bringing into question the truth o f being. In this vein, this
lecture course is not an excursion into “philosophy o f poetry as an art form” or into art in
general.
The pedagogical intention operative in any o f my lecture-courses, namely first to lead
the student to the work (in this case the poet’s work) lies obviously always in the
foreground o f this lecture-course. But this does not at all touch on the hidden intention
that determines the choice o f the “hymns” and the manner o f handling them. (M 377)
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Conclusion
Setting aside the obvious charge of interpretive violence (which the above
quotation acknowledges in its way), what this dissertation has sought to bring forward is
this “hidden intention” as the working out of what Dominique Janicaud has so aptly
described as Heidegger’s “destinal-historicalism.” For it is precisely in his selection of
particular hymns and his treatment of them that Heidegger is engaged in a version of
‘political’ paideia through which the destinal arc of the future is both being prepared for
but also transparently worked out in the details of how Heidegger interprets Holderlin’s
hymns and theoretical writings. Thus while all the lecture courses may indeed be
historical, the assertion of Holderlin as a destiny in the »Germania« und »Der Rhein«
course marks the inauguration of a positive factical commitment that distinguishes it from
a lecture course on Leibniz or on Hegel. And where Heidegger may later admit to
personal failures and more predictable forms of political naivete, he never reneges on
Holderlin’s decisive importance as a destiny. Which is to say that he never relinquishes
his version of politics even as the future implied in it shifts in tonality from urgency to
deferral and even to refusal.
Beyond explaining to myself the commitment I sensed in Heidegger’s conception
of destiny (his treatment of Geschick was something I studiously avoided in a Master’s
Thesis on The Principle o f Reason), I was also motivated by two interrelated
methodological concerns. First, the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course was constantly
being singled out in the secondary literature as a critical moment of transition tied up
with Heidegger’s politics and influencing conceptual innovations such as the passing-by
of the last god later taken up in the Contributions to Philosophy (OfEreignis) and the
self-withdrawal of the Earth in the “Origin of the Work o f Art.” Despite its purported
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Conclusion
significance, the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course received little sustained and
detailed attention. When I first read the lecture course I was therefore struck by its quality
of excess (demigods—really?), but also its originality as Heidegger was working out for
the first time the conception of language as correspondence, the ecstatic disclosivity of
fundamental attunement as a movement of exposure and transposure, and Being’s need.
Though I was certainly used to Heidegger’s voice, this was a Heidegger who was
fragilely overreaching in a way I couldn’t quite grasp. My initial intuition, however, was
that the »Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course was above all Heidegger’s confrontation
with the nature of creativity, and that creativity was implicated in poetic dwelling in an
interesting and unexpected way. It was also inseparable from whatever sense of politics
was also being worked out in the lecture course, something announced precisely in
Heidegger’s assertion of Holderlin as demigod, destiny and “our poet.” I was therefore
left with the tension of wanting to ‘keep’ the conceptual originality of Heidegger’s
interpretations as he was elaborating with and through Holderlin a non-metaphysical
vocabulary intimately his own at the same time that I wanted to remain sensitive to the
quality o f excess that pervades the lecture course.
This led to a second methodological concern. For in contrast to treatments of
Heidegger’s Holderlin interpretations that are episodic and merely touch on particular
passages in relation to more general thematics or that begin immediately with the claim
that Heidegger “ontologizes” or “mythologizes” Holderlin, I wanted to concretely follow
out an argument that showed how Heidegger was enacting a politics through the detailed
interpretations of the hymns. I thus wanted to engage in close reading that followed
Heidegger’s conceptual moves—and thus consented to his interpretative terms—while at
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Conclusion
the same time engaging in critical reflection that was more than exegesis. Whence my
effort to construct a critical vocabulary attentive to the enacted dimension of Heidegger’s
dialogue with Holderlin and the extension of that dialogue to the people through the
structure of address itself implied in the notion of destiny.
The need to invent a new critical vocabulary to capture the enacted dimension of
Heidegger’s project as “history-grounding” is something currently needed within
Heidegger scholarship in order to show both the creative depth o f what Heidegger is
doing interpretively and its internal connection to his politics. In looking for paradigms I
have found myself going back to scholarly work on Dante, which explicitly takes up the
conceptual framework of mediation (via Dante-poet, Virgil and Mary) while remaining
sensitive to the way Dante is inventing the Italian language through the creation o f a
syntax in which it is precisely conjunctions like “since” that bear the weight o f how those
connections are made through language within the context of a fully implicated
particularity.
Besides these methodological concerns (which are also about what it means to
take my place as a reader of Heidegger), there are several insights I have found myself
returning to in which I believe there is something deeper at stake that merits further
thinking within the Heideggerian corpus, but that have also taken me beyond Heidegger
in allowing me to see structural connections with other thinkers that have rich potential.
In addition to understanding the »Germanien« und »Der Rheim course as a confrontation
with the nature of creativity, one of the most important insights concerns the role
language and the tradition play within the creation of an “historical apriori.” (And indeed
I ’ve wondered whether destiny is the historical apriori as the structure of finite
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Conclusion
limitation.) The relationship between the historical apriori and language is something
Heidegger indicates in a footnote in Being and Time, however I believe the place where it
is actually elaborated is the “as”-structure. As Francois Dastur points out in referring to
the 1929/30 lecture course, the synthetic dimension of the “as”-structure replaces the role
imagination plays in Kant’s schematism in both letting and determining or conditioning
how beings come to appear in their appearance. The historical apriori would thus
designate what I have emphasized as the “preceding bond” of world as a relational
totality. Besides simply working out this connection, I’m interested in the way in which
Heidegger can be seen to place the notion of ‘critique’ {krinein) in the differentiation
implied in the disclosivity of the “as”-structure itself as the enactment of limitation.
Going toward Arendt and Foucault (both inheritors of Kant), I’m interested in the
difference in orientation in locating the opening up of possibility in the projective
disclosivity o f the work of art (which supplies it own “measure”) and o f locating it within
the notion of limitation implied in Kantian-styled critique.
Although Heidegger’s discussion of mourning addressed in Chapter Three takes
place within the context o f the flight o f the gods, his analysis nonetheless remains
powerful in providing an alternative to Freud (this is something I don’t develop in the
chapter). In contrast to the overdetermination of the killing off of attachment—this would
be the “Not” of a denial rather than the “Not” of a having to bear giving up— the middle
voiced agency of mourning retains the determinacy o f relation within the context of the
letting go of attachment. In this way mourning is not only possible, it is the occasion for
transformation and for the opening up of new possibilities.
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Conclusion
In addition to the significance mourning has in the »Germanien« und »Der
R heim course where it is directly tied to the undoing of all grounds through Dasein’s
poetic dwelling upon the Earth, Heidegger’s nuanced conception of the agency of
mourning (especially the “placing itself back” that anticipates the “step back in thinking”)
needs to be traced out with respect to Heidegger’s later work on Gelassenheit: Letting
allows transition in deflecting the metaphysics of the will. It also needs to be traced out in
relation to more recent philosophical work on trauma. For where letting go is, of course, a
cliche of mourning, Heidegger’s interpretation can serve as a resource in showing the
internal tension o f an action (and its intensification as pain) whose main thrust is to place
itself back in order to open a space in which to undergo absence. The agency of that
placing itself back is at the same time what allows the possibility of the transformation of
the one who mourns—of an un-doing that dissolves but also opens the space for the
remaking of the self.
Heidegger acknowledges that the work o f mourning is never completed (its
oscillation gives possibilities the shape they have and so reveals them in their finitude).
However that incompleteness does not have to imply melancholy, but instead offers the
possibility of on-going transformation accomplished—and accomplishable— only
through in which mourning unmakes all human projects and especially the project o f an
“I” together with a certain conception of agency. There is thus a peculiar philosophical
investment in this inability to mourn, as though in order to secure its own ground
philosophy needed to become guilty of not just nostalgia but of an inevitably melancholic
repetition through which it attempts to remain faithful not to the past but to an idea of its
own activity— or better, to the idea of itself as activity. But what if, following Heidegger,
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Conclusion
mourning was not only not impossible, but transformative? What would that imply for
the history of philosophy and for the history of selves?
Perhaps the most surprising outcome of a dissertation on Heidegger and destiny
was my discovery of the profound way Heidegger is also attempting to think freedom.
Thus where determinism and freedom have gone together as paired notions within the
history of philosophy, Heidegger understands himself as (again) following Kant, who he
understands to be the philosopher who most radically thinks freedom in the conception of
law as the free binding of a limit. This is the model offered by the “freely bom” Rhine
river in Chapter Four and in Holderlin’s “solid letter.”
The question of freedom is taken over in German Idealism—and most
provocatively in Schelling—where Heidegger claims it miscarries in its attempt to follow
through on the radicality of Kant’s project in succumbing to the temptation of
systematization as the setting up of limits for the sake of limits. Significantly, the
»Germanien« und »Der Rhein« course concludes by appealing to Holderlin’s Dec. 4,
1801 “Letter to Bohlendorff” through which Heidegger calls on the Germans to learn the
“free use o f the national” as the “free use of one’s own” (GA39, 290-91). Following the
distribution o f “endowments” {das Mitgegebene) and “tasks” (das Aufgegebene) between
the Germans and the Greeks respectively outlined in the letter, the Germans are assigned
the encounter with the “overpowering violence o f Beyng” as the context in which their
own gift at grasping (Fassenkdnnen) first comes into its free use in being brought into its
limits. This free use is learned, however, only through the appropriation o f Holderlin as a
destiny. Thus while Heidegger tasks the Germans with the encounter with the Greek
foreign, this is to create the right kind o f distance—the proper configuration of Holderlin
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Conclusion
as the foreign—that allows for the reappropriation of Holderlin through the translation of
German into German. Though freedom does indeed imply a “national,” that national is
realized in the undergoing of the disclosive possibilities of the German language through
which the Germans come into their own freedom and come into their own freedom
precisely through Holderlin as a destiny.
Over and above the projects indicated—which are more scholarly—the process of
this dissertation has also been my education in a philosophical orientation. This has
entailed trying to figure out the set of tensions that capture the sense o f attraction to the
excesses of Heidegger’s destinal-historical project while maintaining some kind of
sensitivity to when—and how—that excess becomes hyperbolic. I want philosophy and
poetry to be able to enact and inaugurate a language that can change the space of
appearance of politics that goes beyond criticism while maintaining the resistance of
criticism.
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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
APPENDIX A
Holderhn’s “Germania” hymn, translated by Michael Hamburger, pp. 401-407
I Nicht sie, die Seeligen, die erschienen sind, Not them, the blessed, who once appeared,
Der Gotterbilder in dem alten Lande, Those images o f gods in the ancient land,
Sie darf ich ja nicht rufen mehr, wenn aber Them, it is true, I may not now invoke, but if,
Ihr heimatlichen Wasser! jezt mit euch You waters o f my homeland, now with you
Des Herzens Liebe klagt, was will es anders, The love o f my heart laments, what else does it want, in
Das Heiligtrauemde? Denn voll Erwartung liegt Its hallowed sadness? For full o f expectation lies
Das Land und als in heiBen Tagen The country, and as though it had been lowered
Herabgesenkt, umschattet heut In sultry dog-days, on us a heaven today,
Ihr Sehnenden! uns ahnungsvoll ein Himmel. You yearning rivers, casts prophetic shade.
10 Voll ist er von VerheiBungen und scheint With promises it is fraught, and to me
Mir drohend auch, doch will ich bei ihm bleiben, Seems threatening too, yet I will stay with it,
Und rukwarts soil die Seele mir nicht fliehn And backward now my soul shall not escape
Zu euch, Vergangene! die zu lieb mir sind. To you, the vanished, whom I love too much.
Denn euer schones Angesicht zu sehn, To look upon your beautiful brows, as though
Als wars, wie sonst, ich furcht’ es, todtlich ists, They were unchanged, I am afraid, for deadly
Und kaum erlaubt, Gestorbene zu weken. And scarcely permitted it is to awaken the dead.
II Entflohene Gotter! auch ihr, ihr gegenwartigen, damals Gods who are fled! And you also, present still,
Wahrhaftiger, ihr hattet eure Zeiten! But once more real, you had your time, your ages!
Nichts laugnen will ich hier und nichts erbitten. No, nothing here I’ll deny and ask no favours.
20 Denn wenn es aus ist, und der Tag erloschen, For when it’s over, and the Day’s light gone out,
Wohl trifts den Priester erst, doch liebend folgt The priest is the first to be struck, but lovingly
Der Tempel und das Bild ihm auch und seine Sitte The temple and the image and the cult
Zum dunkeln Land und keines mag noch scheinen. Follow him down into darkness, and none o f them now may shine.
Nur als von Grabesflammen, ziehet dann Only as from a funeral pyre henceforth
Ein goldner Rauch, die Sage drob hinuber, A golden smoke, the legend o f it, drifts
Und dammert jezt uns Zweifelnden um das Haupt, And glimmers on around our doubting heads
Und keiner weiB, wie ihm geschieht. Er fuhlt And no one knows what’s happening to him. He feels
Die Schatten derer, so gewesen sind, The shadowy shapes o f those who once were here,
30 Die Alten, so die Erde neubesuchen. The ancients, newly visiting the earth.
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Appendix A: “Germania”
Denn die da kommen sollen, drangen uns, For those who are to come now jostle us,
Und langer saumt von Gottermenschen No longer will that holy host o f beings
Die heilige Schaar nicht mehr im blauen Himmel. Divinely human linger in azure Heaven.
III Schon griinet ja, im Vorspiel rauherer Zeit Already, in the prelude o f a rougher age
Fur sie erzogen das Feld, bereitet ist die Gaabe Raised up for them, the field grows green, prepared
Zum Opfermahl und Thai und Strome sind Are offerings for the votive feast and valley
Weitoffen um prophetische Berge, And rivers lie wide open round prophetic mountains,
DaB schauen mag bis in den Orient So that into the very Orient
Der Mann und ihn von dort der Wandlungen viele bewegen. A man may look and thence be moved by many transformations.
Vom Aether aber fallt But down from Aether falls
40 Das treue Bild und Gotterspriiche reegnen The faithful image, and words o f gods rain down
Unzahlbare von ihm, und es tont im innersten Haine. Innumerable from it, and the innermost grove resounds.
Und der Adler, der vom Indus kommt, And the eagle that comes from the Indus
Und iiber des Pamassos And flies over the snow-covered peaks o f
Beschneite Gipfel fliegt, hoch iiber den Opferhiigeln Parnassus, high above the votive hills
Italias, und frohe Beute sucht O f Italy, and seek glad booty for
Dem Vater, nicht wie sonst, geubter im Fluge The Father, not as he used to, more practiced in flight,
Der Alte, jauchzend uberschwingt er That ancient one, exultant, over the Alps
Zulezt die Alpen und sieht die vielgearteten Lander. Wings on at last and sees the diverse countries.
IV Die Priesterin, die stillste Tochter Gottes, The priestess, her, the quietest daughter o f God,
50 Sie, die zu gem in tiefer Einfalt schweigt, Too fond o f keeping silent in deep ingenuousness,
Sie suchet er, die ofFnen Auges schaute, Her now he seeks, who open-eyed looked up
Als wiiBte sie es nicht, jiingst, da ein Sturm As though she did not know it, lately when a storm,
Todtdrohend iiber ihrem Haupt ertonte; Threatening death, rang out above her head;
Es ahnete das Kind ein Besseres, A better destiny the child divined,
Und endlich ward ein Staunen weit im Himmel And in the end amazement spread in heaven
Weil Eines groB an Glauben, wie sie selbst, Because one being was as great in faith
Die seegnende, die Macht der Hohe sei; As they themselves, the blessing powers on high;
Drum sandten sie den Boten, der, sie schnell erkennend, Therefore they sent the messenger, who, quick to recognize her,
Denkt lachelnd so: Dich, unzerbrechliche, muB Smilingly thus reflects: you the unbreakable
60 Ein ander Wort erprufen und raft es laut, A different word must try, and then proclaims,
Der Jugendliche, nach Germania schauende: The youthful, looking towards Germania:
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“Du bist es, auserwahlt, ‘Yes, it is you, elected

“Allliebend und ein schweres Gliik All-loving and to bear
“Bist du zu tragen stark geworden, A burdensome good fortune have grown strong,
V Seit damals, da im Walde verstekt und bliihendem Mohn Since, hidden in the woods and flowering poppies
Voll siiBen Schlummers, trunkene, meiner du Filled with sweet drowsiness, you, drunken, did not heed
Nicht achtetest, lang, ehe noch auch geringere fuhlten Me for a long time, before lesser ones even felt
Der Jungfrau Stolz und staunten wel3 du warst und woher, The virgin’s pride, and marveled whose you are and where from,
Doch du es selbst nicht wuBtest. Ich miskannte dich nicht, But you yourself did not know. Yet I did not misjudge you
70 Und heimlich, da du traumtest, lieB ich And secretly, while you dreamed, at noon,
Am Mittag scheidend dir ein Freundeszeichen, Departing I left a token o f friendship,
Die Blume des Mundes zurtik und du redetest einsam. The flower o f the mouth behind, and lonely you spoke,
Doch Fiille der goldenen Worte sandtest du auch Yet you, the greatly blessed, with the rivers too
Gliikseelige! mit den Stromen und sie quillen unerschopflich Dispatched a wealth o f golden words, and they well unceasing
In die Gegenden all. Denn fast, wie der heiligen, Into all regions now. For almost as is the holy
Die Mutter ist von allem, und den Abgrund tragt The Mother o f all things, upholder o f the abyss,
Die Verborgene sonst genannt von Menschen, Whom men at other times call the Concealed,
So ist von Lieben and Leiden Now full o f loves and sorrows
Und voll von Ahnungen dir And full o f presentiments
80 Und voll von Frieden der Busen. And full o f peace is your bosom.
IV O trinke Morgenlufte, O drink the morning breezes

BiB daB du offen bist, Until you are opened up
Und nenne, was vor Augen dir ist, And name what you see before you;
Nicht langer darf GeheimniB mehr No longer now the unspoken
Das Ungesprochene bleiben, May remain a mystery
Nachdem es lange verhiillt ist; Though long it has been veiled;
Denn Sterblichen geziemet die Schaam, For shame behooves us mortals
Und so zu reden die meiste Zeit, And most o f the time to speak thus
Ist weise auch von Gottem. O f gods indeed is wise.
90 Wo aber uberfliissiger, denn lautere Quellen But where more superabundant than purest wellsprings
Das Gold und emst geworden ist der Zorn an dem Himmel, The gold has become and the anger in Heaven earnest,
MuB zwischen Tag and Nacht For once between Day and Night must
Einsmals ein Wahres erscheinen. A truth be made manifest.
189
Dreifach umschreibe du es, Now threefold circumscribe it,

Doch ungesprochen auch, wie es da ist, Yet unuttered also, just as you found it,
Unschuldige, muB es bleiben. Innocent virgin, let it remain.
O nenne Tochter du der heiligen Erd’ Once only, daughter or holy Earth,
Einmal die Mutter. Es rauschen die Wasser am Fels Pronounce your Mother’s name. The waters roar on the rock
Und Wetter im Wald und bei dem Nahmen derselben And thunderstorms in the wood, and at their name
Tont auf aus alter Zeit Vergangengottliches wieder. Divine things past ring out form time immemorial.
Wie anders ists! und rechthin glanzt und spricht Flow all is changed! And to the right there gleam
Zukunftiges auch erfreulich aus den Femen. And speak things yet to come, joy-giving, from the distance.
Doch in der Mitte der Zeit Yet at the centre o f Time
Lebt ruhig mit geweihter In peace with hallowed,
Jungfraulicher Erde der Aether With virginal Earth lives Aether
Und geme, zur Erinnerung, sind And gladly, for remembrance, they
Die unbedurftigen sie The never-needy dwell
Gastfreundlich bei den unbedurftigen Hospitably amid the never-needy,
Bei deinen Feiertagen Amid your holidays,
Germania, wo du Priesterin bist Germania, where you are priestess and
Und wehrlos Rath giebst rings Defenseless proffer all around
Den Konigen und den Volkern. Advice to the kings and the peoples.’
190
APPENDIX B
Holderlin’s “The Rhine” hymn, translated by Michael Hamburger, pp. 408-421
An Isaak von Sinclair To Issac von Sinclair
I Im dunkeln Epheu saB ich, an der Pforte Amid dark ivy I was sitting, at
Des Waldes, eben, da der goldene Mittag, The forest’s gate, just as a golden noon,
Den Quell besuchend, herunterkam To visit the wellspring there, came down
Von Treppen des Alpengebirgs, From steps o f the Alpine ranges
Das mir die gottlichgebaute, Which, following ancient lore,
Die Burg der Himmlischen heiBt I call the divinely built,
Nach alter Meinung, wo aber The fortress o f the Heavenly,
Geheim noch manches entschieden But where, determined in secret
Zu Menschen gelanget; von da Much even now reaches men; from there
10 Vemahm ich ohne Vermuthen Without surmise I heard
Ein Schiksaal, denn noch kaum A destiny, for, debating
Was mir im warmen Schatten Now this, now that in the warm shade,
Sich manches beredend, die Seele My soul had hardly begun
Italia zu geschweift To make for Italy
Und femhin an die Kusten Moreas. And far away for the shores o f Morea.
II Jetzt aber, drinn im Gebirg, But now, within the mountains,

Tief unter den silbemen Gipfeln Deep down below the silvery summits
Und unter frohlichem Grim, And in the midst o f gay verdure,
Wo die Walder schauemd zu ihm, Where shuddering the forests
20 Und der Felsen Haupter ubereinander And the heads o f rocks overlapping
Hinabschaun, taglang, dort Look down at him, all day
Im kaltesten Abgrund hort’ There in the coldest chasm
Ich um Erlosung jammem I heard the youth implore
Den Jungling, es horten ihn, wie er tobt’, Release; and full o f pity his parents heard
191
Appendix B: “The Rhine”
Und die Mutter Erd’ anklagt’, Him rage there and accuse
Und den Donnerer, der ihn gezeuget, His Mother Earth and the Thunderer
Erbarmend die Eltem, doch Who fathered him, but mortals
Die Sterblichen flohn von dem Ort, Fled from the place, for dreadful,
Denn fiirchtbar war, da lichtlos er As without light he writhed
30 In den Fesseln sich walzte, Within his fetters, was
Das Rasen des Halbgotts. The demigod’s raving.
III Die Stimme wars des edelsten der Strome, The voice it was o f the noblest o f rivers,
Des freigeborenen Rheins, O f free-born Rhine,
Und anderes hoffte der, als droben von den Briidem And different were his hopes when up there from his brothers
Dem Tessin und dem Rhodanus, Ticino and Rhodanus
Er schied und wandem wollt’, und ungeduldig ihn He parted and longed to roam, and impatiently
Nach Asia trieb die konigliche Seele. His regal soul drove him on towards Asia.
Doch unverstandig ist Yet in the face o f fate
Das Wunschen vor dem Schiksaal, Imprudent it is to wish.
40 Die Blindesten aber The sons o f gods, though,
Sind Gottersohne. Denn es kennet der Mensch Are blindest o f all. For human beings know
Sein Haus und dem Thier ward, wo Their house, and the animals
Es bauen solle, doch jenen ist Where they must build, but in
Der Fehl, daB sie nicht wissen wohin? Their inexperienced souls the defect
In die unerfahme Seele gegeben. O f not knowing where was implanted.
IV Ein Rathsel ist Reinentsprungenes. Auch A mystery are those o f pure origin.
Der Gesang kaum darf es enthtillen. Denn Even song may hardly unveil it.
Wie du anfiengst, wirst du bleiben, For as you began, so you will remain,
So viel auch wirket die Noth, As much as need can effect,
50 Und die Zucht, das meiste nemlich And breeding, still greater power
Vermag die Geburt, Adheres to your birth
Und der Lichtstrahl, der And the ray o f light
Dem Neugebomen begegnet. That meets the new-bom infant.
Wo aber ist einer, But where is anyone
Um frei zu bleiben So happily bom as the Rhine
Sein Leben lang, und des Herzens Wunsch From such propitious heights
192
Allein zu erfiillen, so And from so holy a womb,

Aus gunstigen Hohn, wie der Rhein, To remain free
Und so aus heiligem Schoose His whole life long and alone fulfil
60 Gliiklich geboren, wie jener? His heart’s desire, like him?
V Drum ist ein Jauchzen sein Wort. And that is why his word is a jubilant roar
Nicht liebt er, wie andere Kinder, Nor is he fond, like other children,
In Wikelbanden zu weinen; O f weeping in swaddling bands;
Denn wo die Ufer zuerst For where the banks at first
An die Seit ihm schleichen, die krummen, Slink to his side, the crooked,
Und durstig umwindend ihn, And greedily entwining him,
Den Unbedachten, zu ziehn Desire to educate
Und wohl zu behuten begehren And carefully tend the feckless
Im eigenen Zahne, lachend Within their teeth, he laughs,
70 ZerreiBt er die Schlangen und stiirzt Tears up the serpents and rushes
Mit der Beut und wenn in der Eil’ O ff with his prey, and if in haste
Ein GroBerer ihn nicht zahmt, A greater one does not tame him,
Ihn wachsen laBt, wie der Bliz, muB er But lets him grow, like lightning he
Die Erde spalten, und wie Bezauberte fliehn Must rend the earth and like things enchanted
Die Walder ihm nach und zusammensinkend die The forests join his flight and collapsing, the mountains.
VI Ein Gott will aber sparen die Sohnen A god however, wishes to spare his sons
Das eilende Leben und lachelt, A life so fleeting and smiles
Wenn unenthaltsam, aber gehemmt When, thus intemperate but restrained
Von heiligen Alpen, ihm By holy Alps, the rivers
80 In der Tiefe, wie jener, ziirnen die Strome. Like this one rage at him in the depth.
In solcher Esse wird dann In such a forge, then, all
Auch alles Lautre geschmiedet, That’s pure is given shape
Und schon ists, wie er drauf, And it is good to see
Nachdem er die Berge verlassen, How then, after leaving the mountains,
Stillwandelnd sich im deutschen Lande Content with German lands he calmly
Begniiget und das Sehnen stillt Moves on and stills his longing
Im guten Geschaffte, wenn er das Land baut In useful industry, when he tills the land,
Der Vater Rhein und liebe Kinder nahrt Now Father Rhine, and supports dear children
193
In Stadten, die er gegriindet. In cities which he has founded.
V II90 Doch nimmer, nimmer vergiBt ers. Yet never, never does he forget.
Denn eher muB die Wohnung vergehn, For sooner the dwelling shall be destroyed,
Und die Sazung und zum Unbild werden And all the laws, and the day o f men
Der Tag der Menschen, ehe vergessen Become iniquitous, than such as he
Ein solcher durfte den Ursprung Forget his origin
Und die reine Stimme der Jugend. And the pure voice o f his youth.
Wer war es, der zuerst Who was the first to coarsen,
Die Liebesbande verderbt Corrupt the bonds o f love
Und Strike von ihnen gemacht hat? And turn them into ropes?
Dann haben des eigenen Rechts Then, sure o f their own rights
100 Und gewiB des himmlischen Feuers And o f the heavenly fire
Gespottet die Trozigen, dann erst Defiant rebels mocked, not till then
Die sterblichen Pfade verachtend Despising mortal ways,
Verwegnes erwahlt Chose foolhardy arrogance
Und denn Gottem gleich zu werden getrachtet. And strove to become the equals o f gods.
VIII Es haben aber an eigner But their own immortality

Unsterblichkeit die Gotter genug, und bedurfen Suffices the gods, and if
Die Himmlischen eines Dings, The Heavenly have need o f one thing,
So sinds Heroen und Menschen It is o f heroes and human beings
Und Sterbliche sonst. Denn weil And other mortals. For since
110 Die Seeligsten nichts fuhlen von selbst, The most Blessed in themselves feel nothing
MuB wohl, wenn solches zu sagen Another, if to say such a thing is
Erlaubt ist, in der Gotter Nahmen Permitted, must, I suppose,
Theilnehmend fuhlen ein Andrer, Vicariously feel in the name o f the gods,
Den brauchen sie; jedoch ihr Gericht And him they need; but their rule is that
Ist, daB sein eigenes Haus He shall demolish his
Zerbreche der und das Liebste Own house and curse like an enemy
Wie den Feind schelt’ und sich Vater und Kind Those dearest to him and under the rubble
Begrabe unter den Trummem, Shall bury his father and child,
Wenn einer, wie sei, seyn will und nicht When one who aspires to be like them, refusing
120 Ungleiches dulden, der Schwarmer. To bear with inequality, the fantast,
194
IX Drum wohl ihm, welcher fand So happy he who has found

Ein wohlbeschiedenes Schicksaal, A well-allotted fate
Wo noch der Wanderungen Where still o f his wanderings
Und suB der Leiden Erinnerung And sweetly o f his afflictions
Aufrauscht am sichem Gestade, The memory murmurs on banks that are sure,
DaB da und dorthin gem So that this way, that way with pleasure
Er sehn mag bis an die Grenzen He looks as far as the bounds
Die bei der Geburt ihm Gott Which God at birth assigned
Zum Aufenthalte gezeichnet. To him for his term and site.
130 Dann mht er, seeligbescheiden, Then, blissfully humble, he rests,
Denn alles, was er gewollt, For all that he has wanted,
Das Himmlische, von selber umfangt Though heavenly, o f itself surrounds
Es unbezwungen, lachelnd Him uncompelled, and smiles
Jezt, da er ruhet, den Kuhnen. Upon the bold one now that he’s quiet.
X Halbgotter denk’ ich jezt Of demigods now I think

Und kennen muB ich die Theuem, And I must know these dear ones
Weil oft ihr Leben so Because so often their lives
Die sehnende Brust mir beweget. Move me and fill me with longing.
Wem aber, wie, Rousseau, dir, But he whose soul, like yours,
140 Unuberwindlich die Seele Rousseau, ever strong and patient,
Die starkausdauemde ward, Became invincible,
Und sicherer Sinn Endowed with steadfast purpose
Und suBe Gaabe zu horen, And a sweet gift o f hearing,
Zu reden so, daB er aus heiliger Fiille O f speaking, so that from holy profusion
Wie der Weingott, thorig gottlich Like the wine-god foolishly, divinely
Und gesezlos sie die Sprache der Reinesten giebt And lawlessly he gives it away,
Verstandlich den Guten, aber mit Recht The language o f the purest, comprehensible to the good,
Die Achtungslosen mit Blindheit schlagt But rightly strikes with blindness the irreverent,
Die entweihenden Knechte, wie nenn ich den Fremden? The profaning rabble, what shall I call that stranger?
XI 150 Die Sohne der Erde sind, wie die Mutter, The sons o f Earth, like their mother are
Allliebend, so empfangen sie auch All-loving, so without effort too
195
Miihlos, die Gliiklichen, Alles. All things those blessed ones receive.
Drum iiberraschet es auch And therefore it surprises
Und schrokt den sterblichen Mann, And startles the mortal man
Wenn er den Himmel, den When he considers the heaven
Er mit den liebenden Armen Which with loving arms he him self
Sich auf die Schultem gehaufft, Has heaped upon his shoulders,
Und die Last der Freude bedenket; And feels the burden o f joy;
160 Denn scheint ihm oft das Beste, Then often to him it seems best
Fast ganz vergessen da, Almost wholly forgotten to be
Wo der Stral nicht brennt, Where the beam does not sear,
Im Schatten des Walds In the forest’s shade
Am Bielersee in frischer Grime zu seyn, By Lake Bienne amid foliage newly green
Und sorglosarm an Tonen, And blithely poor in tones,
Anfangem gleich, bei Nachtigallen zu lemen. Like beginners, to leam from nightingales.
XII Und herrlich ists, aus heiligem Schlafe dann And glorious then it is to arise once more
Erstehen und aus Waldes Kuhle From holy sleep and awakening
Erwachend, Abends nun From coolness o f the woods, at evening
Dem milderen Licht entgegenzugehn, Walk now toward the softer light
170 Wenn, der die Berge gebaut When he who built the mountains
Und den Pfad der Strome gezeichnet, And drafted the paths o f the rivers,
Nachdem er lachelnd auch Having also smiling directed
Der Menschen geschafftiges Leben The busy lives o f men,
Das othemarme, wie Seegel So short o f breath, like sails,
Mit seinen Luften gelenkt hat, And filled them with his breezes,
Auch ruht und zu der Schulerin jezt, Reposes also, and down to his pupil
Der Bildner, Gutes mehr The master craftsmen, finding
Denn Boses findend, More good than evil,
Zur heutigen Erde der Tag sich neiget.— Day now inclines to the present Earth.
X I I 180 Dann feiem das Brautfest Menschen und Gotter, Then gods and mortals celebrate their nuptials,
Es feiem die Lebenden all, All the living celebrate
Und ausgeglichen And Fate for a while
Ist eine Weile das Schiksaal. Is leveled out, suspended.
196
Und die Fluchtlinge suchen die Heerberg, And fugitives look for asylum,
Und siiBen Schlummer die Tapfem, For sweet slumber the brave,
Die Liebenden aber But lovers are
Sind, was sie waren, sie sind What always they were, at home
Zu HauBe, wo die Blume sich freuet Wherever flowers are glad
Unschadlicher Gluth und die finsteren Baume O f harmless fervor and the spirit wafts
190 Der Geist umsauselt, aber die Unversohnten Around the darkling trees, but those unreconciled
Sind umgewandelt und eilen Are changed and hurry now
Die Hande sich ehe zu reichen, To hold out their hands to the other
Bevor das freundliche Licht Before the benevolent light
Hinuntergeht und die Nacht kommt. Goes down, and night comes.
XIII Doch einigen eilt For some, however,

DiB schnell voruber, andere This quickly passes, others
Behalten es langer, Retain it longer.
Die ewigen Gotter sind The eternal gods are full
Voll Lebens allzeit; bis in den Tod O f life at all times; but until death
200 Kann aber ein Mensch auch A mortal too can retain
Im GedachtniB doch das Beste behalten, And bear in mind what is best
Und dann erlebt er das Hochste. And then is supremely favored.
Nur hat ein jeder sein Maas. Yet each o f us has his measure.
Denn schwer ist zu tragen For hard to bear
Das Ungliik, aber schwerer das Gluk. Is misfortune, but good fortune harder.
Ein Weiser aber vermocht es A wise man, though, was able
Vom Mittag bis in die Mittemacht, From noon to midnight, and on
Und bis der Morgen erglanzte, Till morning lit up the sky
Beim Gastmahl helle zu bleiben. To keep wide awake at the banquet.
XIV 210 Dir mag auf heiBem Pfade unter Tannen oder To you in the heat o f a path under fir-trees or
Im Dunkel des Eichwalds gehiillt Within the oak forest’s half-light, wrapped
In Stahl, mein Sinklair! Gott erscheinen oder In steel, my Sinclair, God may appear, or
In Wolken, du kennst ihn, da du kennest, jugendliche, In clouds, you’ll know him, since, youthfully, you know
Des Guten Kraft, und nimmer ist dir The good God’s power, and never from you
Verborgen das Lacheln des Herrschers The smile o f the Ruler is hidden
197
Bei Tage, wenn By day, when all

Es fieberhaft und angekettet das That lives seems febrile
Lebendige scheinet oder auch And fettered, or also
Bei Nacht, wenn alles gemischt By night, when all is mingled
220 Ist ordnungslos und wiederkehrt Chaotically and back again comes
Uralte Verwirrung. Primeval confusion.
198
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The Poet as Destiny:

The Inauguration of Heidegger’s Dialogue with Holderlin

Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

All rights reserved.

The Poet As Destiny:

The Inauguration o f Heidegger’s Dialogue with Holderlin

This dissertation offers an analysis of Heidegger’s 1934/35 inaugural lecture

Rhine. ” It combines exegesis of Heidegger’s individual interpretations of Holderlin’s

hymns, while arguing that Heidegger’s radical reconceptualization o f Holderlin as a

forward by Dominique Janicaud in The Shadow o f That Thought that Heidegger’s

arguing that Heidegger’s privileging of death generates an insoluble impasse evident in

Dasein’s inability to carry through on the disclosure of its authentic possibilities in

terminological vocabulary sustained in Heidegger’s later thinking. Chapter Two explores

what Heidegger means by “dialogue,” understanding this in terms o f a chain of mediation

as a destiny through an interpretation o f the poet as demigod and between. The

dissertation includes original work on Heidegger’s analyses of holy mourning, the

dissertation was directed by Professor William McNeill.

and especially to the memory of my parents,

Bette C. Irelan Gaffney and Thomas H. Gaffney

ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED W O RK S.................................................v

PREFACE Defense Presentation....................................................................... viii

INTRODUCTION The Poet As Destiny: The Inauguration of Heidegger’s

Chapter One Synopsis............................................................................................................ 12

CHAPTER ONE “Together in the Same World”: Ambiguity and

Ambiguity and Community

CHAPTER TWO “Since we are a dialogue”: Holderlin’s Mediation

Chapter Three S ynopsis......................................................................................................102

CHAPTER THREE Holy Affliction and Fidelity to the Earth: Mourning,

Chapter Four Synopsis........................................................................................................150

CHAPTER FOUR The Poet As Dem igod....................................................................157

Appendix B “The Rhine,”

Appendix C The Poet As Destiny

The chapter “The Poet as Demigod” appeared in Continental Philosophy Review

bravery and competence.

Works by Heidegger in German

EHD Erlauterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Pages 1-

EM Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1966.

GA26 Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz.

GA29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 29/30.

GA39 Holderlins Hymnen »Germanien« und »Der Rhein«. Gesamtausgabe Bd.

GA52 Holderlins Hymne »Andenken«. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 42. Frankfurt:

GA53 Holderlins Hymne »DerIster«. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 53. Frankfurt:

GA65 Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Gesamtausgabe Bd. 65.

GA66 Besinnung. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 66. Frankfurt am Main, 1997.

H Holzwege. Klostermann, 1972.

SZ Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1967.

UK Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks. Introduction by Hans-Georg Gadamer.

B Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London:

EHP Elucidations o f Holderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. Amherst:

BT Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, N.Y: State

FCM The Fundamental Concepts o f Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude.

IM An Introduction into Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New

MFL The Metaphysical Foundations o f Logic. Translated by Michael Heim.

PLT Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York:

Dissertation Defense Presentation

The Poet As Destiny:

The Inauguration of Heidegger’s Dialogue with Holderlin