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Poets and Rivers: Heidegger on Hölderlin's “Der Ister”*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Julian Young
Julian Young
Affiliation:
University of Aukland
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Extract

Between 1934 and 1942 Heidegger delivered three series of lectures on Hölderlin's poetry. The discussion of “Der Ister” was the last of these, although Heidegger continued to think and write about Hölderlin into the 1960s (see GA 4). William McNeill and Julia Davis's recent translation of the “Ister”—volume (GA 53)—is the first of the Hölderlin lectures to appear in English.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , Spring 1999 , pp. 391 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1999

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References

Notes

1 Gesamtausgabe, Vols. 39, 52, and 53 (Frankfurt a.M: Klostermann, 1978–); hereafter referred to as “GA” followed by the appropriate number.

2 McNeill and Davis have made a fine job of an extraordinarily difficult task. Though sticking as closely as possible to the sentence- and even wordstructure of the original, they manage to present an English text that is about as close as it is possible to get to the German original. The four or five points at which I question their translations I shall mention as I come to them.

3 Ziegler, Suzanne, Heidegger, Hölderlin und die Aletheia (Berlin: Duncker u. umblot, 1991), p. 224.Google Scholar

4 Pöggeler, Otto, Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987), p. 189.Google Scholar

5 This point should be taken quite literally. Take, for instance, the troublesome word “found” (stiffen). Heidegger frequently says things like “the homeland (or the polls) is founded by the poet,” which has led many to the conviction that he proposes a kind of inverted Platonism, a poet-dictator (see my Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], chap. 4)Google Scholar. To understand how far this is from the truth, one needs to recognize that Heidegger takes over “found” from Hölderlin's line, “Yet what remains the poet founds” (p. 151—hereafter unadorned page numbers refer to the McNeill and Davis volume) and then to investigate, in its entirety, his Hölderlin-inspired account of the poet, the poet's vocation, and the poet's relation to Being, gods, and community.

6 In his celebrated Heidegger critique, Of Spirit, Jacques Derrida argues that the ground of Heidegger's involvement with Nazism was his entanglement in the Metaphysics of Geist. Only at the end of his career, and then only partially, did Heidegger see the need to “deconstruct” the idea of spirit as substance. The real deconstruction, he implies, is carried out in his own work. (See my Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, chap. 3, section 17.) Evidently, Derrida never read the “Ister” lectures.

7 Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 15–89.Google Scholar

8 Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism.

9 Caro, Adrian del, Hölderlin: the Poetics of Being (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 62Google Scholar: “The prefix father when attached [in German] to locations like house or city indicates one's origins; German Vaterhaus corresponds to one's paternal house, while Vaterstadt corresponds to one's home or native town. It is later on in nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century Germany that Vaterland assumes the political, nationalistic dimensions that make Hölderlin's poems superficially suspect.”

10 Heidegger vigorously resists this way of putting things (pp. 16–20) but is, I elieve, mistaken in doing so. Using the term “symbolic image” (Sinnbild) to cover image, allegory, symbol (Symbole), simile, and metaphor (the distinctions here, he suggests, are vague and “fluid” [p. 16]), he claims that to say the language of poetry is essentially imagistic is to commit oneself to the view that poetry is essentially the presentation in sensuous (sinnlich) terms of something that is, in itself, non-sensuous, i.e., “suprasensuous,” i.e., “spiritual,” i.e., Platonic. But while the broad sweep of Western art has, indeed, been committed to the “metaphysics” of Platonism, it is a perversion of an essentially non-“metaphysical” poet to read this into Hölderlin.

Rather evidently, however, the “i.e.”s here represent, not necessary connections, but, at best, linkages that have frequently been made in the history of Western art and aesthetics. Moreover, Heidegger himself—who holds, as we will see, that truly significant poetry (such as Hölderlin's) evokes, “poeticizes,” Being—writes, later on (referring, evidently, to Greek poetry), that “mythology,” far from being “some doctrine of the gods invented by humans because they are not yet mature enough to do exact physics and chemistry,” is the way in which “Being itself comes to appear poetically,” and, as such, stands in an “originary (ursprunglich)” relation to his own “essential thinking” (p. 111). He himself holds, therefore, that poetry is essentially “mythological.” Since he offers “legends and fairy tales” as instances of allegory (p. 16) he is thus, in fact, committed to the view that great poetry is essentially imagistic. There is a great deal more to be said on this topic.

11 New Zealand poets James K. Baxter, Sam Hunt, and Gary McCormack, for instance—perhaps New World poets in general— are particularly conscious of this vocation. McCormick named his 1995 TVNZ series of celebrations of uniquely New Zealand locations “Heartland”-poetically speaking, perhaps he closest English can get to “Heimat.”

12 At one place, Heidegger betrays this distinction. Though he here describes “Americanism” (see, further, section 11 below) as unhistorical (ungeschichtlich), earlier (p. 55) he had described it as a historical (geschichtslos). Presumably the point of the later correction is to cancel the unintended implication that Americans are Untermenschen.

13 See Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, chap. 3.

14 Heidegger wishes us to hear, here, the connection between Statt (places, stead) and gestattet (to be permitted).

15 Heidegger speaks of pre-Socratic Greece as the place where “something like a commencement” (p. 55), the “commencement” of the West happened, but he does not, of course, mean to deny the debt of Greece to pre- and non-Hellenic cultures. The claim is, rather, that the distinctively Western unity of art, thought, religion, morals, politics, the law, and so on—this “relationship …. between the relationships”—first happened in Greece.

16 Making a related point in the context of warning against understanding Antigone too quickly through the lens of Christianity, Heidegger points out hat, in Greece, there were no “silent sufferers,” no “martyrs” (p. 103).

17 Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 44, 18.Google Scholar

18 Gary Wills points out that pre-modern cities always had a sacred centre. In Greece, “a temple, an arx (citadel), a hearth fire, an acropolis,” in Mediaeval times a holy tomb (St. Peter's in Rome, St. Markés in Venice), a relic (St. John he Baptist's arm in Florence), or a patron saint (London being the city of St. Paul, Paris of Our Lady). By contrast, he suggests, “There is no more defining note in our [America's] history than the total absence of a sacred city on our soil. We never had a central cultic place.” Hence, America is a culture of “departures, not arrivals” (of, that is, homelessness), a culture epitomized by John Wayne and the Wild West (Wills, Gary, “American Adam,” New York Review of Books, 64, 4 [1993]: 30–33)Google Scholar. Though I am sympathetic to Wills's point, I am inclined to believe that he is overfocused on the idea of an institutionally provided “centre” of holiness. In a rural community, for example, it may be the landscape (or riverscape)—something non-institutional, that is— which provides the community with its source of “radiance.” In the city, it may perhaps be that there are many different institutionally constituted “centres” through which different citizens gain access to the sacredness of their place.

19 See my Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 3, sections 7–11.

20 It might be suggested that the foregoing discussion plays upon an insidious duality within the notion of Heimat. On the one hand, it is said to be the locus of ultimate security, which is the ground of its being required to be a holy place. On the other, it is das Eigene, the place whose ethical commitments I take as my commitments on account of my belonging there. But surely, it may be said, I can belong somewhere, yet fail to find, in the defined sense, ultimate security. (Positivists can find a Heimat, too!) Hence, commitment and holiness fall apart. The background to Heidegger's implicit assumption that one can only truly belong where one also finds ultimate security is the theme from §53 of Being and Time that death “individualizes.” Unless we can “overcome” death, we will see that “all being-with others [in thepolis] will fail us when our ownmost potentiality-for-being is the issue.”

21 See Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, p. 39.

22 In the Phaedrus, Plato complains about the lack of system in the rhetorical practice of the sophists, and he takes himself to be the inventor of the method of “collection and division” which is what is needed to turn rhetoric and psychology from mere knacks into sciences.

23 It might be asked why this journey into the foreign should be the poet's journey, given that what the early Greeks suffered from was, in effect, anexcess of “poetry.” The answer is that Heidegger has simply made a mistake, one of several mistakes which have their source in the attempt to contain everything he wishes to say qua philosopher within the rubric of Hölderlin-exposition. Hölderlin's own journey of appropriation, the journey described by “Der Ister,” is, indeed, a poet's journey. But not every instancing of Hölderlin's law needs to, or can, have the character of Hölderlin's own instancing of it.

24 This comes from Karl Lowith's report of his meeting with Heidegger in Rome in 1936; see Wolin, R., ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 142Google Scholar. To be compared with it is Heidegger's remark about the “frenzy” of the “unrestricted organization of the average man” in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Manheim, R. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 37Google Scholar. The full import of this remark depends on the long passage which runs from pp. 37–50.

25 The powerful echoes, here, of Being and Time's account, in §26, of authentic “care” for others as the kind of relationship which “frees the other in his freedom for himself” suggest that Heidegger had long been in possession of this account of the proper relationship between oneself and the (personal or suprapersonal) other.

26 See Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, chap. 5, for bibliographical references.

27 Ibid., chap. 3, §14 ff.

28 I have altered McNeill and Davis's translation for reasons given in the next note.

29 The German here is “überragend.” McNeill and Davis translate it in terms of “looming over.” To my ear, however, that which “looms over” is not a possible object of “honour.”

30 Wright, Kathleen, “Heidegger's Hölderlin and the Mo(u)rning of History,” Philosophy Today, 37 (Winter 1993): 423–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wright suggests that there is no genuine etymological connection between the two words, that the overlap is merely phonemic. But this invalidates Heidegger's point no more than the point that motivates the feminists' replacement of the “his” by “her” in “history” is invalidated by the fact of a merely phonemic overlap between “his” and “history.”

31 See Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, chap. 1, §6.

32 Ibid., see “Afterword.”

33 Quoted in Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy, p. 48 (cf. p. 50).

34 In Schneeberger, G., ed., Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern: Suhr, 1962), pp. 258–62Google Scholar; also in GA 13, pp. 15–21.

35 Der Deutschen. McNeill and Davis have “for the Germans,” but, to my ear, this reading of the genitive produces a result more opaque than is necessary.

36 See note 14 above.

37 Heidegger writes that, since the essence of modernity is world-disclosure or “spirit,” it is childish to suppose we could turn history back to a pretechnological era. Then he says, according to McNeill and Davis's translation, “All that remains is to unconditionally actualize this spirit so that we simultaneously come to know the essence of its truth” (p. 53). This, however, seems to me a mistranslation of “Es bleibt nur die unbedingte Verwirklichung dieses Geistes…” which actually says, “All that remains is the unconditional actualization of this spirit.” The point is important, since, as well as rendering the passage incoherent, the mistranslation plays into the hands of those who try to argue that, before Stalingrad, Heidegger adopted a position of Nietzschean, “positive,” epoch-concluding nihilism in order to provide an enthusiastic, philosophical rationalization of the German war effort (see Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, chap. 5).