Martin Heidegger's 1941–1942 lecture course on Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn, "Remembrance," delivered immediately following his confrontation with Nietzsche, lays out a detailed plan for the interpretation of Hölderlin's poetry in which remembrance is a central concern. With its emphasis on the "free use of the national" and the "holy of the fatherland," the course marks an important progression in Heidegger's political thought. In addition to its startlingly innovative analyses of greeting, the festive, and the dream, the text provides Heidegger's fullest elaboration of the structure of commemorative thinking in relationship to time and the possibility of an "other beginning." This English translation by William McNeill and Julia Ireland completes the series of Heidegger's major lecture courses on Hölderlin.
Martin Heidegger's 1941–1942 lecture course on Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn, "Remembrance," delivered immediately following his confrontation with Nietzsche, lays out a detailed plan for the interpretation of Hölderlin's poetry in which remembrance is a central concern. With its emphasis on the "free use of the national" and the "holy of the fatherland," the course marks an important progression in Heidegger's political thought. In addition to its startlingly innovative analyses of greeting, the festive, and the dream, the text provides Heidegger's fullest elaboration of the structure of commemorative thinking in relationship to time and the possibility of an "other beginning." This English translation by William McNeill and Julia Ireland completes the series of Heidegger's major lecture courses on Hölderlin.
Hölderlin's Hymn "Remembrance"
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Overview
Martin Heidegger's 1941–1942 lecture course on Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn, "Remembrance," delivered immediately following his confrontation with Nietzsche, lays out a detailed plan for the interpretation of Hölderlin's poetry in which remembrance is a central concern. With its emphasis on the "free use of the national" and the "holy of the fatherland," the course marks an important progression in Heidegger's political thought. In addition to its startlingly innovative analyses of greeting, the festive, and the dream, the text provides Heidegger's fullest elaboration of the structure of commemorative thinking in relationship to time and the possibility of an "other beginning." This English translation by William McNeill and Julia Ireland completes the series of Heidegger's major lecture courses on Hölderlin.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253035899 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2018 |
| Series: | Studies in Continental Thought |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 204 |
| File size: | 608 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
Part One
Entry into the Realm of the Poem as Word
§11. The beginning and conclusion of the poem
Der Nordost wehet,
"The northeasterly" — that wind is named which, in the broad regions of the Swabian homeland, sweeps and clears the sky with its biting coolness, clearing a space for the fire from the heavens, "the sun," a space in which its illumination and glow can unfold. This wind clears the air. In such an air, that which is cold, bold, and unerring opens up; this air directs us into the open distances, yet in such a way that it makes our vision steadfast and capable of seeing all things loom forth and repose, as their outline emerges from all haze and mist. This wind brings an assured transparency into the world, grants a pervasive constancy to the weather, and anchors our attunement. A later draft that may even be related to "Remembrance" also names the "northeasterly"; in this draft it is said of the migratory birds, of the "starlings" (IV, 257):
Und ihnen machet waker Scharfwehend die Augen der Nordost ...
And their eyes are made steadfast By the northeasterly's bite ...
"Remembrance" begins with the word "The northeasterly blows." This sounds like the ascertainment of a fact, although we are not told directly when it blows. Nor is it immediately clear where it blows. "The northeasterly blows" — and not the southwesterly. Is the northeasterly blowing now, as the poet begins to compose this poem? Is the first line meant, perhaps, to ascertain the direction of the wind at the time when Hölderlin is beginning to write down this poem? Perhaps everything is the other way round instead. The poem names the northeasterly, not because there is a northeasterly air at the moment of the poetic composition of this poem. Rather, it is because this entire poem must be said from out of that which it poetizes that there lies already over everything the cool clarity and pure decidedness of a simple knowing. This is why it must begin with the naming of the northeasterly.
"The northeasterly blows." This is neither the factual ascertaining of wind conditions, nor the description of a contingent weather situation, nor a "poetological" "framing" for subsequent "thoughts." "The northeasterly blows": with this first line there begins already the mystery. Indeed, this line contains the mystery of the entire poem. This first line resonates in every line that follows. As we transition from each strophe to the next, we must hear this line. This first line attains its full resonance only in the last line.
It might now appear as though we were looking for mysteries even in those places where "rational human beings" find none. And yet we must assert the following: "The northeasterly blows" — taken by itself, this word indeed leaves indeterminate the point in time and the location of that of which it speaks. Nevertheless, it names the time-space from out of which comes the attuning favor of the poetizing that is now needed and is yet to come, in order that this poetizing may fulfill its essence and that poets may be. "The northeasterly blows" — that is to say: the time-space of poetizing, of the poetizing that is also poetized in this poem, stands open. We avoid saying that the first line is an "image" for this "thought." We are indicating only that, if the first line says what we have named, then between the beginning of the poem and its conclusion there lies an essential relation that at once embraces this poem in its totality: "The northeasterly blows" — "Yet what remains, the poets found."
What stands between the first and last lines of this poem is drawn out discursively and in writing in the sequential ordering of its strophes. The sequence of lines is an accumulation of words, and yet we name what is said and what speaks as a whole "the word" of the poem — more precisely, the poem as this word. Because our pointer concerning Hölderlin's poem moves within this realm of the word, already with the first line we must give thought to something essential concerning the word and language.
§12. Concerning language: the poetizing word and sounding words
"Language" is the faculty of the word. What gets formed in the process of speaking we call the "words" of a language. Words [Wörter], however, are something other than the word [Worte]. The statements of the thinker Heraclitus, for example, indeed consist of words, yet we do not say "the words" of Heraclitus, but the word [die Worte]. There are words only where there is language. Yet language itself exists only where there is the word. The word is the origin of language. Yet what does this mean: "the word" as the origin of language? In the unfolding of this lecture course, we are to learn to give thought to some aspects of this question.
Language enunciates the word [Worte], and what is enunciated can disintegrate into "words." As a result of long habituation, we are all too inclined to determine the essence of language and of the word on the basis of such words, and thus also to interpret on this basis the relationship of the poem as a linguistic construction to what is poetized. We thus arrive at the view that that which is said, which is something poetized, is itself reproduced in the sequence of sounds and words of the poem.
And yet words [Wörter] are never reproductions or copies of that which they signify. Onomatopoeic words [Worte] like "cuckoo," "buzz," "whizz," or "hiss" appear to contradict this. Yet even the articulated sound "cuckoo" is a word only whenever we mean and say "the" cuckoo: what this "the" means, and what it conveys and imparts to the articulated sound "cuckoo" — none of this lies within the mere sounding of the reproduced call of the bird, no matter how often, or how loud, or how imitative this sound resonates. Nonetheless, sound and sounding do belong in a certain manner to the "word" ["Wort"]; indeed, the way in which the sounds, the vowels, and the consonants are conjoined also in one respect contributes to the form of what we tend to call "the beauty" of a "language."
Why do we mention such "things"? To indicate that the essence of the word [des Wortes] (of words [der Wörter] and of the word [der Worte]) is indeed familiar to us in certain aspects, yet in truth is altogether hidden from us. For this very reason we find it difficult to grasp the unity of the sounding words and the poetizing word, as we simultaneously let ourselves enter the sequence of lines and strophes and nevertheless maintain a relation to that which is poetized in the poetizing word.
When we say "and nevertheless," then this seems to confirm an opposition between the word-form of the poetizing and that which is poetized. We may be of the opinion that that which is poetized is a separate "spiritual meaning," and the verbal sound [Wortlaut] of the poem its contingent "sensuous image" ["Sinnbild"]. Ever since Plato, the entire Western view of art has stood under the force of this distinction between "suprasensuous" and "sensuous." The "sensuous image" — as symbol — has the task of bringing the two together and conjoining them. "Language" itself becomes forced into this schema too, such that the articulated sound of the word is conceived as the "body," and the meaning of the word, on the other hand, as the "soul" or "spirit" of language.
§13. Language in our historical moment
Our relation to language, to words and to the word, has for a long time been confused, indeterminate, and without grounding. Language is like some present at hand thing; why should it, too, not be exploited as an instrument of "organization" and as something human beings arm themselves with, and be secured as a means of power and as a form of domination? No one today can exclude himself from this process, which is "metaphysical" in nature and remains withdrawn from the predilection, negligence, and zeal of the individual.
For this process of the "instrumentalization" of language does not have to proceed in a purely negative manner. Within this same sphere, it can call forth a countermovement that strives for a new "instrumentation" of language in order to achieve for it the highest degree of "accuracy." This relationship to language, which is, for example, embodied by Ernst Jünger, still belongs entirely to that metaphysical space determined by Nietzsche's interpretation of being as will to power. Just like "film," language is a way of arming oneself, a way through which the "Gestalt of the Worker" comes to dominate the "world." The word as a weapon of the highest order and of the deepest concern is distinguished only in degree, and not according to its essence, from the word in its Americanized form, which, in piecing together the first letters of its syllables and component parts, turns both the Auswärtige Amt [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] and the Aufklärungs- Abteilung [Instructional Division] into the "AA."
This technical instrumentation of the essence of language itself plays a role in shaping our historical moment. In a metaphysical, historical moment that is determined in this waywe must indeed be instructed about our relationship — or distorted relationship — to language and to the word. It may then become clear to us that it is only through patient effort that we arrive at the path whereby we may apprehend Hölderlin's poem as the poetizing of what has been poetized.
§14. Preliminary consideration of the unity of the poem
To our immediate, indeterminate hearing, the first line, "The northeasterly blows," names an isolated occurrence within "nature" that can be sensuously experienced. To our fleeting reflection, the last line, "Yet what remains, the poets found," names an essential law in the supreme realm of "spirit"––if, for the purpose of a preliminary understanding, we are permitted to speak of "nature" and "spirit" in such general terms. Yet at the same time it became evident that the first line is not a description of nature, but rather names the favor of the poetic and its time-space. Correspondingly, the concluding line perhaps does not simply give us a didactic "sententia" about the essence of poetry, but, in speaking of what remains, in fact names "nature," without thereby depicting something that can be experienced.
When in advance we retrace the poem from its beginning and from its end in the direction of its as yet concealed unity, our inner ear is already becoming more concentrated. Even that which at first only appears as a tranquil description, "The northeasterly blows," will in the future, from time to time, become fuller and have more to say.
"The northeasterly blows." This is an unconditioned event, which here stands immediately in the word, and consequently is. "The northeasterly blows." Its blowing is arrival, and is a going that points and carries off into something futural. Everything is replete with coming. The title "Remembrance" becomes less and less fitting:
Der Nordost wehet,
The northeasterly is singled out before all other winds. "Most beloved ... to me ..." Here Hölderlin speaks of himself. Certainly. But is it the I who is speaking and who judges the different winds and weather conditions in relation to the personal state he finds himself in? Is Hölderlin here expressing his "sensitivity to nature" through a depiction of nature in which the thought of the wind also plays a role? "Most beloved ... to me ..." With this "me" Hölderlin indeed means himself. Yet the I who speaks of itself there is not Hölderlin the person. The basis of this predilection for the northeasterly is not to be found in the personal leanings, wants, or biographical relationships of the human being Hölderlin; for the grounds for this predilection for the northeasterly, which immediately follow in the next lines, can in no way be traced back to the personal taste and "mode of lived experience" of Hölderlin the human being, and not at all to the mental or physical state that an individual human being finds himself in. Rather, the northeasterly is the most beloved of the winds "to me":
... weil er feurigen Geist Und gute Fahrt verheißet den Schiffern.
... for it promises fiery spirit And good voyage to mariners.
The northeasterly is named, and is singled out as the most beloved, in view of its relation to "mariners." Who are the "mariners"? Men, in any case, for whom the northeasterly is a promise, which is to say: advance notice, assurance, bestowal. All this in a twofold way: The northeasterly points the direction to where the spirit is fiery, and at the same time it carries and brings those who set forth into a "good voyage."
REVIEW
We have now taken our first step over the threshold in our attempt to interpret Hölderlin's poetry. The threshold is the place of transition in stepping from one domain into another. The domain familiar to us is the poem as a thing present at hand, as it were: the written, read, spoken phonetic construction. This is what lies before us; it is we who have the poem at our disposal and can make of it what we will. There has lately been talk of the "handling of poetry."
The other domain is the poem as the word, which we do not have before us, but that instead, proceeding from itself, is to take us up into the space of its truth. The word is never something we can "handle"; instead, the word will either "affect" us or pass right over us.
Both these domains, that of the linguistic construction present at hand and that of the word, would however never be captured if we were to conceive the former as the exterior and the latter as the interior. For this distinction between "outside" and "inside" still falls within that first domain, insofar as one attributes to the linguistic construction a meaning that it bears "within" itself as its "content."
Yet we are seeking something different here, something that will in general presumably entail a transformation in the relation of the word to ourselves. It is questionable whether such a transformation may be ventured outside the domain of Hölderlin's word. For this word, as the word of his hymnal poetizing, is singular, in a sense that is itself singular in turn. This word is like a solitary mountain range that, rising from an exigency that has emerged, first opens another space of truth around itself. Nothing in this poetizing is embellishment, and there are no blank spaces. This word is not a statement "about" something to someone who might assume power over the word.
We ourselves can no longer gauge the fact that our relation to the "word" is completely disrupted, and has been for decades, through the rampant production of idle scribble, through groundless idle talk and through idle and indiscriminate reading. For this reason we should also not expect to regain this relation to the word at a stroke, for instance by bringing into play our so-called "direct lived experience" when encountering a poem by Hölderlin. Heartfelt sensitivity and artistic intuition are fine things. Yet the question remains whether such recourse to "lived experience," even when it is genuine, does not in fact still remain within our already disrupted relation to the word, and thus is capable neither of recognizing, nor of overcoming this disruption.
To now reach even just the perimeter of the sphere of Hölderlin's word, a different and higher-level exertion is required, one that must pass through the clarity of a particular knowing. Such exertion is, among other things, reflected in the laboriousness of our interpretation. You may very well run up against this laboriousness. Well and good. You may very well consider this all an intellectual violation of the "artistic," which after all, as one hears, remains reserved in the first place for the domain of "feeling" and of "taste." Well and good. Yet you may also one day want to check whether a light has not suddenly been turned on for you as a result of this conceptual laboriousness.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hölderlin's Hymn "Remembrance""
by .
Copyright © 1992 Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Translators' Foreword
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
Preparation for Hearing the Word of the Poetizing
1. What the Lecture Course Does Not Intend. On Literary-Historiographical Research and the Arbitrary Interpretation of Poetry
2. The Attempt to Think the Word Poetized by Hölderlin
3. That Which is Poetized in the Word of Essential Poetizing 'Poetizes Over and Beyond' the Poet and Those Who Hear this Word
4. The Essential Singularity of Hölderlin's Poetizing is Not Subject to Any Demand for Proof
5. The Poetizing Word and Language as Means of Communication. Planetary Alienation in Relation to the Word
Review
1) 'Thinking' That Which is Poetized
2) Hearing That Which is Poetized is Hearkening: Waiting for the Coming of the Inceptual Word
6. The Univocity of 'Logic' and the Wealth of the Genuine Word Out of the Inexhaustibility of the Commencement
7. Remark on the Editions of Hölderlin's Works
MAIN PART
"Remembrance"
8. A Word of Warning about Merely Admiring the Beauty of the Poem
9. Establishing a Preliminary Understanding About 'Content' and What is Poetized in the Poem
Review
1) The Wealth of the Poetizing Word
2) Poetizing and Thinking as Historical Action
3) The Transformation of the Biographical in That Which is Poetized
10. That Which is Poetized in the Poetizing and the 'Content' of the Poem are Not the Same
Part One
Entry into the Realm of the Poem as Word
11. The Beginning and Conclusion of the Poem
12. Concerning Language: The Poetizing Word and Sounding Words
13. Language in Our Historical Moment
14. Preliminary Consideration of the Unity of the Poem
Review
15. Poetizing and the Explanation of Nature in Modernity. On the Theory of 'Image' and 'Metaphor'
16. "The Northeasterly blows." The Favor of Belonging to the Vocation of Poet
17. The "Greeting." On the Dangerous Addiction to Psychological-Biographical Explanation
18. Norbert von Hellingrath on "Hölderlin's Madness." Commemoration of von Hellingrath
19. Hölderlin's De-rangement as Entering the Range of a Different Essential Locale
20. The "Going" of the Northeasterly. The "Greeting" of the Poet's Going with It
Review
21. Transition From the First to the Second Strophe. The Greeting Thinking-in-the-Direction-Of as the Letting Be of the Greeted. The Greeted Thinks Its Way To the Poet
22. In the Unity of That Which is Greeted, Gathered by the Poet's Greeting, the Day's Work and Stead of Human Dwelling Arise
Part Two
"Holidays" and "Festival" in Hölderlin's Poetizing
23. Preliminary Hints From Citing 'Passages' In the Poetry
Review
24. Celebrating as Pausing From Work and Passing Over into Reflection upon the Essential
25. The Radiance of the Essential Within Celebration. Play and Dance
26. The Essential Relation Between Festival and History. The "Bridal Festival" of Humans and Gods
27. The Festive as Origin of Attunements. Joy and Mournfulness: The Epigram "Sophocles"
Review
1) Celebration as Becoming Free in Belonging to the Inhabitual
2) Improbable Celebration in the Echo of What is 'Habitual' in a Day: The First Strophe of the Elegy "Bread and Wine"
3) "The Festival" and the Appropriative Event. The Festival of the Day of History in Greece. Hölderlin and Nietzsche
28. The Greeting of the Women. Their Role in Preparing the Festival. The Women of Southern France and the Festival that Once Was in Greece
Review
29. Transition as Reconciliation and Equalization
30. "Night": Time-Space of a Thinking Remembering the Gods that Once Were Transition in Receiving the Downgoing and Preparing the Dawn
31. Gods and Humans as Fitting Themselves to What is Fitting. That Which is Fitting and Fate
32. How Fate is Viewed Within the Calculative Thinking of Metaphysics, and "Fate" in Hölderlin's Sense
33. The Festival as Equalizing the While for Fate
34. The Transition from What Once Was in Greece into That Which is to Come: The Veiled Truth of the Hymnal Poetizing
Review
1) The Provenance of the Poetized Transition. The "Demigods" Called into the Transition. Hegel and Hölderlin
2) What is Fitting for Humans and Gods is the Holy. The Fitting of the Jointure as Letting-be
3) Fitting as Releasing into the Search for Essence and the Loss of Essence. Errancy and Evil
4) The Temporal Character of the "While," and the Metaphysical Concept of Time
35. "Lulling Breezes": Sheltering in the Origin, the Ownmost of Humans and Gods. "Golden Dreams"
36. Interim Remark Concerning Scientific Explanations of Dreams
37. The Dream. That Which Is Dreamlike as the Unreal or Nonexistent
38. Greek Thought on the Dream. Pindar
Review
39. The Dream as Shadow-like Appearing of Vanishing into the Lightless. Presencing and Absencing
40. The Possible as Presencing of Vanishing from, and as Appearing of Arrival Within 'Reality' (Beyng)
41. Hölderlin's Treatise "Becoming in Dissolution." Dream as Bringing the Possible and Preserving the Transfigured Actual
Part Three
The Search for the Free Use of One's Own
42. Hesitant Awe Before the Transition onto "Slow Footbridges"
Review
43. Greece and Germania: The Banks and Sides of the Transition Toward Learning What is Historically One's Own
44. One's Own as the Holy of the Fatherland, Inaccessible to Theologies and Historiographical Sciences. The "Highest"
45. The Transition From the Second to the Third Strophe. Grounding in the Homely
46. Interim Remark Concerning Three Misinterpretations of Hölderlin's Turn to the "Fatherland"
47. Learning the Appropriation of One's Own
48. What is Their Own for the Germans: "The Clarity of Presentation"
49. The Drunkenness of Higher Reflection and Soberness of Presentation in the Word
50. "Dark Light": That Which is to be Presented in the Free Use of One's Own
51. The Danger of Slumber Among Shadows. "Soulful" Reflection Upon the Holy in the Festival
Part Four
The Dialogue with the Friends as Fitting Preparation for the Festival
52. "Dialogue" in the Commonplace Understanding and in Hölderlin's Poetic Word Usage
53. The "Opinion" of the "Heart" in the Dialogue: The Holy
54. Listening in the Dialogue to Love and Deed, which, as Celebration, Ground the Festival in Advance
55. The Endangering of the Poetic Dialogue of Love and Deeds by Chatter
56. The Poetic Dialogue as "Remembrance"
57. The Question of Where the Friends Are, and the Essence of Future Friendship
58. The Friends' Being Shy to Go to the Source
59. "Source" and "River." The Wealth of the Origin
60. The Initial Appropriation of "Wealth" on the Poets' Voyage Across the Ocean into the Foreign
61. The "Year Long" Learning of the Foreign on the Ocean Voyage of a Long Time Without Festival
62. The Singular Remembrance of the Locale of the Friends and of the Fitting that is to be Poetized
63. The Word Regarding the River that Goes Backwards: The Shy Intimation of the Essence of Commencement and History
64. The Passage to the Foreign, "Bold Forgetting" of One's Own, and the Return Home
65. The Founding of the Coming Holy in the Word
APPENDIX
The Interpretive Structure for the Said Poems
Editor's Epilogue
Translators' Notes
German—English Glossary
English—German Glossary
What People are Saying About This
This faithful and readable translation by William McNeill and Julia Ireland serves as a critical orientation to interpreting Heidegger's later thought, which has become the focus of a great deal of scholarly interest. In Heidegger's own words, Hölderlin's poetry is "absolutely essential" to understanding his later thought. --Christopher D. Merwin, Emory University
This faithful and readable translation by William McNeill and Julia Ireland serves as a critical orientation to interpreting Heidegger's later thought, which has become the focus of a great deal of scholarly interest. In Heidegger's own words, Hölderlin's poetry is 'absolutely essential' to understanding his later thought.