Studies in Continental Thought

Martin Heidegger, William McNeill, Julia Ireland

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253035899
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

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.

Part One

Entry into the Realm of the Poem as Word

§11. The beginning and conclusion of the poem

Der Nordost wehet,

Der liebste unter den Winden

Mir, weil er feurigen Geist

Und gute Fahrt verheißet den Schiffern.

The northeasterly blows,

Most beloved of the winds

To me, for it promises fiery spirit

And good voyage to mariners.

“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].^[3] 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.^[4] 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 way we 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translators’ Foreword
• Preliminary Considerations: Preparation for hearing the word of the poetizing
• Main Part: “Remembrance”
• Part One: Entry into the Realm of the Poem as Word
• Part Two: “Holidays” and “Festival” in Hölderlin’s Poetizing
• Part Three: The Search for the Free Use of One’s Own
• Part Four: The Dialogue with the Friends as Fitting Preparation for the Festival
• Appendix: The Interpretive Structure for the Said Poems
• Editor’s Epilogue
• Translators’ Notes
• German–English Glossary
• English–German Glossary