Hölderlin as Destiny?

Julia A. Ireland

Then humans and gods the bridal festival celebrate.
All the living celebrate.
And fate [das Schicksal] is
Evened out for a while.
Hölderlin, “The Rhine”

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On the 1963 recording of his reading Hölderlin, Heidegger begins with remarks about “hearing” the poems he has selected. The needle has barely touched the vinyl when a thin voice, Heidegger’s voice, irrupts from the distance of a technological apparatus to which he has said “yes”: “Will we ever realize it? Hölderlin’s poetry is for us a destiny. It waits for mortals to correspond [entsprechen] to it” (GA 4: 195/224 tm). Heidegger repeats the above sentence before ending his remarks with the pronouncement that the “peal” (Klang) of the poems – they are Gesang – he will so carefully intone “call[s] into the turning [Wende] of time” (GA 4: 197/226).

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At a key moment in “Das abendländische Gespräch” (1946–48), which Heidegger wrote as a dialogue between a “Young Man” and an “Old Man” walking the Danube (and enacting the generational handing down of “destiny,” Geschick, described in §74 of Being and Time), the conversation turns to the will and to whether their dialogue about poetry can bring about “a transformed essential relation to the human being.” The Old Man suggests that such a transformation “can happen [geschehen] only from out of beyng itself. This must come to appear differently” (GA 75: 81).¹ The exchange continues:

Young Man   Something different [ein Anderes] must come to appear differently and must address itself [sich ansprechen] to us.

Old Man     But what if it were the case that this has already happened through Hölderlin’s singular poetry?

Mortals’ co-responding to, and thereby answering the address of “the something different” that is singular, waits, and has already happened, is my definition of what Heidegger means by Schicksal. Hölderlin announces and is this destiny, and the destiny he names is the “bridal festival” (Brautfest) of gods and human beings as the coming to appear of “measure” on Earth, or what Heidegger terms “the fitting” (das Schickliche). This nuptial is a “whiling” (weilen), whose turn in time is Ereignis in its finitude as epochal sending.

Yet have we understood this conception of destiny in order to judge whether it is “palatable,” “persuasive” or “subject to political misuse”? For what is at stake in this conception is language, Earth, and singularity as the articulation of mortal finitude. That is, the event of difference per se, whose dirty opposite is the willed supremacy of a “destiny” derived from a teleological conception of time.

Heidegger’s lifelong dialogue with Hölderlin occupies a decisive middle position between his analysis of destiny in §74 of Being and Time, which foundered on the question of shared destiny, and his later meditations on epochality, e.g. The Principle of Reason. Hölderlin as Schicksal is not Heidegger talking up the machinery of destiny (which he does in every Hölderlin volume) but is the concrete, factical and communal articulation of Geschick, whose sending is the address that language, interpolated into its historical singularity, answers by way of a people. This may indeed be unpalatable both because it does not privilege the human and because it confers absolute authority to the poet, whose inaugurating of a coming to appear is the originary founding of the political before all politics. (Even in 1933 Hitler was third in the line of Heideggerian creative succession.) For Heidegger, the configuration of Hölderlin’s “who” anticipated the ambiguity of the current historical epoch – the possibility of “the holy” (das Heilige) as read against Gestell – and projectively realized the turning in the sending of the event of disclosure itself “differently,” explicitly naming that “differently” as “destiny.” Does this install a metanarrative? I’m not sure this question can make sense since destiny’s narrative track is destiny’s failure to arrive, whose critical force is to hold open the space of a still radically unthinkable alternative. Heidegger intended its sending as the way out of the dead end of the ascendency of subjectivity through the will, whose “political misuse” today goes by the name “power,” whether in the guise of “Make America Great Again” or bad readings of Foucault.

But destiny is power, Macht. The question is, in what sense? Heidegger’s Hölderlin interpretation is on a continuum with §74 and his analyses of epochality in the disclosure of death as an experience of limitation and the temporalizing coming toward of “what has been” (das Gewesene) from out of the future. I am thus not sure that we can be released from thinking the nature of destiny without evacuating the entirety of Heidegger’s philosophical project. Consistent with Being and Time, the Hölderlin volumes make clear that every conception of destiny requires a confrontation with – and knowledge of – death. The operative insight here is not biological superiority, a reactive cultural chauvinism, or technological and economic supremacy. It is creative impotence. (And this aligns destiny with the tragic.) Like a good tyrant we mistake this conception at our peril: destiny is not just persuasive, it is the very structure of that which is inescapable. If this constitutes destiny, then I agree with Heidegger on two points: I do not believe human beings can author their own self-limitation, and I would only trust an angel (poet) with such power, who could wield it only because he is wielded by it.

The disclosivity of Hölderlin’s poetry, which both is and prepares the time-space of “the holy,” implicates knowledge of death within ecstatic temporality by way of the (possible) arrival of the coming gods, whose return is awaited on Earth. The Heideggerian response to both nostalgia and nihilism, this is an abandonment whose pain is the posing of the question of the possibility of the future. Not which future, as though this were some decisionistic choice, but the future temporalized as “urgency” (Not). Such co-implication, or “co-respondence,” as the event of difference between gods and human beings, and between humans beings bound to an Earth in common (in 1934 “destiny” as Fatherland; in 2020 “destiny” as climate change, thanks to the West), is what Heidegger means by destiny as “nuptial.” The wedding is the coming to appear and enjoining of “what is fitting” in the singularity of its finitude and prevailing of measure. Its “whiling” signals the turning of time, the kairotic Augenblick reconceived as Ereignis, whose finitude enacts a hospitality in which each thing is “given into” (geschickt) its own. To say Hölderlin is destiny is to say the ethopoetic as “poetic dwelling.”

What is this conception “other” to? The ordering of Gestell, the sovereignty of calculability (to which democracy as a form is inadequate), and the temporalizing of a future whose destinal-teleological turning in time is apocalyptic. Can there be a political guarantee urgency is read correctly as it oscillates between fear and hope? No. And what hangs in the balance is, singularly, Earth.

Notes

1 This exchange is the transition to the dialogue’s explicit introduction of destiny, which becomes its guiding concern. Several lines later the Old Man says: “You mean to say that the resounding of [Hölderlin’s] song in our age and for future ages is itself a fate [Schicksal] that is not dependent upon human capacity and will but rather is hidden and conserved in the destiny [Geschick] of Beyng” (GA 75: 82).