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humans to themselves and to everything around them. Thus we understand "to live the death of humans" and "to die the life of the gods" as a reciprocal, intertwining relationship of the self-understanding and understanding of being of gods and humans. The gods live the death of humans in the sense that they could only understand themselves as immortals in their perpetual being against the background of what is transient. They are only perpetual when, at the same time, they are referred to the sphere of change in time.
According to Fr. 62, gods and humans behave precisely not as in Holderlin's poem, "Hyperion's Song of Fate." "You walk above in the light, / Weightless tread a soft floor, blessed genii! / Radiant the gods' mild breezes / Gently play on you / As the girl artist's fingers / On holy strings. — Fateless the Heavenly breathe / Like an unweaned infant asleep; / Chastely preserved / In modest bud / For ever their minds / Are in flower / And their blissful eyes / Eternally tranquil gaze, / Eternally clear. — But we are fated / to find no foothold, no rest, / And suffering mortals / Dwindle and fall / Headlong from one / Hour to the next, I Hurled like water / From ledge to ledge / Downward for years to the vague abyss."28 Here the domain of the gods and the domain of humans are separated like two spheres that do not intertwine with each other, but lie opposite one another without mutual reference. High above in the light, the gods wander without destiny, their spirit eternally in bloom, while humans lead a restless life and fall into the cataract of time and disappear. The way in which Hölderlin here views the eternal life of the gods indicates that the view of mortals does not necessarily belong to the self-understanding of the gods. But if gods and humans do not form two separated domains, but rather form two domains turned toward each other, then we could apply the intertwining relationship to the beginning of Fr. 62, which ties mortals and immortals together with each other in a hard manner.
PARTICIPANT: The tying together of the gods' perpetual being and the being of humans wandering in time has its analogy in Goethe's thought of perdurance in oscillation [Dauer im Wechsel].
FINK: There is, however, a perdurance as constancy in time. Kant, for example, thought the continuation of the world stuff in roughly this manner.
PARTICIPANT: Goethe's thought of perdurance in oscillation does not mean constancy in time, but goes in the direction of Heraclitus' thoughts.
FINK: Still, we would first have to know to which passage of Goethe's you refer. For there is also perdurance that stands throughout oscillation like, for example, the world stuff of Kant, which does not itself pass away or come into being, but only appears as different. Thus, however, we think the relationship between substance and its attributes.