If, however, beings can thus never be grasped one-sidedly, then the naming of beings and the saying of beyng finds itself in a peculiar difficulty, above all wherever being as a whole and in its essence is to be said and made manifest. For a word indeed names a being in such or such a way, for example, in Fragment 67: God—war. The word makes the being manifest. Yet at the same time it also conceals, if we stick to this naming taken on its own. For the God is equally ‘peace.’ For this reason, the authentic, essential saying of beings is of a properly primordial kind: It is originarily that kind of saying that is proper to the gods. See Fragment 93:
ὁ ἄναξ, οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει.
“The lord, whose oracle is at Delphi [the God Apollo], neither says, nor does he conceal, but rather beckons.” Originary saying neither merely makes beings directly manifest, nor does it simply conceal them altogether. Rather, this saying is both together in one, and as this one is a beckoning—in which what is said points to the unsaid, and what is unsaid to what is said and to be said—the elements that stand in conflict to the harmony that they are, the harmony to the conflict within which alone harmony oscillates.
‘Beckonings are the language of the gods,’2 we heard earlier from Hölderlin (p 31). This echo of Heraclitus is not accidental. In his poetizing that founds being, Hölderlin’s entire thinking and understanding of beyng was subject to the power of Heraclitus, and remained so from his student years in Tübingen to the years of his greatest creativity and well beyond. The wisdom of Heraclitus was condensed in an almost formulaic manner into the words of Fragment 50: ἓν πάντα εἶναι—One is all. But “One” does not mean uniformity, empty sameness, and “all” does not mean the countless multitude of arbitrary things: rather, ἕν, “One” = harmony, is all—that which arises in each case essentially constitutes beings as a whole as diverse and in conflict with one another.
The power of Heraclitean thought over the poet’s existence [Dasein] is attested to by the fact that well into the period in which the gods with their lightning flashes had spared him already and placed him under the protection of what we, with our fragile and short-sighted standards, call ‘mental illness,’ the poet still had to struggle with that saying, ἓν πάντα.
From the summer of 1807 until his death in the summer of 1843 Hölderlin lived in Tübingen with the carpenter Zimmer. In the 1820s
2. “Rousseau,” IV, 135, lines 39f.