We must not, however, equate Hölderlin’s knowing of destiny with the Greek one. We must learn to use this essential German word to name an essential beyng in its true German content, and to do so in an essential manner, which also means: seldom.
Over and beyond our warding off such misapprehensions concerning how that beyng that is named by the word “destiny” is to be determined, it is also possible and necessary to say in which perspective we must think in Hölderlin’s poetizing in general in order to come to a correct understanding. What is thought under destiny is the beyng of the demigods—a beyng that is at the same time above the human and beneath the divine, and indeed in such a way that precisely human being and divine being in each case correspond in their own way to such being as destiny; that is, each has its own relationship to it. Only if beyng in the sense of destiny speaks to us is a correspondence possible that is appropriate to being, whether a correspondence to the human or to the gods (co-respondence in “dialogue”).
By contrast, beyng in the sense of destiny does not directly impart any correspondence to, for instance, the being of a boulder, of a rose, or of an eagle. We do indeed directly experience stone, plant, and animal as being. Yet who, when asked, would presume to say how things stand concerning the beyng of such beings? Does the boulder ‘have’ its beyng, just as it ‘has’ its extension, heaviness, hardness, and color? And where, then, does such beyng ‘reside’? And correspondingly in the case of the rose and the eagle: We can say one thing only, and that only on the basis of a very difficult argument: stone, plant, and animal are—but their ‘own’ beyng remains closed off to them as such beyng, and indeed in a different way each time for each of these beings. It is even precipitous to say that they have their ‘own’ beyng.
For us humans, by contrast, our beyng—that we are and how we are—is manifest to us in a certain way, yet not only, and not primarily, by our having knowledge of such beyng as something already established that we can ascertain, in the way that, for instance, we can take note of the fact that a tower stands on the Feldberg. Something like that does not affect us. But our beyng does affect us: we cannot be at all without our being affected by such being. Our being, however, is not that of an individuated subject, but rather, in accordance with what was said earlier (p. 126), it is historical being with one another as being in a world. That such being of the human being is in each case mine does not mean that such being is ‘subjectivized’—confined to the isolated individual and determined starting from him—but means only that in the first and last instance, and always, this historical being with one another of the human being must pass through decisions that no one can ever take from another.