PATHMARKS
And finally "nature" becomes the word for what is not only above everything "elemental" and everything human, but even above the gods. Thus Hölderlin says in the hymn, "As when on feast day ..." (third verse):
Now breaks the day! I yearned for it and saw it come.
And my word for what I saw shall be the Holy.
For nature herself, more ancient than the ages
And above the gods of East and West,
Has awakened with the clang of a warrior's arms.
And from aether on high to abyss below
By unswerving law as once from frightful Chaos born,
She feels herself again renewed,
The Inspirer, the All-creating.
(Here "nature" becomes the name for what is above the gods and "more ancient than the ages" in which beings always come to be. "Nature" becomes the word for "being": being is prior to all beings, for they owe what they are to being. And the gods likewise: to the degree that they are, and however they are, they too all stand under "being.")
Here beings as a whole are not misinterpreted "naturalistically" and reduced to "nature" in the sense of matter endowed with force, nor is this whole "mystically" obscured and dissolved into indeterminacy.
Whatever range has been attributed to the word "nature" in the various ages of Western history, in each case the word contains an interpretation of beings as a whole, even when "nature" seems to be meant as only one term in a dichotomy. In all such dichotomies, "nature" is not just one of two equal terms but "essentially" holds the position of priority, inasmuch as the other terms are always and primarily differentiated by contrast with - and therefore are determined by - nature. (For example, when "nature" is taken in a one-sided and superficial manner as "stuff," "matter," element, or the unformed, [311] then "spirit" is taken correspondingly as the "non-material," the "spiritual," the "creative," or that which gives form.)
[But the perspective within which the distinction itself is made is "being."]2
Therefore in our thinking, even the distinction between nature and history must be pushed back into the underlying area that sustains the dichotomy, the area where nature and history are. Even if we disregard or leave open the question about whether and how "history" rests upon "nature," even if we understand history in terms of human "subjectivity" and conceive of history as "spirit" and therefore let nature be determined by spirit, even then we are in essence still and already thinking about the
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