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It seems that Hölderlin’s words about the Germans at the conclusion of “Hyperion” are definitive.1
What lies therein? That the Germans remain the ones who make ready the hardest suffering for the greatness of the creators and so— ever again provide an | essential condition of fate. And also that “misfortune” and doom would result if this people were one day drawn into a mediocrity that knew everything because it diminished everything. The greatest danger is not barbarity and decay, for these states can be driven out into something external and so can drive a plight to the foreground. The greatest danger is mediocrity and the uniform disposal of everything—whether in the form of the emptiest activity or in the mode of respectable—although no longer compelled by anything—conventionality.
Thought more deeply, Hölderlin’s words are not an accusation, or even a reproach, in the usual sense; instead, they name that which reverts and cannot be averted.
Whoever has at any time thought all the way back to these necessities and from them has drawn essential knowledge will remain secure against the danger of falling into a fruitless reproach over contrary states and contingencies. Censure can always only lead to a sharpening of the necessity to affirm the | contrary. And that means: to lead to a holding open of the question of the ground of the opposition and from that to a holding open of the impulses toward creativity. (Cf. p. 111.)
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Why are humans becoming ever smaller? Because they are denied an arena for growing into greatness and because the grounding of this arena is thwarted. And what is this arena? That which we call Da-sein, that site at which the avoidable is preserved in diffidence and thus is unfolded into freedom on the paths of creativity. And where are the signs of that thwarting? The clearest is anxiety in the face of questioning accompanied by a simultaneous suspicion of all “anxiety.” And the most dreadful sign is impatience, the avoidance of the vocation to be a transition.
Instead of this, where once the name “philosophy” could still have been spoken, there are now a hollow presumptuousness and a noisy
1. {Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, Gedichte-Hyperion-Briefe. (Berlin: Propyläen, 1923), 282ff.}