The turning away cannot demonstrate what is essential and first in it and what bears it: the originarily appropriated turning toward the truth of beyng—the steadfastness of Da-sein.
32
For all future creativity, the unique destiny of Hölderlin’s work remains a unique predetermination of the affiliation of his work to history. For this work did not meet with a mere ordinary misunderstanding or a mere inability to master it on account of its difficulty—instead, this work as such involves something unique: to establish a decisional domain far ahead into the future and precisely for that reason | to remain behind for every calculating present and, as something past, to fall victim to various changing timely interpretations.
33
Misled by the excess of a historiology pursued through a mere craving for cognition, we see even history only as the elapsing of stories (incidents). We are unable to surmise what is leaping ahead in happenings (and the resultant long and concealed remaining behind of what is most essential) and to take from this space our measure for historical greatness (from the space of the remaining behind that leaps ahead). (Cf. p. 102.)
34
How strong must a work be, in order to remain constantly untimely in itself (not merely on account of an incapacity in those who are contemporaneous with it)? This “untimeliness” is the presupposition of every genuine—i.e., ever invisible and mediate—“effectiveness.” The strength of a work is measured by the extent to which it refutes its creator—i.e., grounds something altogether different than that on which its creator himself stood and had to stand. Therefore, all “biography,” “psychology,” “biology,” and “sociology” are null and void for the work and its “effectiveness.” The latter does not at all consist in | being understood, if that means: explainable out of the sphere of what is intelligible to an epoch.
The “utility” of a work is often said to consist in its allowing us to recognize ourselves in the work, to find our wishes fulfilled therein, and to reform ourselves accordingly. The work as mirror. The mirror becomes what it is through the one who takes the work as a mirror. The work is thereby degraded to the standards of lived experience.