10
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?
what draws away as into the withdrawal. The sign stays without interpretation.
In a draft to one of his hymns, Hoelderlin writes:
"We are a sign that is not read."
He continues with these two lines:
"We feel no pain, we almost have
Lost our tongue in foreign lands."
The several drafts of that hymn—besides bearing such titles as "The Serpent," "The Sign," "The Nymph"—also include the title "Mnemosyne." This Greek word may be translated: Memory. And since the Greek word is feminine, we break no rules if we translate "Dame Memory."
For Hoelderlin uses the Greek word Mnemosyne as the name of a Titaness. According to the myth, she is the daughter of Heaven and Earth. Myth means the telling word. For the Greeks, to tell is to lay bare and make appear—both the appearance and that which has its essence in the appearance, its epiphany. Mythos is what has its essence in its telling—what is apparent in the unconcealedness of its appeal. The mythos is that appeal of foremost and radical concern to all human beings which makes man think of what appears, what is in being. Logos says the same; mythos and logos are not, as our current historians of philosophy claim, placed into opposition by philosophy as such; on the contrary, the early Greek thinkers (Parmenides, fragment 8) are precisely the ones to use mythos and logos in the same sense. Mythos and logos become separated and opposed only at the point where neither mythos nor logos can keep to its original nature. In Plato's work, this separation has already taken place. Historians and philologists, by virtue of a prejudice which modern rationalism adopted from Platonism, imagine that mythos was destroyed by logos. But nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by the God's withdrawal.