This paper is an attempt to think through the issue of freedom in Heidegger’s thought from the perspective of what is anything but a simple methodological concern: the question of reading. I argue that reading designates an essential feature of being itself: as being enters the realm of signification – “language is the house of being,” as Heidegger says – it becomes a written trace that gives itself to be deciphered and read. What I thus call the legibility of being is housed primarily in poetic language for Heidegger, Hölderlin’s poetry having a pride of place in this regard due to its reflexive theorization of poetic language itself. In this paper, I call attention to a particular philological problem in a poem by Hölderlin where it is impossible to tell whether Hölderlin wrote “spricht” (speak) or “spielt” (play), an impossibility that ought to have prevented Heidegger from ruling out free play from the speaking essence of poetry.
…das Wesen der Sprache spielt mit uns.
- Heidegger, Was heißt Denken?
One of the many examples Heidegger gives in Being and Time of the way in which Dasein falls prey to the silent “dictatorship” of “the they” and “the public way of being-interpreted” is that of reading: “we read (lesen), see and judge literature and art the way they see and judge it.”1 As Heidegger later points out in the “B” section of chapter V of Division One, titled “The Everyday Being of the There and The Falling Prey of Dasein,” the “prattling and gossiping” (Weiter- und Nachredens) of “idle talk” (Gerede) – the everyday mode of discourse which “has lost the primary relation of being to the being talked about,” so that what is publicly spoken about “spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character,” i.e. “things are so because one (Man) says so” – is not “restricted” to the acoustico-vocal dimension of hearing and speaking, as Heidegger’s very terminological choice (Ge-rede) might misleadingly suggest, but also “spreads to what is written,” that is to say, read:
Idle talk is constituted in this gossiping and prattling, a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness. And this is not restricted to vocal gossip, but spreads to what is written, as “scribbling” (Geschreibe). In this latter case, gossiping is based not so much on hear-say. It feeds on sporadic superficial reading (es speist sich aus dem Angelesenen): the average understanding of the reader (Lesers) will never be able to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle, and how much is just gossip.2
As Jacques Derrida provocatively suggests in his recently published 1964-65 lecture course titled Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, this problem of reading comes to affect the very project of Being and Time: as Derrida has perceptively noticed, the verb Heidegger uses in his question at the opening of Being and Time regarding the particular being from which “the disclosure of being is to take its departure” can be more literally read – but do we know how to do this? – in the sense of reading, precisely: “On which being is the meaning of being to be read (an welchem Seienden soll der Sinn von Sein abgelesen werden)?”3
There would be a lot to say as concerns the supposedly metaphorical status of Dasein as a text, in and through which being gives itself to be deciphered and read. As always in Heidegger, metaphors are never simply metaphors, and one can imagine Heidegger’s scornful disdain for those who would blithely presume to know what reading is, a common and ordinary – what Heidegger would have perhaps called “vulgar” – understanding of reading which a naïve self-assuredness would calmly transfer on to the meaning of being itself, without realizing that this readability or legibility of being is actually where the proper sense of reading lies and is thus anything but a metaphor for Heidegger.4 At which point we might begin to suspect that reading, far from being a simple methodological concern, designates an essential feature of being itself: as being enters the realm of signification, “language is the house of being,” as Heidegger says, being becomes a trace, a Spur to be read. In this brief paper, I would like to focus on the rather enigmatic way in which being writes itself out in Hölderlin’s poetry, a writing that, as we shall see, entails an undecidable, if not indecipherable legibility that Heidegger at once recognizes but pulls back from as he reads Hölderlin’s poem “Germania.” I call attention to how a particular philological issue in Hölderlin’s poem – the problem of deciphering Hölderlin’s handwriting of the last word of verse 101 of “Germania” – enacts an irreducible dissemination whereby the trace of being is scattered into an undecidable free play between the word “spricht” (speak) and the very word for play “spielt.”
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Relatively early on in the 1934-35 lecture course titled Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” Heidegger pauses over what he calls “two textual questions” arising from the poem “Germania,” the second of which will be my concern in what follows.5 Heidegger calls attention to a word occurring on the fifth verse of the last stanza of the poem which seems to have been a matter of dispute in Hölderlin scholarship. Whereas three different early editions of Hölderlin’s complete works render this fifth verse as “Wie anders ists! und rechthin glänzt und spielt (How different it is! and to the right there gleams and plays),” Norbert von Hellingrath, by far Heidegger’s favorite Hölderlin editor, provides a different reading of the verse, changing the last word “spielt” to “spricht”: “Wie anders ists! und rechthin glänzt und spricht (How different it is! and to the right there gleams and speaks), a “reading” (Leasart) Heidegger is prepared to agree with even as he admits to not being “familiar with the manuscript of the poem.”6 Now the reason why Heidegger is able to discard one reading and confidently sign up for another, without ever having even seen the manuscript and Hölderlin’s handwriting of the word in question, lies in what deciphering Hölderlin’s handwriting means for Heidegger, “an issue of reading” (eine Sache des Lesens) that Heidegger equates with “understanding” the particular word, verse, stanza, and poem “from out of the whole” of Hölderlin’s poetry (d.h. aber zugleich des Verstehens aus dem Ganzen).7 In other words, if Heidegger does not even need to see Hölderlin’s manuscript in order to know that Hellingrath’s reading is correct, it is because he (and Hellingrath) have presumably grasped “the whole” of Hölderlin’s poetry and are now in an optimal position from which to read – or in Heidegger’s case, guess – Hölderlin’s handwriting, a script whose legibility and decipherability are no longer really an issue as long as one has first understood the whole.
Now, were Heidegger to have seen Hölderlin’s handwriting of the aforementioned word and verse, his confidence might have begun to falter. Take a look at how Hölderlin writes this word [show slides 1, 2, 3]: notice that, of all the words in these last verses of the poem, “spricht” or “spielt” is the least well written word, with its last three letters on a downward incline, breaking the symmetry of an invisible line that is distorted by a trembling of Hölderlin’s hand.8 Nevertheless, to a pair of modern eyes, given the alternative between “spricht” and “spielt,” the loop of the penultimate letter followed by what seems to be an uncrossed “t” seems to indicate that Hölderlin wrote “spielt” and not “spricht.” Indeed, in the early twentieth century, such was also the reading suggested by at least three different editors of Hölderlin’s work, over and against which Hellingrath, and Heidegger and other editors following him, suggest instead “spricht,” no doubt on account of the fact that Hölderlin’s “hs” often have an “l” shape, particularly when used in the rather common cht- ending of German words [slides 4, 5, 6]. This makes it difficult, if not impossible to decide between “spricht” and “spielt,” particularly as there are strong arguments to be made on both sides: even though it is true that the antepenultimate letter of the word seems to resemble some instances of how Hölderlin writes his “c”s in cht- endings, it also resembles how he sometimes writes his “e”s, for example just a few lines down in the very same page of the manuscript [slides]. As for the other letters in the word that might help us decide between “spielt” or “spricht,” they, too, prove to be of little help: the third letter of the word, which could be either the “r” of “spricht” or the undotted “i” of “spielt,” is followed by a somewhat strange concaveshape arc [slide] that does not resemble the way Hölderlin tends to write vowels after the consonant cluster “spr” [slides], making it difficult to determine whether this unusually elongated mark corresponds either to the undotted vowel “i” of “spricht” or to an unintentional scratching of the page, produced inadvertently as Hölderlin’s quill moved from the end of the “i” of “spielt” – and not “spricht” – to dot that very same “i.” Let it also be noted, however, that it is not impossible that a similar phenomenon – something as mundane as a tired hand – might have caused Hölderlin not to lift the quill from the surface of the page when dotting, this time, the “i” of “spricht,” as opposed to the “i” of “spielt,” it not being so unusual for Hölderlin to place the dots of his “i”s slightly to the left, explaining the left-upward direction of the accidental scribble.
A philosopher might think to be above such “philological minutiae” when reading Hölderlin’s poetry. He would be wrong to do so, argues Heidegger a little later in the course:
Here we have occasion once again to point to a textual question and to examine the alterations among the different versions [of the poem “Patmos”]. People usually call this “philological minutiae.” There are such things, but not in a work like Hölderlin’s, and especially not if we move beyond merely cataloguing the changes. Here the struggle for every word is a pointer to understanding the poetry.9
No wonder, then, that Heidegger should want to come to a decision regarding the spricht-spielt dilemma, especially as the poem in question is said to be “a dialogue which brings language to language (ein Gespräch […], das die Sprache zur Sprache bringt),” “a saying of the saying” or “the speaking of language,” as Heidegger reads “Germania” as the name of a girl who receives a “mission” (Auftrag) to speak and, as Hölderlin poetizes, “dispatch a wealth of golden words (Fülle der goldenen Worte sandtest du).”10 As Heidegger reads the poem, or Hölderlin’s poetry in general, as a matter of fact, the singular issue with which Hölderlin is concerned is that of “naming and saying” (eigentlicher: um das Nennen und Sagen geht es), it then being decisive, for Heidegger’s reading at least, to locate instances in the poem “Germania” where the aforementioned speaking is speaking itself out, as it were, as though we switched registers and the poem itself became one of Germania’s dispensations and a very special one at that, given that what the poem – and Hölderlin’s poetry as a whole, as Heidegger argues – poetizes is the very act of poetic dispensation in general, a dispensation of dispensation, if you like.11
Heidegger offers in the lecture course an explanation as to why “we cannot read ‘spielt’” in the aforementioned verse, conceding that this negative and indirect justification “does not yet ground why we must read ‘spricht’” instead:
The word “play” seems to be suggested by the word “joyful” (erfreulich). Yet if we merely take the latter in the straightforward meaning of pleasant, welcome, or notable, which fits with “play,” then we are not understanding this in a Hölderlinian sense. Hölderlin does not mean the word erfreulich to be understood in the sense in which we say that trial runs of the new race car that is supposed to reach 240 kilometers per hour produced quite “encouraging” results. Erfreulich, “joyful,” here means heralding joy (Freude), not joy in the sense of pleasure as opposed to disagreeableness, but joy in the eminent meaning of the Greek word charis — charm, enchantment, and therein unapproachable dignity. Yet this reading of erfreulich indicates only why we cannot read “play,” and does not yet justify why we must read “speak.” This can be shown only from our more extensive interpretation.12
Yet what are we to make of the very beginning of the poem “To Mother Earth” where “spielt” occurs almost side-by-side “erfreulich”? “So, as though to try it out, a string, touched by joyful hands, plays from the beginning.” (So spielt von erfreulichen Händen […] eine Saite von Anfang).13 Notice that the manuscript of “To Mother Earth” is much more legible than that of “Germania” where Hölderlin writes “spielt,” leaving no room for doubt here [slide]. This would seem to very quickly complicate Heidegger’s claim that the simple existence of the word “erfreulich” in verse 102 of “Germania” is enough to prove that Hölderlin could not have possibly written “spielt” in the preceding verse, as though the Hölderlinian sense of “erfreulich” qua “charis” (“charm, enchantment, and therein unapproachable dignity”) were incommensurable with any sense of play, as though “play” in Höldelin’s poetry named only “pleasure” and not “joy” in the Greek sense. That such is not the case is also attested by another couple of verses from the poem “Homecoming”:
But a string instrument (Saitenspiel) lends tones to each hour And perhaps delights (erfreuet) the heavenly, who draw near14
The same “Spiel” of a “Saite,” again associated with the joy (Freude) of “erfreuen,” this time in connection with “the heavenly who draw near,” whom Heidegger would have called, without hesitation, “the Greeks and their gods” who, in the poem “Germania,” “press upon us” (drängen uns).15 And just as this playful music gives rise to a certain readiness (das bereitet) at the end of “Homecoming,” at the beginning of the third stanza of “Germania” a certain “prelude” (Vorspiel) seems to go hand in hand with the readiness of a field “nurtured” for the gods whose shadows “visit the earth anew,” drawing near and pressing upon us, as we saw:
Already nurtured for them [the gods], the field indeed grows verdant,
Prelude (Vorspiel) to a rougher time, the gift is readied (bereitet)
For the sacrificial meal and valley and rivers lie
Open wide around prophetic mountains16
It is tempting, indeed, to relate this Vorspiel to a rougher time to come of the third stanza to that controversial verse of the last where it does not seem so implausible to read “spielt” in the context of a future time that already plays itself out “joyfully and from afar,” as the return of a “bygone divinity” which “resonates from ancient times again.”17 Apparently forgetting his own reservations vis-à-vis “spielt” or play in general, Heidegger comments on the third stanza later on in the course, arguing that “history and historical time are the monumental play (das große Spiel) which the gods play with the peoples and with a people”:
The Earth, as this Earth of the homeland, is nurtured for the gods. Through such nurturing it first becomes homeland, yet as such it can once again fall into decline and sink to the level of a mere place of residence, which accordingly goes hand in hand with the advent of godlessness. The coming to be of homeland thus does not happen through mere settlement, either, unless it is accompanied by a nurturing of the Earth for the gods, in which the Earth is held open for an encounter with the prevailing of the gods in the course of the changing seasons of the year and their festivals. This occurs in “prelude” (Vorspiel) to a rougher time, so that the Earth then first comes fully and properly into play, i.e., history and historical time. History is the monumental play that the gods play with the peoples and with a people; for the great times and eras of world time are a play, according to the word of an ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, whom they call the obscure one, and whose most profound thoughts were thought anew precisely by Hölderlin.18
Yet if Hölderlin’s poetry “thinks anew” the Heraclitean notion of time (aiōn) as a playful child (pais paizdōn) from fragment 52, why, then, is it so unthinkable for Heidegger that a similar play might happen in the last stanza of “Germania”? Or, more to the point, why does Heidegger feel as though he has to decide between “spricht” and “spielt”? What if Hölderlin’s manuscript enacted an undecidability that goes to the heart of what Heidegger is trying to think? What if it belonged to the very essence of language to play, what if die Sprache spricht insofar as it spielt? And what if this Spiel happened primarily in writing?
In the lecture course, Heidegger provides a powerful account of how Hölderlin understands language as “the most dangerous of all goods” (der Güter Gefährlichstes) given to man, a danger Heidegger describes as “essentially double”: first “the danger of supreme nearness to the gods and thereby to being annihilated by their excessive character” and, “at the same time,” “the danger of the most shallow turning away and becoming entangled in worn-out idle talk and the semblance that goes with it.”19 What seems to interest Heidegger the most here is how these two “fundamentally different” and even “conflicting” dangers “intimately accompany each other” (das innige Beieinander), it being an “inevitability” (Unentrinnbarkeit) that “the creative, founding saying of the poet” be at the same time “the fateful necessity of a decline” into idle talk.20 “To say an essential word,” argues Heidegger, “intrinsically entails also delivering this word to the realm of misinterpretation, of misuse and deception – to the danger of the most direct and contrary repercussions of its determination.”21 My suggestion here is that his goes especially for the very words “say” or “speak,” it being perhaps not entirely accidental that at the very moment when language is supposed to speak itself out it should also misspeak itself, “die Sprache verspricht (sich),” as Paul de Man would say.22 Heidegger knows this and goes so far as to describe the “non-essence” of language as playful (spielerischen Unwesen), perhaps the same kind of play he identifies in verse 101 of “Germania” where the play is precisely between language and play, “spricht” and “spiel,” as we saw.23 But whereas reading this verse forces Heidegger to decide between essence and non-essence, we might want to say, with Heidegger, that if the playful non-essence always already belongs to the essence, then this essence is not so essential as we once thought, and that it is really not our place to decide between terms that we cannot neatly keep apart. What if just this undecidability were the ultimate trait of what reading means? And what if Hölderlin’s poetry gave us to read just that?
1 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006), 127; Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 123. References to Being and Time will henceforth be given in abbreviated form: “SZ” followed by the German and English pagination. I have occasionally modified Stambaugh’s translations throughout.
3 SZ: 7/5; Stambaugh translates this a bit loosely as: “In which being is the meaning of being to be found?” For Derrida’s remarks on “abgelesen,” see his recently published 1964-65 course titled Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 2016), 77.
4 For an insightful discussion of metaphor in Heidegger, see Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, 62-64, 78, 222-224.
5 Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” and “Der Rhein” (GA 39), ed. Susanne Ziegler (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), 24; Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” trans. Julia Ireland and Will McNeill (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 24. References to this lecture course will henceforth be given in abbreviated form: “GA 39,” followed by the German and English pagination.
6 GA 39: 25/26. Franz Zinkernagel, Wilhelm Böhn, Paul Ernst and Will Vesper are some of the early editors of Hölderlin’s work who read this mysterious word as “spielt.” For Hellingrath’s reading as “spricht” instead, see Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, begun by Norbert v. Hellingrath, completed by Friedrich Seebass and Ludwig v. Pigenot, Second Edition (Berlin: Propyläen, 1923), Volume IV, 183. I have contacted Jörg Ennen, head of the Hölderlin Archive in Stuttgart regarding this issue and he agrees in sum with Hellingrath’s (and Heidegger’s) reading. Here is his answer to my inquiry: “Dear Mr. Therezo, The poem “Germania” is included in the Homburg Folioheft (63). The word in verse 101 you are looking for (4th line, far right), looks a bit fatter. You can enlarge the image (attached) and see the word clearly. I tend to “spricht” like the Stuttgart edition (Beissner) and the Frankfurt edition (Sattler). Best Regards, Jörg Ennen.”
8 All images of Hölderlin’s manuscripts were taken from the official website of the Hölderlin-Archiv in Stuttgart, most of which has been recently made available online: http://digital.wlbstuttgart.de/sammlungen/sammlungsliste/?no_cache=1
11 Ibid.
12 GA 39: 25/25-26. Heidegger is alluding to the word “erfreulich” in the subsequent verse: “Wie anders ists! und rechthin glänzt and spricht [spielt] / Zukünftiges auch erfreulich aus den Fernen.” (How different it is! And to the right there gleams and speaks [plays] / Future things also joyfully from afar.)
13 See Volume IV of Hellingrath’s edition, 156. For an English translation of the poem, see Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press, 2004), 469.
14 Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 331 (translation modified).
16 Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 331 (translation modified).
17 See footnote xii above; verse 100 runs as follows: “Tönt auf aus alter Zeit Vergangengöttliches wieder.” (“A bygone divinity resonates from ancient times again.”)
21 Ibid.
22 See Paul de Man, “Promises,” in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 277.
23 GA 39: 64/62.