Heidegger's Hölderlin and the importance of place

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 258-274

  Elden, Stuart ^a  

^a BRUNEL UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85011598439     PISSN: 00071773     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1999.11007260     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Gesamtausgabe Band 6.1; Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996, p. xii; Nietzsche Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991, p. xl. Using ‘Commentaries’ for Erläuterungen follows David Farrell Krell,; other suggestions have included ‘Interpretations’, ‘Elucidations’ and ‘Soundings’. See André Schuwer, “Nature and the Holy: On Heidegger's Interpretation of Hölderlin's Hymn ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage’”, in John Sallis, (ed.). Radical Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Martin Heidegger, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1978, p. 231; James F. Ward, Heidegger's Political Thinking, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, p. 290n3.
2. In order to read these texts, I have made extensive use of the French translations: Approche de Hölderlin, Paris: Gallimard, 1973; and Les hymnes, de Hölderlin,: La Germanie, et Le Rhin, Paris: Gallimard, 1988.
3. The standard text is Beda Allemann, Hölderlin und Heidegger, Zürich: Atlantic Verlag, 1954; though this is somewhat dated and cannot, of course, take into account the Gesamtausgabe. For a useful discussion of some of the other issues at stake see Werner Marx, Is There a Measure on Earth? Foundations for a Nonmetaphysical Ethics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; George Kovacs, The Question of God in Heidegger's Phenomenology, Evanston IL; Northwestern University Press, 1990; Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986; the essays in the special edition of Research in Phenomenology, Volume XIX, 1989; Philosophy Today, Vol 37 No 4, Winter 1993; and Krysztof Ziarek, “Semiosis of Listening: The Other in Heidegger's Writings on Hölderlin and Celan's ‘The Meridian’”, in Research in Phenomenology, Volume XXIV, 1994.
4. Bruce V. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics and the Metaphysics of Nature, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995, pp. 33–4 n2, claims that Heidegger's Kehre is not at issue in his work. In distinction I suggest that the issues of earth, nature, space and time are the very substance of the Kehre. The Kehre is political and philosophical certainly, but immanently spatial.
5. Reported in Bernd Magnus, “Foreword to the English Translation”, in Karl, Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. xvii n5. See also the “Author's Preface to the Second Edition” in Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Gesamtausgabe Band 3, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991, pxvi; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, p. xxv. On Hölderlin as understood in mainstream literary scholarship, see Ronald Peacock, Hölderlin, London: Methuen & Co, 1973 (1938); and David, Constantine, Hölderlin, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
6. For a discussion of some the issues that arise from this, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, Cambridge, MASS: MIT Press, 1991, p. 130ff; Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 52–4; Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Being and Time, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 360–1; Maria, Villela-Petit, “Heidegger's Conception of Space”, in Christopher Macann, (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, London: Routledge, Four Volumes, 1992, Volume I.
7. Heidegger's examples in Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Gesamtausgabe Band 24; Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975, pp. 231–3; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 163, are tailored to the situation of the lecture course: “Sitting here in the auditorium, we do not in fact apprehend walls—not unless we are getting bored. Nevertheless, the walls are already present even before we think of them as objects…When we enter here through the door, we do not apprehend the seats, and the same holds for the door-knob. Nevertheless, they are there in this peculiar way: we go by them circumspectly, avoid them circumspectly, stumble against them, and the like. Stairs, corridors, windows, chair and bench, blackboard, and much more are not given thematically. We say that an equipmental contexture environs us”.
8. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, p. 200; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 136–7.
9. For some of the reasons for this see Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger,: A Political Life, London: HarperCollins, 1993, p. 14.
10. Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us”, p. 102. See also, Karl, Löwith, “My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936”, both in Richard Wolin, (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993.
11. Ott, Martin Heidegger, pp. 133–4. Löwith's postcard to Jaspers is quoted from the personal papers of the latter in the German Literary Archive in Marbach.
12. Ott, Martin Heidegger, p. 305.
13. This approach is greatly shaped by Dominique Janicaud's The Shadow of That Thought: Heidegger and the Question of Politics, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
14. The best English collection of Hölderlin is found in the bi-lingual Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
15. On the role of time in Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin, see the dispute between Richard Rorty, and Michael Murray. Rorty, in “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey”, in Michael Murray, (ed.), Heidegger and Modem Philosophy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978, p. 251, argues that “there is no indication that Heidegger thinks that poetry has a history. Less crudely put, there is no indication that Heidegger thinks that the historicity of Being can be seen in poetry”. Murray's response, in “Heidegger's Hermeneutic Reading of Hölderlin: The Signs of Time”, in The Eighteenth Century, Vol 21 No 1, 1980, convincingly shows this to be an error.
16. On this part of the course see Arthur Grugan, “Heidegger on Hölderlin's Der Rhein: Some External Considerations”, in Philosophy Today, Vol 39 No 1, Spring 1995.
17. On place and locale in Hölderlin more generally, though without reference to Heidegger, see David J. Constantine, The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, London: The Modem Humanities Research Association, 1979. Constantine suggests that place need not interest a poet, that many make no use of it, but it was important for Hölderlin, especially in his later work. He argues that Hölderlin celebrates rather than describes the places in his poetry.
18. See particularly, Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken”, “Das Ding” and “Dichterist Wohnet der Mensch” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen: Günther Neske, Vierte Auflage, 1978; “Building Dwelling Thinking”, “The Thing”, and “…Poetically Man Dwells…”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
19. See Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Verse, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, p. 246n for Michael Hamburger's note on the status of this poem.
20. J.M., Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, p. 115.
21. For a critical discussion of Heidegger's reading of Plato's Timaeus, see Jacques Derrida, “Khora”, in On The Name, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. In this context Joseph Fell argues that the “Kehre is the ‘turn’ of space (dissimulated place) ‘into’ place, which it originally and always is”. See his Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, p. 204.
22. On this, see Schuwer, “Nature and the Holy”.
23. For a discussion on the topic of blood, soil and earth, see Karsten Harries, “Heidegger as Political Thinker”, in Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy. The conclusion (p. 324) is that Heidegger “came to see that his hope had been in vain and misguided, that the Nazi's Blut und Boden had little in common with Hölderlin's Erde. This recognition forced Heidegger to reinterpret the nature of their leadership”. It does not necessarily follow that Heidegger's use of earth and soil in his analyses is a move following Nazism, but it is certainly a dangerous political manoeuvre.
24. See for example, Heidegger's own address of May 26th 1933 on Albert Leo Schlageter in “Political Texts, 1933–34”, in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, pp. 40–2. On this issue see also GA39, pp. 72–3.
25. See the ‘Letter on Humanism’ for a more detailed discussion of the reason for this. Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe Band 9; Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976, p. 314; Basic Writings, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 218.
26. In the discussion of ‘The Rhine’ Heidegger suggests that no Dasein is purely poetic, thinking or acting, but that we must think them together (GA39, pp. 184–5). For a discussion of these issues see Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought, pp. 99–100. Some important themes are also discussed in Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger's Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)”, in John Sallis, (ed.), Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
27. Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 172. See Wegmarken, pp. 337–8; Basic Writings, p. 241 for Heidegger's explicit distancing from the patriotic and nationalist overtones to Heimat.
28. e.g.Kolbenheyer, Vorträge, Aufsätze, Darmstadt: Reden, 1966. Quoted in GA39, p. 27.
29. SeeOtto Pöggeler, “Heidegger's Political Self-Understanding”, in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, p. 203.
30. Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us”, p. 101.
31. Quoted in Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand”, in John Sallis, (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 165.
32. For more detail about the political implications of this and later courses on Hölderlin see, particularly, Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias, London: Routledge, 1998; Ward, Heidegger's Political Thinking; and Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
33. SeeMartin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken’, Gesamtausgabe Band 52, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982.
34. SeeDominique Janicaud, “The Overcoming’ of Metaphysics in the Hölderlin Lectures”, in Sallis (ed.), Reading Heidegger. Though Janicaud provides much useful detail, and is correct to see a shift between the first lecture course and the later two regarding the attitude to metaphysics (a shift from an attempt at a replacement to an overcoming) he neglects the differences between the attitudes to space and time, claiming that the project of a poetic dwelling is common to both.
35. Michael Hamburger, “Introduction” in Hölderlin, Selected Verse, p. xxi.
36. Andrej Warminski, Reading in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 67. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, p. x, does not consider that the return to the rural is an example of nostalgia, and uses this as a opportunity to berate “recent French philosophers” for not having much “to say about the natural environment or about the world outside of large cities in general”.
37. SeeMartin Heidegger, “Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?” and “Der Feldweg” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Gesamtausgabe Band 13, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983; “Why do I Stay in the Provinces?” and “The Pathway” in Thomas Sheehan, (ed.), Martin Heidegger,: The Man and the Thinker, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981.
38. Sophocles, Antigone in The Three Theban Plays, New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1994, p. 77. Heidegger's own translation of this choral ode is found as “Chorlied aus der Antigone des Sophokles” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, pp. 35–7.
39. On this see also Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, Gesamtausgabe Band 54, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982, pp. 130ff. This is further discussed in Stuart Eiden, “Rethinking the Polis: Implications of Heidegger's Questioning the Political”, forthcoming.
40. Janicaud, “The ‘Overcoming’ of Metaphysics in the Hölderlin Lectures”, p. 384.
41. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1976, p24; On Time and Being, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, p. 23.