Interpreting Hölderlin's Poetry with Heidegger

by Egor Falyov

Excerpt from Heidegger’s Hermeneutics (PRAV Publishing, 2025 [COMING SOON]), translated by Jafe Arnold.

For the sake of presenting an example of the “mytho-poetic” thinking in Heidegger’s later works, let us examine his interpretations of several poetic fragments by Hölderlin, all of which are brought together by the search for the poetically thought and poetically expressed essence of poetry. Over the course of this interpreting, Heidegger makes a number of important philosophico-historical summations concerning the “conclusion of metaphysics.”

Heidegger selects five “key verses” from among Hölderlin’s poems, that is, five “keys” which most fully draw out the contours of the essence of poetry, and presents them in his lecture “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry.”

1. Composing poems: “This most innocent of occupations." (Ill, 377)

2. “That is why language, the most dangerous of goods, has been given to man... so that he may bear witness to what he is…” (IV, 246)

3. “Much has man experienced,
Named many of the heavenly ones,
Since we have been a conversation
And able to hear from one another.” (IV, 343)

4. “But what remains is founded by the poets." (IV, 63)

5. “Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth.” (VI, 25)¹

At the outset, a few words are in order regarding the new understanding of the hermeneutic method and the hermeneutic circle at which Heidegger has evidently arrived over the course of his deep meditations on Hölderlin’s poetic works. The hermeneutic circle means that any text can be understood only on the basis of a pre-understanding. But this pre-understanding is in no way bound to the text itself; therefore, it cannot be evaluated as adequate or inadequate until the interpretation has produced some kind of results. Over the course of the interpreting, however, the pre-understanding changes, becomes understanding, and then it is already pointless to evaluate the pre-understanding, except perhaps retrospectively, as a case of reflecting on the history of the interpretation.

Pre-understanding is always subjective, always individual, and even personal. Its necessity for interpretation shows the need for “subjectivity,” and hence a subject, for beginning the path of interpretation. But the latter is needed only as a “launch mechanism,” only to then “die,” “removing” oneself in the interpreting and passing from pre-understanding to understanding, giving birth to a new “subject.”

Here it seems to me that Heidegger is overcoming metaphysics in a much deeper way than Foucault and Deleuze with their “death of the subject.” In the latter, the “death of the subject” is merely a polemically sharpened expression of the “relativization” of the subject, depriving it of the status of original principle and translating it into an array of derivative concepts.

The subject is nothing more than a point of view, one among infinitely many possible perspectives. Nevertheless, perhaps it is such precisely because it possesses an irreplaceable value. Without a subject, without a point of view, there would be no seeing, no experiencing, and hence no experience. A point of view not only constitutes the domain of what is discernible (cf. German vernehmbar, Russian vniatnoe) and unconcealed, but allows everything to come about, to be illuminated within this domain. The unity of the Event is constituted by the point of view (the subject).

The space which a path traverses, the “region of the poetic country,” is a space that consists of possible “points of view.” Traversing a path in this region means changing one’s point of view, changing oneself.

A point of view does not simply establish a “horizon of visibility” for a given subject, as if it were a horizon of space visible to sight. Every point of view constitutes its own world, one that is infinite in its spatial, temporal, and semantic relations. It is an integral Event of World, in which there is room for all gods and demons, all people and all living things, even if this world is of the smallest essence (a “simple monad” per Leibniz). Changing a point of view always means founding a new world, a new Event of World.

Thus, once again, in following Heidegger around the “hermeneutic circle,” we arrive at an awareness of the kinship of thinking and poetry. Just like the poet, the philosopher cannot produce any grounds for his “pre-understanding” or for the interpretation subsequently built thereupon. Thinking turns out to be just as (seemingly) arbitrary and just as (essentially) unarbitrary as poetry. In its essence, metaphysics harbors a fear of arbitrariness and has always tried to find a law and measure for it. Just like poetry, thinking finds grounds for its arbitrariness in “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) and “essentiality” (Wesentlichkeit), in the depths of the experience that is accessible in the Event of a given point of view and a given subject, in the clarity of “seeing” that illuminates the essence and meaning of that which is coming about. Essence and meaning alone are what can be conveyed from one point of view to another, from one subject to another. Neither the philosopher nor the poet, nor anyone else, can share the “matter” of their experience with a reader or listener. Even the most detailed and vivid story cannot attain this goal. But if an experience really did come about, and really did become “my own,” and myself “its own,” then the resounding of the Event alone is what can be heard by others.

Now let us move on to examining the five keys in the lecture on “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry.”

1. “Poetry is the most innocent of occupations” — this is so, because poetry lives and has power only in the world of its own imagination. Although imagination turns out to be of far greater gravity than it ordinarily seems (cf. key 4), what could be safer than ordinary poetic language? This is an expression of a “non-reflective” point of view, analogous to the phenomenological “natural setup” in relation to poetry and language in general. Hölderlin wrote this not in a poem, but in a letter to his mother, which lends ground to thinking that he probably simply wanted to assuage her, for mothers always deeply feel any danger that threatens their children. The ensuing poetic indications lead Heidegger from this “natural setup” to a completely different, hermeneutic comprehension of the essence of language and poetry, their danger and safety. But a path that has been traversed remains only part of the way, like ascending a mountain — even beginning the ascent from the valley is part of the heights that we reach with our last step. Just like the mountain’s inseparability from the valley, the “natural” understanding of language always remains with the poet. Yet, in this twofoldness lies the source of the danger of the fall.

2. Hölderlin’s second indication says that language is “the most dangerous of goods.” Why? In order to understand the idea expressed by Hölderlin, we need to answer three questions:

(1). To whom does this good belong? That is: Who is man? “He is the one who must bear witness to what he is…Man is he who he is precisely in the attestation of his own existence.”² This “bearing witness,” “testifying,” or “attesting” (Bezeugung) is what constitutes the essence of man. By his very way of being, man is a sign, a “bearing witness” or “signifying” (Zeugesein). In its essence, a sign is what sends attention to something other than itself, to what is being signified. This can be expressed in the formula: Man is the generally significant being. He is insofar as he participates in “drawing attention” between the earthly and the heavenly, the divine and the mortal (the Fourfold). According to Heidegger, “To bear witness can signify to testify, but it also means to be answerable for what one has testified in one's testimony."³ According to Hölderlin, man testifies to his belonging to the earth.

It is interesting to compare Heidegger’s thesis here to the views of the Postmodernists (such as Deleuze). They would agree that the being of man (like everything else) is akin to a sign, Heidegger’s Zeugesein, but they would deny, firstly, that man is answerable for what he signifies. Who could answer for such? After all, there is no such subject that is itself subject to freedom and responsibility. Secondly, they would disagree that man testifies to something, much less to belonging to the earth. For them, there is only a network of signs and the thoughts flailing around therein, and the latter does not refer to anything — or, more precisely, it does not refer (as a sign) to anything but other signs. Behind signs stand other signs and nothing else. The early Heidegger was close to this position. The Verweisungszusammenhang, the “context of references,” and the being of signs themselves, without any presupposed signified, have now been replaced by the supra-human, supra-lingual, as well as pre-lingual being of “earth.” Man’s “attestation” refers to the earth and is answerable to the earth by its sign-being: if it fares poorly in drawing attention to Being, then it takes up different signs, and man simply loses his individual being.

(2). Why is language the most dangerous? Language by nature is common and manifold, but, according to Heidegger, this does not mean that it is a means for expressing and conveying thought. Language simply always exists in the form of one or another speech, and speech is audible to many others, but these “many others” are not always ready to hear the depth of meaning in speech, that is, the Event. Therefore, speech (language) is always a struggle, an effort, and essential thought insists on its right to being essential (Wesentlichsein), while superficial speaking opposes it to the extent of its power. Thus, Hölderlin was fully conscious of this eternal struggle and the danger bound up with it, as is reflected in his verses:

For a fragile vessel is not always able to hold the divine gift,

Only at times can man bear it.⁴

Already overtaken by madness, the poet wrote in a letter to a friend: “The mighty element, the fire of the heavens and the stillness of men, their life in nature, and their confinedness and their contentment, moved me continually, and as one says of heroes, I can well say of myself that Apollo has struck me.”⁵ Heidegger adds: “Excessive brightness drove the poet into darkness. Do we need any further testimony in regard to the extreme danger of his ‘occupation’? The poet's own fate tells us everything.”⁶

Evidently, no single philosophical current can ever be regarded as superficial. Rather, any philosophical current might become superficial when the fire of creation, the effort and struggle over truth (the struggle with nature’s striving to “hide itself”), leaves it. Superficial thinkers can be found among the followers of any philosophy.

(3). Why is language a “good” that, as it were, has been “given” or “inherited”? As we already saw in discussing the correlation between word and thing in the case of Stefan George’s poem “The Word,” it is the name alone that first lets the essence of a thing be rooted in Being. In this lies the “good” or “gift” of language: the founding of being(s) in the word. But man himself also exists “by way of the being of a sign,” and he must testify to his belonging to the Fourfold — it is to this end that he is given language. That is, the second “gift” of language and the “good” gifted by it is what is properly human in man. Heidegger writes: “Language is a good in a more primordial sense. It holds good for the fact that man can be as historical, i.e., it guarantees that. Language is not a tool at man’s disposal, but that primal event which disposes of the highest possibility of man’s being.”⁷

3. “Since we have been a conversation…” Heidegger writes: “Mans being is grounded in language; but this actually occurs only in conversation [Gespräch].”⁸ In this conversation, “being able to talk and being able to hear are co-original… We are a conversation, that always also signifies we are one conversation [ein Gespräch].”⁹ For Heidegger, the lines “Much has man experienced, named many of the heavenly ones” mean that “it is precisely in the naming of the gods and in the world becoming word that authentic conversation, which we ourselves are, consists.”¹⁰ The gods ask for us and ask from us, claiming us: “A word which names the gods is always an answer to such a claim.”¹¹ This is to say that the relation to the gods and naming them is in some essential way inlaid in the nature of man; it is the "human" in him.

But who are the gods? Has Heidegger given in to the temptation of his mythopoetic “tale-telling” to construct some kind of new theology in the spirit of neo-paganism? The word “gods” has a tradition of usage that is even more ancient and even more prevalent than the word “Being,” and yet Heidegger resolves to bring it into his interpretation, evidently believing that it is utterly impossible to bypass it. Of course, based on what we already know of Heidegger’s hermeneutics, we can confidently presume that these “gods” are not to be understood as “persons,” “beings,” or “substances,” as anything “real in itself.” Rather, the gods are part of that “magical country” of poetic reality. Strictly speaking, man himself, as a poet, creates the gods, but he is at the same time dependent upon them, for only in this creative naming of the gods does man become human.

The gods are the “rays of the light of Being” overflowing and pouring forth from the “Holy,” das Heilige. “The Holy” is nature in its beingful dimension, and the gods are the bearers and expression of its power, das Machtende selbst, the “Self-Ruling.” The gods are living, cheerful, joyful forces that inhabit the “clearing of Being,” the personification of the creative, destructive, rhythmic movements of nature. But the "creation of their face," giving them a guise and a glorious name, is the work of the poet and of every human. It is the act of answering the gods' claim, becoming the conductors of their power in the world of beings. This participation in their divine game (which closely resembles the Hindu notion of līlā) involves filling the vessel of the divine name with glory, dignity, and nobility, and taking communion from this vessel.

4. “But what remains is founded by the poets.” Here, once again, the significance of the imagination is affirmed: Being and essence can never be derived from any available (superficial) phenomenon, for they must be freely co-created, founded, and offered up as a gift in poetic saying.

What was previously considered to be the “weakness” or frivolousness of poetry, i.e., its “restriction” to an imaginal world, now comes back around as its strength. Heidegger thereby indirectly confirms anew the conclusion he had drawn in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics lectures, namely, that Kant’s main discovery, along with the thing-in-itself, was the power of the imagination. Only the imagination raises man above the level of phenomena and gives him access to “things-in-themselves.”¹² Although it molds its images from the present material of sensibility according to the patterns of the categories of reason, the imagination is completely free in its combining of both of the latter and therefore presents the most direct of all the expressions of an intelligible character that are available to us, and it is therefore a bearer of freedom. Only from the noumenal freedom of the productive imagination can we glean the pre-understanding that is necessary for understanding the world before any contact with it — such is the measure, the essentiality, the “condensation points” around which sensuality as well as the forms of rational concepts “precipitate.” Imagination is the “regal capacity” of the soul, for it is with the imagination that we create and destroy worlds — in fact and deed, not only in one thought alone. This is an immense freedom and responsibility, and it is not without reason that man avoids using this capacity too often. The flight from Being in metaphysics is a flight from freedom and, above all, from the freedom of the imagination.

The world is also the human world, the world co-created by the human imagination of the “primal poets”: we perceive the world as we do rather than in another way precisely because the poets (like the kaviḥ in Indian tradition) have thought of it in such a way and have proclaimed and raised up each thing within it (“a thing [veshch’] is what is proclaimed [vozveshcheno]).”

Being itself, prior to man, is one and indivisible. It has no ground to be many — Parmenides was right. That which first posits a limit within the One (the Father), thus making Two — the Word (the Son, the Logos) — is the fruit of the imagination, for there were no grounds whatsoever that determined that the primal limit be drawn in such a way rather than otherwise. Measure, law, and order are the domain of the freedom that founds them; the measureless, lawless, and chaos are the domain of necessity and coercion.

5. “Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth.” Heidegger writes: “‘To dwell poetically’ means to stand in the presence of the gods and to be struck by the essential nearness of things. Existence is ‘poetic’ in its ground — which means, at the same time, as founded (grounded), it is not something earned, but is rather a gift.”¹³ Yet, in Hölderlin’s poetic words, accepting this gift means

To grasp the father's ray, itself, with our own hands,

And to offer to the people

The heavenly gift wrapt in song.¹⁴

And this is the dangerous affair of the poet. Only thanks to the poet can people become, without fear, involved with the gods, and accordingly, involved in their own essence:

And hence the sons of the earth now drink

Heavenly fire without danger.

And hence, however indirectly, the conclusion follows that poets are the only ones entrusted with the service of the priests who guard the connection between the human and the divine. Indeed, in the most ancient pagan cults, the priests were poets.

But what does it mean that the poets are exposed to the thunderstorms of the gods? What is this danger that struck Hölderlin and Nietzsche, Gogol and Dostoevsky? How can the “most innocent of occupations” — imagining aloud — turn around to be the greatest danger? Here is one more of Hölderlin’s testimonies presented by Heidegger:

For among all that I can see of God, this sign [the lightning of a thunderstorm] has become my chosen one. I used to be able to rejoice over a new truth, a better view of what is above us and around us, but now I fear that I shall end like old Tantalus, who received more from the gods than he could digest.¹⁵

In the past, the ones who could withstand this danger were the heroes — from Hercules and Odysseus to Arthur and Lancelot — because their hearts were sufficiently strong. Heidegger brings the reader to the conclusion that at the core of this danger lies pure imagination. This is the fiery breath of freedom that the poet breathes, but “only he is deserving of life and freedom who every day goes to battle for them” (Goethe). Ordinary, weak people “feed” themselves with necessity and subordinate themselves to exterior circumstances, to whatever is devised by a foreign imagination. Freedom is always a battle, and one can always lose this battle. Defeat in this battle is not simply death and not simply a return to necessity. Defeat means falling under the power of one’s own images, whether positive or negative. The stronger the creator (the stronger his imagination), the mightier the image he creates, and hence the greater the risk of simply “going along with” this image and losing one’s freedom — though in a different way than healthy people, yet with the same outcome. Madness or insanity, as in the cases of Hölderlin and Nietzsche, is only an expression of the contradiction between the imagined worlds of a fallen creator and the very same worlds of ordinary people. But the state of the former and the latter is the same: slavery in the kingdom of necessity.

In order for a creator to not fall, his imagination must always find sufficient material for his creativity — material of sensory and generally empirical diversity. The creator must have a strong sensory experience, rigid reason, and broad mind — and burn all of this within the fire of the imagination. If there is insufficient material, then this fire can burn man himself. Already aware that he had been struck by such a lot, Hölderlin wrote in his letter to a friend: “I can well say of myself that Apollo has struck me.”¹⁶

In Hölderlin’s poem “Remembrance” (Andenken), Heidegger finds a poetically expressed answer to one of the questions that remained open from Being and Time: Why is man’s own being the most “propulsive,” why does it “throw” Dasein into a world of beings?

nemlich zu Hauß ist der Geist

nicht im Anfang, nicht an der Quell.

Ihn zehret die Heimath.

Kolonie liebt, und tapfer Vergessen der

Geist.¹⁷

For the spirit is not at home

At the beginning, not at the source.

The homeland preys upon it.

The spirit loves the colony and valor forgotten.¹⁸

The spirit wandering far away from its native source, gaining invaluable experience and returning with it like a treasure back to the source, is an often repeated theme in Hölderlin as well as other poets (indeed, it is present in Stefan George’s poem “The Word,” which we examined above). The reason why such wanderings are necessary is expressed in the following words: “The homeland preys upon it.” Heidegger clarifies: “Turned toward the homelike and wanting to find the homeland in it, at the beginning the spirit is expelled from the homeland and pushed into an always more fruitless search.”¹⁹ The spirit is by its nature a creator, and it is most difficult of all for it to remain eternally “with its own,” for its creative power finds no outlet and no application “at home.” In this lies the cause of the only real suffering that man as a creator shares with the gods: the state in which the gift of creative power is not in use, and creation cannot overflow and pour forth into the primal element of the Other so as to give itself up and thus come into being. All other sufferings are illusory and, as soon as the spirit awakens, dissipate like nighttime fog when the sun rises. This is why “the spirit loves the colony and valor forgotten.” One could, of course, see this figure of the spirit’s movement towards its source through a foreign land as analogous to the Hegelian triad of the “in itself,” “for itself,” and “in and for itself,” but this very same principle of the spirit’s self-knowledge through the image it creates, nature, has been known since deep antiquity, including in Europe and in the Platonic-Hermetic tradition. On the other hand, one could also draw a parallel with Taoist wisdom: “The best in life is wandering. The best in wandering is returning.”

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READ MORE: Heidegger’s Hermeneutics (PRAV Publishing, 2025 [COMING SOON]), translated by Jafe Arnold.

1. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), 51; idem, Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, trans. G.B. Notkin (Saint Petersburg: Academic Project, 2003), 64-65.

2. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 54.

3. Ibid.

4. [Translated from the Russian edition: Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, 95-95. Cf. the alternative translation in Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 65].

5. Ibid., 62; idem, Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, 86-87.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 56; idem, Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, 74-75.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 57; idem, Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, 75.

10. Ibid., 58; idem, Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, 78-79.

11. Ibid.

12. This is also how one of the Neo-Kantians, Friedrich Lange, interpreted Kant in his work The History of Materialism.

13. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 60; idem, Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, 82-83.

14. Ibid., 61.

15. Ibid., 61; idem, Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, 86-87.

16. Ibid., 62; idem, Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, 87.

17. The poet’s style of writing here differs from the standard in modern German.

18. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 114.

19. Ibid., 116; idem, Raz’iasneniia k poezii Gel’derlina, 194-195.

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