Husserl noted we never leave the present.  The past was a past present and the future will be a future present.  This moves forward as clock time.  On the other hand, as I observed in my master’s thesis on Heidegger and the Greeks (2002, pg 10), there is another experience of time moving in the opposite direction of, say, Christmas is coming / is here / has gone into the past.  For Hölderlin, there is an abandonment of the gods.  If we are talking about the abandonment of the gods and waiting on new gods, what are “gods” for Hölderlin?  Heidegger comments “For Hölderlin the gods are ‘nothing other than time’ (92).”  There are two kinds of time:

Which time is long? It is “the time” of the everyday and the time on the peaks, yet each in a different way. Everyday time is “long” [lang] in boredom [Langeweile], where time holds us in limbo and in so doing leaves us empty, where we hurriedly and indiscriminately reach for whatever makes the long time pass or makes for diversion [kurzweilig macht].[4] The time of the peaks is long, because on the peaks reigns a persistent waiting for and awaiting the event [Ereignis], not boredom or diversion. There is no passing or even killing of time there, but a struggle for the duration and fullness of time that is preserved in awaiting. The time on the peaks is essentially long; for a making ready for the true that shall once come to pass [sich ereignen] does not happen overnight or to order, but consumes many human lives and even ‘generations.’ This ‘long time’ remains closed to all those who are overcome with boredom and have no intimation of their own boringness. This long time, however, “once” lets the true—the becoming manifest of beyng—come to pass. (Cf. “Germania,” line 93: “Something true must once appear.”)  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 93). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Calasso characterizes the flight of the gods in this way:

Yet there was a time when the gods were not just a literary clich?, but an event, a sudden apparition, an encounter with bandits perhaps, or the sighting of a ship. And it didn’t even have to be a vision of the whole. Ajax Oileus recognized Poseidon disguised as Calchas from his gait. He saw him walking from behind and knew it was Poseidon “from his feet, his legs.”  Since for us everything begins with Homer, we can ask ourselves: which words did he use for such events? By the time the Trojan War broke out, the gods were already coming to earth less frequently than in an earlier age. Only a generation before, Zeus had fathered Sarpedon on a mortal woman. All the gods had turned up for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. But now Zeus no longer showed himself to men; he sent other Olympians along to do his exploring for him: Hermes, Athena, Apollo. And it was getting harder to see them. Odysseus admits as much to Athena: “Arduous it is, oh goddess, to recognize you, even for one who knows much.” The Hymn to Demeter offers the plainest comment: “Difficult are the gods for men to see.” Every primordial age is one in which it is said that the gods have almost disappeared. Only to the select few, chosen by divine will, do they show themselves: “The gods do not appear to everyone in all their fullness [enargeis],” the Odyssey tells us. Enargei?s is the terminus technicus for divine epiphany: an adjective that contains the dazzle of “white,” argos, but which ultimately comes to designate a pure and unquestionable “conspicuousness.” It’s the kind of “conspicuousness” that will later be inherited by poetry, thus becoming perhaps the characteristic that distinguishes poetry from every other form.  But how does a god make himself manifest? In the Greek language the word theos, “god,” has no vocative case, observed the illustrious linguist Jakob Wackernagel. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens. There is a wonderful example of this in Euripides’ Helen: “O theoi. theos gar kai to gigno’ skein philous”–“O gods: recognizing the beloved is god.” Kerenyi thought that the distinguishing quality of the Greek world was this habit of “saying of an event: ‘It is theos.'” And an event referred to as being the?s could easily become Zeus, the most vast and all-inclusive of gods, the god who is the background noise of the divine. So when Aratus set out to describe the phenomena of the cosmos, he began his poem thus: “From Zeus let our beginning be, from he whom men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are the paths and the places where men meet, full of Zeus the sea and the seaports. Every one of us and in every way has need of Zeus. Indeed we are his offspring.”  “Iovis omnia plena,” Virgil would later write, and in these words we hear his assurance that this was a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of its events, in the intertwining of its forms. And we also hear a great familiarity, almost a recklessness, in the way the divine is mentioned, as though to encounter divinity was hardly unusual, but rather something that could be expected, or provoked. The word atheos, on the other hand, was only rarely used to refer to those who didn’t believe in the gods. More often it meant to be abandoned by the gods, meant that they had chosen to withdraw from all commerce with men. Aratus was writing in the third century b.c., but what became of this experience that for him was so obvious and all-pervasive in the centuries that followed? How did time affect it? Did it dissolve it, destroy it, alter and empty it beyond recognition? Or is it something that still reaches out to us, whole and unscathed? And if so, where, how?

For Hölderlin there is

(1) Abandonment by Gods

(2-3) World time vs poetic time

(4) Mourning

The poetic is surprised by the flash of inspiration that is just present for an instant then passes away, and so poetizing trying to remember what appeared in that moment.  There is a contrast between the “I” of the thinker and the “we” of the poet.

The ‘I’ that is doing the telling here has plaint with the homeland because this ‘I’ self, as standing within itself, experiences itself precisely as belonging to the homeland. Homeland—not as a mere birth place, nor as a mere landscape familiar to us, but as the power of the Earth upon which the human being “dwells poetically,” (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 130). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

We noted previously this Heraclitus fourfold logic of mixed opposites is seen in the hidden presence of death in life:

                  1. CONSPICUOUS    LIFE

(2) Assertiveness of Carpe Diem (3) Restraint of Memento Mori

       (4) CONCEALED/ INCONSPICUOUS DEATH

Similarly, you might say

1. Fine wine

2.  You hate the taste of wine 3. You love the taste of wine

4. Criteria of evaluation

Clearly, if you hate the taste of wine like I do the criteria are meaningless.

Similarly

1. Fiction Writing

2. You appreciate good fiction 3. You think fiction writing is childish

4.  Criteria of evaluation

In Platonic philosophy, we might ask what makes the eternal forms the “really real”

1.  The really real Idea of justice, what is and always was (recollection)

2. Particular actions show a limited aspect of Justice 3. A particular action was Justice Incarnate.

4. Restlessness makes the idea the really real

Similarly, we noted previously

1. Houseness

2-3.  Houseness appearing differently through Mansion/average house/dilapidated shack

4.  being-there making mansion “true house:”  Now that’s a House!

Heidegger comments: … To be absorbed by something … [means] ‘to be totally preoccupied by something , as for instance, when one says: He is entirely engrossed in his subject matter. Then he exists authentically as who he is, that is, in his task … Da-sein means being absorbed in that toward which I comport myself… To be absorbed in beholding the palm tree in front of our window is letting the palm tree come to presence, its swaying in the wind, is absorption of my being-in-the world and of my comportment in the palm tree. (Z, 160-161)

We see this 4-fold logic in Nietzsche’s analysis of slave morality:

1.  Christian Maxim: “Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person get into heaven.”

2-3.  Evaluate above statement according to healthy vs sickly rather than good and evil

4.  Question: if a slave was to invent morality what kind of morality would they invent?

The time of the Greek philosophers was eternity, since a concept/idea never came to be or will it cease to be, but simply “is.”  In terms of the new time, “because, through the arrival of the new gods, the entire historical, Earthly Dasein of the Germans is to be pointed on a new path and created a new determinacy and orientation.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 136). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).

With the abandonment the “I” gets dislodged and a “we” emerges, “Now, where even the individual in his particular relation to particular gods has been abandoned, where only the preservation of the divinity of the gods that have fled remains—there the ‘I’ recedes and the telling is a word of the ‘we.’ (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 145-6). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).

The new time is not a marching forward but passing away, “Thus everything heavenly passes quickly. (“Conciliator, you who . . . ,” Appendix, IV, 341, line 5) To pass does not here mean to perish, but rather to pass by, not to remain, not to remain there constantly present, i.e., thought in To pass does not here mean to perish, but rather to pass by, not to remain, not to remain there constantly present, i.e., thought in terms of the issue, to presence as something that has been, to come to presence in a coming that presses upon us. Because we are here concerned with something other than things that are present at hand or not present at hand—things whose appearing can be directly ascertained—our experience of such eternities and times is also of a different character, one that must appear incongruous to our everyday way of experiencing time. In the ensuing lines of the poem just cited, we are told that something is indeed first recognized as what it is when it has passed, in memory (ibid., lines 5ff.) (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 158-9). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

It seems everyday time is the past-now, present, and future now – we never leave the now.  Calendar time Marches forward.  But there is another time that flows in the opposite direction and passes away. (Christmas has passed):

We said earlier (p. 69) that in the words “Not those . . .” at the beginning of the poem there lies a temporal decision. Only now do we correctly understand what is meant: not the mere choice between an old and a new, between what was then and what is today. Rather, what is to be decided is this: whether we decide in favor of the authentic time of poetizing with its having-been, future, and present, or whether we continue to cling to the everyday experience of time that regards everything in a merely ‘historiographical-chronological’ way. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 160). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Poetry is the time of passing.  Inspiration can’t be simply worked toward through effort.  We have all stayed up all night in futility trying to solve something when suddenly the insight comes to you.  The flash of insight from the muse (so to speak) suddenly arrives for the briefest moment and passes away.  You can put forth all your effort and still not receive the inspiration.  Poetic thinking is thus recollecting what was contained in the flash.

Thinking tries to accommodate itself to the lowest level possible through using examples, analogies, allegories, etc.  But Holderlin’s poetry doesn’t use imagery in that way.  Heidegger says:

We must free ourselves from the commonplace view of what images and the intuitable content of poetizing are supposed to accomplish, even though this view is often entirely correct. According to such a view, these images are meant to clarify as much as possible, to make familiar and bring close to us the true states of affairs that the poet wishes to name poetically and to found. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 165). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

There is going to be a German foundation of mourning rather than a Greek foundation of restlessness.  The house in front of me offers a limited aspect of the concept “houseness,”  which is eternal.  But houseness appears incarnate in the mansion then fades.  Fatherland is to passing away Poetic time what a supratemporal idea is to Now time: “The fatherland is not some abstract, supratemporal idea in itself …Rather, the beyng of the fatherland—that is, of the historical Dasein of a people—is experienced as the authentic and singular beyng from which the fundamental orientation toward beings as a whole arises and attains its configuration… We take from these passages the essence of that originary beyng in which the poet comprehends the flight of the gods of old and the emergence of the new gods.” (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 171-2). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).  In all this we see the logic of mixed opposites of Heraclitus:

The wisdom of Heraclitus was condensed in an almost formulaic manner into the words of Fragment 50: ἓν πάντα εἶναι—One is all. But “One” does not mean uniformity, uniformity, empty sameness, and “all” does not mean the countless multitude of arbitrary things: rather, ἕν, “One” = harmony, is all—that which arises in each case essentially constitutes beings as a whole as diverse and in conflict with one another. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (pp. 177-178). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.) 

This is also the kind of thinking we find in Hölderlin’s friend Hegel:

Hegel comprehends philosophy as infinite thinking. Finite thinking only ever thinks one side, thinks one-sidedly, finitely. That thinking that thinks one side and the opposing side reciprocally—that is, that thinks their conflict in its unity—is infinite…As absolute thinking, Hegel’s thought seeks to bring opposites into a universal fluidity and thus to resolution. Hegel’s infinite thinking, however, is not some thought-up formula, but has arisen from, and is sustained by, a fundamental experience of Western existence [Dasein] and of the essence of its Spirit. To this essence belongs the pain of being torn into extreme oppositions. The knowledge of existence being dismembered in this way is what Hegel calls the “unhappy consciousness.” It is the proper spur of Spirit, which drives its happening in the most diverse configurations and stages of world history, and thus drives Spirit to itself, to its essence. Spirit knows itself in philosophy as absolute knowing itself. And in this knowing, it is at the same time truly actualized. For Hegel, however, the actuality of Spirit in history is the state, and the state can only be what it has to be if it is permeated and sustained by the infinite force of infinite Spirit—that is, if it actualizes universally in a living unity the most extreme opposition between the free independence of the individual and the free power of the community. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (pp. 182-183). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).

In Hegel, the tearing of sock produces previously inconspicuous unity “as” a lost unity.  This is the thinking that typified western thought from the Greeks to the Germans,

Hölderlin too, however, was subject to the power of the Heraclitean thought. A later thinker, Nietzsche, would also come under its power. Indirectly, the commencement of German philosophy with Meister Eckhart fundamentally stood under this power. The name Heraclitus is not the title for a philosophy of the Greeks that has long since run its course. Just as little is it the formula for the thinking of some universal world humanity in itself. Presumably, it is the name of a primordial power of Western-Germanic, historical Dasein, and indeed in its first confrontation with the Asiatic. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 183). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Heidegger also drank from this well, and so more primordial than awake and unconscious for him was Dasein (being-there)/ Nicht Da Sein (not being there) since even if I’m asleep I can be vividly absorbed in a dream just as I can be in a conversation but not present for it: Weg-Sein, being away.

Next time I’ll finish off with Hölderlin’s “Germania” and transition to “The Rhine.”