“[T]he closed essence of the universe contains no force which could withstand the courage of cognition; it must open up before it, and afford it the spectacle and enjoyment of its riches and its depths. (Hegel 1818).” 

Heidegger comments: “[The] fundamental experience of Hegelian metaphysics – namely that the universe cannot withstand the courage of cognition and must open itself to the will for unconditioned certain knowledge (i.e., the will for absolute certainty) – is entirely and utterly non-Greek … The obscurity attended to in the way of thinking is essentially divorced from every ‘mysticism’ and mere sinking into the darkness of obscurity for its own sake (H, 26).”

(1) Greek: Gods/thinkers (athanatizein – deathlessness) – the individual- apart from man

(2) German: Gods fled, thinkers demi-gods, bring the word to man and fatherland.

Hölderlin comments:

Habit is such a powerful goddess that no one, presumably, can rebel against her without being punished. The accord with others that we so readily attain when we remain attentive to whatever is simply there, this harmony of opinions and of customs, appears in its full significance only when we have to live without it; and our heart will most likely never again find proper peace once we have abandoned those former ties. For forging new ties is so little up to us, especially with regard to those that are more refined and excellent. Admittedly, the human beings who have elevated themselves into a new world of what is fitting [des Schiklichen] and good then keep together all the more inseparably. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 239). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

The goddess as Habit is related to habitat, both coming from “habitare,” which means “to dwell” or “to live in.”  Both “habit” and “habitat” share the underlying concept of a place or mode where one resides or operates, whether it’s a physical space or a behavioral pattern.  Contrast this with the Greeks:

Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, relates at one place (Nicomachean Ethics, Z 7, 1141b 77ff ) the basic conception determining the Greek view on the essence of the thinker: ‘It is said they (the thinkers) indeed know things that are excessive, and thus astounding, and thereby difficult, and hence in general ‘demonic (daimonia)’ – but also useless, for they are not seeking what is, according to the straightforward popular opinion, good for man.’ … The Greeks, to whom we owe the essence and name of ‘philosophy’ and of the ‘philosopher,’ already knew quite well that thinkers are not ‘close to life.’ But only the Greeks concluded from this lack of closeness to life that the thinkers are then the most necessary -precisely in view ofthe essential misery of man (P, 100). 

Heraclitus thus agrees as he himself experiences the world in this way that “Fr. 29 also names the polloi next to the aristoi (the best). In Fr. 1, the polloi are compared with the apeiroisin, with the untried, who are contrasted with ego, that is, with Heraclitus … The many do not strive, like the noble minded, after the radiance of glory; they indulge in transitory things and therefore do not see the one … Pindar also connected gold, and thus the radiant, with fire and lighting (HS, 22; also cf HS, 106-7)…  “There is one thing which the best prefer to all else; eternal glory rather than transient things”; Heidegger also treats this passage at IM, 103-4). 

But what is mighty in Heraclitus is he sees the thinker needs the extraordinary, is addicted to the luster of the uncanny and so more unsatisfied with the world than ordinary people, and so brings to word that Philosophers are said to pursue only the fantastic, and so when people come to philosophers, they too wish to find the fantastic, where they can temporarily satiate their desires. And yet, for the men who came to Heraclitus and saw him warming himself at the stove, they were disappointed because there was nothing of the extraordinary. Heraclitus, noticing their disappointment, called to them and said for them to come in, for even there at the stove “the gods come to presence (Pa, LH, 270).”

Heidegger, in his commentary on Heraclitus’ word ‘Agchibasie” from fragment 122, shows that it has the same meaning as the use of the term ‘nearness’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, and brings out the notion of the child and lustre in the Greek sense rather nicely, as well as a thinking that does not wish to resolve itself (I cite crosswise to conserve space):

“Scholar: Agchibasie: ‘moving-into-neamess,’ the word could rather, so it seems to me now, be the name for our walk today along this country path / Teacher: Which guides us deep into the night … / Scientist: that gleams ever more splendidly … / Scholar: and overwhelms the stars … / Teacher: because it nears their distances in the heavens. / Scientist: … at least for the naive observer, although not for the exact [technological] scientist … / Teacher: Ever to the child in man, night neighbors the stars. / Scholar: She binds together without seam or edge or thread. / Scientist: She neighbors; because she works only with nearness. /Scholar: If she ever works rather than rests … / Teacher: while wandering upon the depths of the height (DT, 89-90).”

Heidegger notes “But because human beings now concern themselves, for various reasons, with the continually “new” and “up to date,” whatever exhausts itself in always and only being the same is completely boring to them (32).”  Modernity has shifted from world to man, “[M]odern science holds the key to all understanding.  Sunsets are now only for poets or lovers.  The enchantment of the world has been displaced by another enchantment.  The new enchantment is now physics itself as an outstanding achievement of the human.  The human now enchants himself through himself.  The modern human is now what is enchanting (41).” 

Gods have fled, and so the athanatizein/godliness/deathlessness of the philosopher.  The new God Habit/Habitat = dwelling has arrived, and so as demigods the poets bring to word that which facilitates the dwelling of all people in spectrum from philosopher – poet – peasant/masses.  Habit is generally seen as the enemy of the philosophical because it is understood in the sense of the “habitual,” and so is precisely that which, as common behavior and opinion, must be pressed beyond and overcome:  “The concept and word for ‘fittingly sent or destined’ [das Schickliche], frequently used by Hölderlin, holds an essential meaning for him, and an intrinsic relation precisely to the renewal and transformation of human being, in the sense of a being out beyond what is merely habitual and everyday.”  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 238). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).

There is a twofoldedness to habit in that the habitual must be overcome to find home, but not as the athanatizein (deathlessness) of the Greeks.  The poet must suffer as the demigod suffers.  Heidegger says “The fundamental experience in this is the experience of death and the knowing of death. For this reason too, no concept of beyng is adequate that has not set itself the task of thinking death. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 235). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).”  The death of the poet is not restlessness with the Greeks (as Hölderlin notes in Hyperion’s Song of Fate/Destiny) but homelessness which accompanies restlessness but is not limited to it.  The demigod does not simply have the being of the God. Aristotle said only a beast or God delights in solitude. The poet is also with the people.

For Aristotle the highest life was not community but Theoria.  “Therein resides the peculiar tendency of the accommodation of the temporality of human Dasein to the eternity of the world … This is the extreme position to which the Greeks carried human Dasein (PS, 122).”  Heidegger notes

“We can say one thing only, and that only on the basis of a very difficult argument: stone, plant, and animal are—but their ‘own’ beyng remains closed off to them as such beyng, and indeed in a different way each time for each of these beings. It is even precipitous to say that they have their ‘own’ beyng. For us humans, by contrast, our beyng—that we are and how we are—is manifest to us in a certain way, yet not only, and not primarily, primarily, by our having knowledge of such beyng as something already established that we can ascertain, in the way that, for instance, we can take note of the fact that a tower stands on the Feldberg. Something like that does not affect us. But our beyng does affect us: we cannot be at all without our being affected by such being. Our being, however, is not that of an individuated subject, but rather, in accordance accordance with what was said earlier (p. 126), it is historical being with one another as being in a world. That such being of the human being is in each case mine does not mean that such being is ‘subjectivized’—confined to the isolated individual and determined starting from him—but means only that in the first and last instance, and always, this historical being with one another of the human being must pass through decisions that no one can ever take from another.  Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 237). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.

Regarding the demigod, Holderlin isolates demigod Dionysus: “Being, however, for the Greeks means ‘presence’—παρουσία. In presencing, this demigod is absent, and in absencing he is present. The symbol of the one who is absent in presencing and present in absencing is the mask. The mask is the distinctive symbol of Dionysos— (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 255). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.). 

The eternal that the Greek philosophical soul attunes to is not the thing in itself but a mask that hides the restlessness underneath, because without this the eternal can’t be the “really real.” The pseudonymous mask both manifests its surface and hides what’s beneath.  It is not general or a concept, but what gives the eternal its value.  

Heidegger comments: “First, what is at stake is not something like destiny in general, but rather something singular—the destiny of the Rhine, “that most noble of rivers” (line 32), befitting of a “kingly soul” (line 37). This singular destiny is also not conceived as an individual instance of a general essence of destiny; rather, this singularity has its own essential character that is historical.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 250). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition).  The people must mourn and put to bed the gods that have fled and feel the emptiness left behind so as to be able to redefine themselves.

So, for example, contra Hegel, Heidegger notes regarding truth as certainty – freedom from doubt, ‘”Although certainty as the ultimate arbiter of truth only entered the western tradition following the Christian theological interpretation of truth, specifically in Luther and Thomas, and there only under the specific rubric that arose for a need for the certainty of the salvation of the soul (cf esp. P 51-4).”