Epochal Discordance: Holderlin's Philosophy of Tragedy

7. From an Agonistic of Powers to a Homecoming: Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Sophocles

. . . Denn vieles vermag Und die Flut und den Fels und Feuersgewalt auch Bezwinget mit Kunst der Mensch . . . aber er steht Vor Göttlichem der Starke niedergeschlagen . . . . . . For much he is capable of, And flood and rock and the power of fire Man vanquishes by art . . . but he stands Beaten down, the strong one, before what is divine . . . Greek tragedy is, for Heidegger, an initial and significant modality of thinking the being of beings in its essential interrelation with and differentiation from becoming (phainesthiai) and semblance (Schein), as well as thinking (Denken) and obligation (Sollen). In Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, Heidegger understands Oedipus Tyrannos as “a single strife between semblance (concealment and dissemblance) and unconcealment (being).”1 Oedipus’s driving passion is for the uncovering of being (Seinsenthüllung), and if he thus has, in the Hölderlinian phrase, “perhaps an eye too many,” this excessive eye is, Heidegger reflects, “the fundamental condition of all great questioning and knowing.”2 In the context of questioning the interrelation of being and thinking with a view to the essential character of logos, Heidegger moves from a discussion 91 SEVEN From an Agonistic of Powers to a Homecoming: Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Sophocles of the “poetic thinking” (das dichterische Denken, that is, a thinking that is genuinely philosophical rather than technically scientific) of Parmenides and Heraclitus to the thoughtful poetic articulation (das denkerische Dichten) of Greek tragedy. He focuses on Parmenides’ statement that to; ga;r aujto; e[stin noei`n t´ kai; ei{nai (“for both are the same, to think and to be”)3 characterizing noei`n not as thinking in the modern sense, but as a receptive apprehension or Vernehmen of apophainesthai or presencing. Since an understanding of noei`n, in this sense, is needed to determine the essentiality as well as the historicality of the human being “out of the essential belonging together of being and apprehension [Vernehmung],” while nevertheless the path to such an understanding is obstructed by much of the history of Western thought, Heidegger addresses a poetic text that speaks of the essentiality of the human being in a complementary way: the first stasimon of Antigone. To undo the obstructions to genuine understanding that prevail even here, he reflects that a certain license of translation and interpretation may prove necessary; and he acknowledges that he cannot, in this context, do full justice to scholarly issues. He also acknowledges that his analysis will not be able to base itself on the tragedy as a whole, let alone on the Sophoclean corpus. With these qualifications , he undertakes an interpretation of the choral ode that follows out three trajectories: seeking firstly what is crucially at issue in the ode as a whole and inspires its linguistic articulation, exploring secondly the dimension opened up by its strophic order or sequence, and lastly taking the measure of human being as characterized by the poetic word. THE FIRST TRAJECTORY OF INTERPRETATION The first trajectory follows out, as the guiding insight of the Sophoclean ode, the essential trait of human being in virtue of which man is spoken of as to; deinovtaton, the most awesome among polla; ta; deina;, the multitude of awesome things encountered. The word deinovn, which Heidegger prefers to translate, not as “awesome ,” but as “uncanny” or “un-homelike” (das Unheimliche, das Unheimische , in the sense of that which dislocates one from all comfortable familiarity ), carries, as he points out, two meanings. Firstly, it indicates what overwhelmingly prevails or holds sway (das überwältigende Walten), which characterizes all that is as a whole, in its very being. What makes it uncanny is that it continually expropriates one from any accepted framework of interpretation , and thus from all that one may cling to as habitual, assured, or “non-endangered”—from the lighted precinct, as it were, within which humans seek to define themselves and to map out their lives. Yet humans are in no way alien to to deinovn in this first sense. On the contrary, they are essentially and therefore relentlessly exposed to it and drawn into it in that they bring to pass being’s self-disclosure. Since such disclosure involves EPOCHAL DISCORDANCE 92 bringing all presencing into some configuration of un-concealment, it is necessarily forceful or even violative, so that man is deinovn also in the second sense of the term: he actively exercizes power (ist gewalt-tätig) within the overpowering. This exercise of...