No One Knows (II)

The Stakes. How “The Ister” Relates to “The Question Concerning Technology”

II. The Stakes. How “The Ister” Relates to “The Question Concerning Technology”

The Independent: “The Danube River has seen drastic changes in land use, over-exploitation of natural resources, hydraulic re-engineering through damming and widespread illegal fishing over the last few decades” (Getty)

The advent of the will to power as the will to will opens up the possibility for the unlimited exploitation of everything. This occurs through the universal establishment of everything not merely as objects but as pure instrumentalities (Bestände) and through the subordination of all subjectivity and freedom to the overarching necessities of the will implicit in technology. Man is organized on a global scale by political, social, and economic agencies for production and consumption, and the earth itself becomes nothing but a reserve of energy and raw materials that are brought forth and directed by a technology that aims only at its own continuation and growth. The absolute technical state itself serves only to guide the total mobilization of human and natural resources for the unlimited exploitation and consumption of the earth. Politics along with all other institutions thus becomes an appendage of technology. In this “planetary imperialism” of technical organization subjectivity and modernity reach their end.

With the advent of world technology freedom is extinguished. The general conception of technology as a tool in the hands of a self-determining humanity is in Heidegger’s view a fundamental misunderstanding, for technology has a logic and necessity of its own that passes beyond human control. All men are governed by economic and technical necessities: the competition for the unlimited exploitation of the earth requires the objectification and subordination not just of some men to others but of all men to the world task. Man thus becomes human to the extent that he constitutes himself as a raw material that has no determinate characteristics, or as a pure instrumentality that can be used as momentary necessity dictates. Man becomes an interchangeable part.

In the midst of this technological frenzy of production and consumption, of subordination and exploitation, man fails to recognize, according to Heidegger, that it is the very subjectivity and freedom he regards as the essence of his humanity that uproots him and casts him into uncertainty, insecurity, and alienation. Hence he does not recognize that all his striving only more completely obliterates his place in the world and his true humanity. Indeed, man and the world are thereby so transformed that the very possibility of a place, of an ethos, and hence of an authentic ethics and politics is extinguished. Man who had a home in the world in the context of the polis and traditional life is at home in the modern world everywhere and nowhere: as a pure instrumentality man can adapt himself to anything. As homo faber man becomes mass man.

—Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History¹

i. The Journeying

Heidegger’s exposition on the unhomeliness of humanity over the course of the Second and Third Parts of the Ister lecture is grounded in four quotations from Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’s so-called Ode to Man from Antigone. I shall present them and then proceed to run through a synopsis of the two Parts.

From the first strophe,

“Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing / more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being” [in other words, “nothing is more uncanny than man”]

From the second strophe,

“Everywhere venturing forth underway, experienceless without any way out / he comes to nothing”

From the second antistrophe,

“Towering high above the site, forfeiting the site / is he for whom non-beings always are / for the sake of risk”

And, immediately following those lines,

“Such shall not be entrusted to my hearth, / nor share their delusion with my knowing, / who put such a thing to work.”²

Hölderlin’s term “das Unheimlichste,” “the most uncanny,” is a translation of the Greek “τò δεινότατον,” a modification of the word “δεινόν” (neuter of δεινός). In English, this word is usually translated to something like “terrible,” “fearful,” or “powerful,” as it has connotations of danger. But it also has connotations of “strange,” “wondrous,” or “marvelous.” Sophocles’s “Ode” understands man to be an aberration in the animal kingdom, a creature who possesses immense technical inventiveness which has enabled him to master its environment and harness nature toward his advantage, able to overpower all limits—except mortality. Hölderlin’s translation, by capturing both the “fearful” and the “strange” connotations of the word, renders palpable the implied aberrant status of man. First, Heidegger points to the resonance between “das Unheimlichste” and “unheimisch,” or “unhomely.”³ For Heidegger, the unhomely process, the process of tearing ourselves out of the flow of nature, forgetting our home and venturing out, is History, the essence or meaningful pattern of history since the inception of metaphysics, with its calamitous culmination being globalized technological civilization. The decisive role the Ister played in transmitting metaphysics from the Greeks to the Germanic peoples, and the ways rivers in general determine the historic destiny of human beings, is at least one of the elements at play in Hölderlin’s Ister hymn. Heidegger adds that, if bringing out the ways that rivers determine humans in their essential historicity—and thus in their Being, for Time is the horizon of being—was Hölderlin’s early attempt at poetizing beyond representation, then such post-representational poetizing must necessarily poetize upon the Journeying or Venturing, ὁ πόρος, the metaphysical homelessness that man as the uncanniest of creatures experiences as an extension.⁴ Because if Hölderlin’s poetizing is a poetizing on the essence of rivers, and rivers in their essentiality are “locality” (a river is always a particular river, indelibly idiosyncratic, wrapping around an unreplicable series of earthen features, shaping them in turn, a place where humans build homes, the source of our homeliness, making arable our abode) as well as “journeying” (both the natural history of this river and the world-historical status of man’s relations to it, seen in the hymn’s references to Pindar’s lines about “Hercules” traveling it as mythic summary of the spirit of philosophy transiting from the “Indus” in India to Greece’s “Alpheus” to the Germanic peoples), then to really circle in on the essence of the river the poet must open up its temporal activity by weaving the story of the events to which it has been essential.

Humans draw meaning from rivers themselves, in a more fundamental way than how we draw meaning from the study of history (“historiography”). At its most essential layer, the poetizing on the river as becoming homely is far more than the drawing of “meaning” from a mere reflection on history. Rather, the historical reflecting Hölderlin, and Heidegger, undertake is a reflection on the “History of Being.” This is not the history of mere facts and dates; this is the history of how Being has been grasped within philosophy and poetry over the centuries, and how this grasping has determined the exterior being of the earth, informing our modes of revealing, meditating on all its metamorphoses (from polytheism to monotheism to the flight of the gods) in an attempt to arrive at its so-called Ground (the gods’ return). The river has been essential to the unfolding of human history—especially the Ister, which for Hölderlin (in Heidegger’s reading) is the site of the transmission specifically of the question of the meaning of Being from the Greek pre-Socratics to the German philosophers of what we can call the advent of nihilism—but more importantly, because it determines human history, it therefore might serve as a porthole to view its underlying process or strategy.

That the history of Being is decisively driven by the rivers means that the rivers must also be decisive in the question concerning Being, and only by heeding them as they are rather than contorting them into a puppet for our preconceived theories can we receive it. In a beautiful summation of all this—this being the content of some 125 pages—Heidegger at the end of the lecture decides that poets and rivers share the same ground. They are both “demigods.”⁵ They are demigods in the sense that they mediate between the gods (or “the heavenly,” or simply “the holy,” as in holy-ness), and man, the mortals. They do this by making an “Open” which faces the direction of the holy, which allows for a moment of appropriation, of receiving and sending: locality and journeying are a unity that cannot be made sense of using the spatio-temporal logic we are accustomed to; rather they can only be rendered sensible with the clearing Ereignis, a prominent word in late Heidegger that is typically translated as “event of appropriation.”⁶ It is difficult to translate Ereignis into a single word that conveys the various senses Heidegger means to get across, but, according to a careful elaboration by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, it should be thought of as inowning, as a ““going all the way into and through” without possessing,” neither an event within time-space or an appropriation in the sense of taking but a property-less and unappropriating owning of being.⁷ In terms of human praxis, Ereignis understood as inowning is like the term gelassenheit [releasement of self-will] that Heidegger borrows from Meister Eckhart with the added sense that it is not pure resignation but a positive and world-focused rather than God-focused action, an active gelassenheit.

Proper historicality is only commenced when we stand “in the realm of the essential,” when we “are able to wait for what is destined to be of one’s own [die Zu-schickung des Eigenen—the resonance between Eigenen and Ereignis is intentional].”⁸ But ‘one’s own’ and its essence “is so mysterious [geheimnisvoll]” that the unfolding of “its ownmost essential wealth” can only proceed from a “supremely thoughtful” meditation on the “foreign,”⁹ i.e., the journeying away from home, like Hercules the foreigner’s visit to the “shady springs of Ister” to persuade “the Hyperborean people, Apollo’s servants,” along with “Zeus himself” to bestow unto him the olive tree, a plant he could bring back to the Hellenes and with which he could “provide shade for men to share” and create “crowns for deeds of excellence.”¹⁰ The “passage through the foreign” is that by which we are enabled to “return home into one’s own, and thereby that which is one’s own itself”’¹¹; in other words, only by becoming enmeshed in what is not our home can we understand what is home, and through this understanding provide “shade and crowns,” glorify and find gratitude, and “establish the holy judging” as Hercules did.¹² Indeed, in Hölderlin’s telling, Hercules was “invited” by the “distantly gleaming” Ister river itself; and he had to “come up from the sultry Isthmus” of Greece and “look for shadows” because “full of courage they were / in that place [Greece], but, because of the spirits, / there’s need of coolness too. That is why that hero / Preferred to come here to the well-springs and yellow banks, / Highly fragrant on top, and black / With fir woods.”¹³ Let us, with Giambattista Vico, understand Hercules as an amalgam of various pre-historic founders who slayed the beasts of the pre-civilized earth and cleared the ground for cities to grow.¹⁴ If one of the Greek’s founding fathers, apparently, traveled beyond the north wind—to those men unreachable “by ship or by foot” whom Apollo feasts with for three months each year because he “finds greatest delight” in “their banquets and praises”¹⁵—in order to establish one of Greece’s holiest cults, the Olympic Games—the sanctification of the athletic feats of nobles, a “leisurely” activity enabled by their emancipation from toiling labor through the combined efforts of techne and slavery—then at the tail-end of technology-enabled leisure the modern western technician must, as shall see, travel back to Greece to retrieve the answer to world technology: the theurgic abilities of the ancient Poet.

Homecoming is inaugural theme of post-representation. Only by experiencing nihilism and the despair of the Technical nullifying of human life and culture can we experience what is not nihilism, not unhomeliness. In the Isterlecture, Heidegger says Being is synonymous with Hestia, the Hearth, via Hölderlin’s translations of Antigone: Heidegger connects the third Sophoclean passage above with the fourth: “the site” that Sophocles says man “towers above,” Heidegger claims, is not “the polis,” the turning-pole which pulls the beings of the regime into the civil order, but the more primordial “Hearth” mentioned a few lines later. And this “hearth” bears an immediate relation to the goddess Hestia, who, according to Plato’s Phaedrus, “alone always remains steadfastly behind in the homestead of the gods.” Heidegger takes this to mean that Hestia “is the middle of all steadfast constancy and presence—that which essentially prevails in being, that which the Greeks experience in the sense of constant presence.”¹⁶ The Ister river, by revealing both the locality (the homely) and the journeying (the unhomely) at once, is not a symbol for but is the “demigod” window into the God—without the use of metaphysics, onto-theology. As the mouthpieces of this mediatory ground, the poets and the rivers are Others; poets Otherize themselves to be able to lose the essential-lack-of-essence in humanity, to lose a bit of their uncanniness, and thus become able to grasp Being.¹⁷

In the Ister hymn, Hölderlin says “a sign [Zeichen] is needed” “so that / Sun and moon it may bear in mind, inseparable, / And go away, day and night no less, and / The Heavenly feel warm one beside the other.”¹⁸ Where he got this notion is not known, but the ancient Norse poem Völuspá, collected into the “Poetica Edda,” tells of how the Aesir gods gave names to “noon and twilight, / Morning they named, and the waning moon, / night and evening, the years to number” (stanza 6), how the Norns carved runes into wood and thereby set the laws of men and the fate of their lives (20), and how, after the battling breaks out between the Aesir and the Vanir over the breaking of “words and bonds” (26), the process of Ragnarok commences: “The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea, / The hot stars down from heaven are whirled; / Fierce grows the steam and the life-feeding flame, / Till fire leaps high about heaven itself” (57). After most of the gods die, the few remaining “call to mind” “the mighty past” “and the ancient runes of the Ruler of Gods” (60) and thenceafter rebuild the world, to be ruled over by “a mighty lord,” and “happiness ever there shall they have” (64-65).¹⁹ There is also, of course, the God of Genesis speaking the world into being, and Saint John’s identification of Jesus Christ with the Logos. The notion that the world is sustained by language is an old tradition, but what is perhaps new with Hölderlin is that this is the task of man, not of gods: as he writes in the “Patmos” hymn, “but what the Father / Who reigns over all loves most / Is that the solid letter / Be given scrupulous care, and the existing / Be well interpreted. This German song observes.”²⁰

Heidegger takes “the sign” to be the poet himself, rather than a symbol, because Hölderlin says this “sign” can bear things in “mind,” implying it has a mind.²¹ To become the sign, rather than making the river a “sign of” something, is what is meant by the poet’s becoming Other.²² The river too is the sign, as the river and the poet, given what they do, are exchangeable. Heidegger then reiterates that rivers cannot be said to be “signs of” something else because they are themselves signs, themselves this something else²³—and, to disagree with Heidegger here (who, at the very end of the lecture, bizarrely changes his previous reading of the poem’s last line, “No one knows,” claiming without evidence that the poem broke off there and that Hölderlin was about to start connecting what he was saying to the Rhine²⁴—I will return to this later), this is precisely why Hölderlin can say “no one knows” what the rivers do, because no mortal can grasp this, only the demigods, and them only barely. The poet nevertheless bears the heavenly in mind for us and distributes this share of the heavenly to us, sharing the Holy without fragmenting it or enframing it.²⁵ But, to again depart from Heidegger, the claim that the poet is the sign because a sign lacks a mind is a bit tenuous, and the identification of the poet with a demigod would be too hubristic for Hölderlin. It is easier to argue, as Hölderlin suggests in the Patmos lines quoted above, that the poem is the sign, that language is mind and that language bears or houses Being (“Hestia”), as Heidegger will say elsewhere.²⁶

Regardless, the poet avoids enframing by naming, giving the poetic word to things; the sign (“the besouler”) “bears everything originarily in mind,” makes them appear: the sign lets the heavenly show themselves—otherwise they would face oblivion, as they do under planetary technology, whose mode of revealing is Ge-stell, enframing.²⁷

Quoting from Hölderlin’s hymn “The Rhine,” Heidegger notes that the heavenly “feel nothing” on their own, cannot comport toward beings; they need a relation to “the holy beyond them” which is shown to them by the Others who are the signs (river, poet or poem, demigod) and who in turn fence in and mark them for mortals to see.²⁸ The poet’s task is in one sense a “showing,” a revealing, just as “truth” for Heidegger has a phenomenological character rather than a propositional one, as with the Greek aletheia, “unconcealment.” Through the sign/rivers, the heavenly unite with this world, which makes possible their relation to mortals, their descent to them, opening up the joy of relating to “sons of earth.” Heidegger describes the poets’ act of making a descent for the divine possible as “building of a staircase” for the gods to come down on, which simultaneously makes a “dwelling place” for humans: both are established poetically through a grounding in Being.²⁹ The rivers, as signs, point out or show what is essential, “make arable” the land (“poiēsis” as “making”): ““Poetically” they ground the dwelling of human beings upon this earth.”³⁰ This is not even figurative: places are farmed and thus their soil and waterways are tended to when humans decide to dwell there (as in the Ister hymn: “But here we wish to build. / For rivers make arable / the land”), and this decision is reciprocally decided by the quality of land contributed to by the length and the size of the rivers, both as fertilizing entities and as routes of transportation for goods and travelers. And with cultivation comes cults for the divine.

But, given the gulf between humans and their homeless groundlessness, the loss of their essence, and the homely steadfast staying in Essence that is Hestia the hearth goddess, we can assume that poets have, since the death of God, abdicated this task or have been unable to perform it. Inessential poetry has meant that Hestia has been obscured by the Symbol just as the philosophical practitioners of ontotheology obscure her with the Idea. The only way this can be overcome is if a poet departs from mere aesthetic, metaphysical versifying and reaches a more essential poetizing that can find in the earth’s rivers their steadfast nature without a need for technē, and thereby relate us to the hearth. This would be the occurrence of truth in the work of art, its presence rather than re-presence, whereby beauty would come to be understood as the appearance of the truth of Being rather than an idea in-itself. Poets of Hölderlin’s caliber are in a secret pact with the Norns and with History: they have been entrusted with the construction of a passage through which the fled divine will return. This staircase is the “sign” that Hölderlin refers to in the Ister hymn, after he states that “a sign is needed” for the “rivers to be to language” and keep the heavenly bodies in sight.³¹ The signage that poets and rivers do cannot be comprehended scientifically-metaphysically, but only phenomenologically-poetically. The “meaning” of this kind of sign is not a logical proposition but a caring nourishment—not unlike how Christians speak of Christ as “the truth.” Finally, on the last page of the lecture, Heidegger interprets Hölderlin’s line from the In Lovely Blueness… fragment, “Is there a measure on earth? There is none,” as a protest against forceful, “stealthy” scientific observation and systematicity, but for all that it is not a complete denial of measure in favor of mindlessness. Measure can only come from a place not-earthly. And this can only spring upon us by surprise—a thought which Heidegger takes from Hölderlin’s “The Journey”:

A dream it becomes for him who would

Approach it by stealth, and punishes him

Who would equal it with force.

Often it surprises one

Who indeed has scarcely thought it.³²

The “demigod” can find the measure, for he alone is egoless enough and has given himself over to the gift and the hearth enough to be able to face the Holy.

ii. Technology and the Saving Power

Let us return to the poets’ abdication of their task. How can it be that this “Sign” to “bear the heavenly in mind” has not yet “surprised” a poet with its presence? If poetry is the domain in which we shall find the solution to our diremption from the home and find the means by which we will dethrone the reign of world technology, why has it not yet appeared, when plenty of people claim to practice poetry and have claimed to practice it since the death of God? To understand this, we must understand what the essence of technology is, which is to say we must discover what exactly is blocking the essential poetizing Heidegger has in mind.

In QCT, Heidegger puts forward the claim that the essence of (modern) technology is nothing technological; that it has, as he termed it elsewhere, an underlying “world picture” (Weltbild) which it imposes on the world. This Heidegger terms “Gestell,” an ordinary German word used for things like a “bookrack” or a “skeleton” that he says he chose precisely to use in an “eerie” way, as Plato did when he “daringly” used the Greek word εἶδος, which was previously used for outward visible aspects, for the underlying reality in things.³³ Gestell is translated by William Lovitt as “enframing.” The thought here is that technological instruments themselves are not the source of the trouble, but the intellectual interface that representational thinking, which undergirds the modern scientific worldview required for the invention of modern technological instruments, establishes in us. Heidegger in QCT defines “enframing” as “the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve.” Enframing tells us that nature is a set of objects awaiting exploitation by subjects. The river is nothing more than a potential power source for a hydroelectric dam. Elsewhere he noted that the sense of “to set or posit” is present in the common understanding of “stellen” (to frame), as can be seen the word Ge-Setz (similar to the English word “statute,” from the Latin “statuere,” to set),³⁴ which is believed to come from the same root. Heidegger insists that enframing is not just one posited “worldview” among many, which could be corrected by adjusting our opinions on social-political “positions,” but is that predecessor positing which enables all worldviews, since the notion of a world-“view” is already something framed.³⁵ Enframing is a “way of revealing” that “holds sway” in modern technology, a phenomenological model preceding all modern perspectives, something that we are not conscious of having adopted.³⁶ No one alive is outside of it: since enframing challenges man forth, man unavoidably “stands within the essential realm of enframing.” The general trajectory of its unfolding is also predetermined by its inner logic: Gestell once adopted automatically starts “man upon a way of revealing, destining [Geschick]. It is from this destining that the essence of all history [Geschichte] is determined.”³⁷ Its inner logic can be said to be the will-to-power, which in the final analysis is nothing more than the will-to-will, “empowering to power,” an infinitely regressive tautological exploitation of beings without end.³⁸

Heidegger contends that the “final delusion” imputed by enframing, stemming from both technological man’s view that everything he encounters is his construct and from his self-conception as “lord of the earth,” is that “man everywhere and always encounters only himself.” This is delusional because Gestell, as an alien essence that follows its own logic, cannot be controlled by man, and so what man is encountering is not himself but Gestell; it is a false self-confrontation: “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e. his essence.” Man as challenged-forth cannot be encountering himself when he encounters his products, natural things represented as mere objects, and the world itself as “standing reserve”—instead, he is encountering always only technology and, typically, is ignorant even of that: “Man stands so decisively in subservience to the challenging-forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to.”³⁹ As we saw, man’s forgetting of his essence and his subsequent homeless wandering is the central theme of the Second Part of the Ister lecture. This is because modern technology and man’s unhomely uncanniness share as a common root the decision that was made in distant antiquity when the question of Being presented itself: the advent of metaphysics and the substitution of Being for beings, whether as material objects or as ideas.

About five paragraphs down from these remarks, Heidegger tempers this world-historical tension with a quote from Hölderlin’s hymn “Patmos”: “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.” Patmos, an island in the Aegean Sea, was used by the Romans as a prison colony for exiles, among them being John, who according to tradition was the same man who wrote the eponymous Gospel and the Epistles. It was on Patmos that he claimed to have received a vision of the end times and which he copied down as a text known as the Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse of John.⁴⁰ This hymn of Hölderlin’s is fittingly chiliastic and, like many of his other poems, attempts to unite Christ and the gods of pagan Greece together into one heavenly council presiding over the same cosmos. The “saving power” is literal: for Hölderlin, the gods fled the world and are withholding their grace, but in an age to come they shall return, a prophesy he also wrote about in Bread and Wine and The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism.⁴¹ Heidegger first introduces the “saving power” lines from “Patmos” by way of contrasting “the actual threat” of technology with the “potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology.” The latter are a threat, but are not the primary threat that technology poses to man; that, the former, “has already afflicted man in his essence.” Specifically, the “rule” of enframing, the place where “there is danger in the highest sense,” is not merely the threat of being killed off by technology such as in a nuclear war; the rule of enframing is dangerous even if technology does not threaten us existentially. Enframing’s danger is essential; it “threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.” In a different essay, Heidegger spelled out the danger clearly:

But even supposing that the modern doctor, beneficiary of the progress of medicine, not only escapes death for a while but also recovers her health, even then the art of medicine has only better supported and guided φύσις. Τέχνη can merely cooperate with φύσις, can more or less expedite the cure; but as τέχνη it can never replace φύσις and in its stead become the ἀρχή of health as such. This could happen only if life as such were to become a “technically” producible artifact. However, at that very moment there would also no longer be such a thing as health, any more than there would be birth and death. Sometimes it seems as if modern humanity is rushing headlong toward this goal of producing itself technologically. If humanity achieves this, it will have exploded itself, i.e. its essence qua subjectivity, into thin air, into a region where the absolutely meaningless is valued as the one and only “meaning” and where preserving this value appears as the human “domination” of the globe. “Subjectivity” is not overcome in this way but merely “tranquilized” in the “eternal progress” of a Chinese-like “constancy” [“Konstanz”]. This is the most extreme nonessence [Unwesen] in relation to φύσις-οὐσία.⁴²

On the other hand, the abasement of metaphysics to (or, more accurately, its final self-revealing as) the nihilist will-to-will could serve as a moment of “cleaning house,” a sweeping away of the confused verbiage of tradition that would illumine the path to a more original revealing, that of ποίησις (“poiēsis,” a production, creation, fabrication, poem; from ποιέω, “I make”), a mode that the Greeks originally understood τέχνη to participate in before it broke off into the instrumental logic of subordinating objects toward the undefined ends of subjectivity. In “The Principle of Identity,” Heidegger puts it succinctly: “In Gestell we catch sight of a belonging-together of Man and Being, wherein causative belonging alone determines the kind of togetherness and its unity.”⁴³ While enframing “challenges forth,” poiēsis more gently “brings forth.” While enframing “blocks poiēsis” because of its characteristic “destining,” at the same time it promises to show the way back to poiēsis, because poiēsis’s “bringing-forth” is the origin of the frame’s challenging-forth.⁴⁴ The problem, though, is that enframing “banishes man into the kind of revealing that is an ordering” and “drives out every other possibility of revealing.” Poets struggle to reach back into poiēsis because its very identity is blocked. Enframing “above all” conceals the revealing-mode known as poiēsis which “lets presence comes forth into appearance,” as opposed to challenging it forth and “thrust[ing] man into a relation to whatever is that is at once antithetical and rigorously ordered.”⁴⁵ Enframing, besides covering over its own historical roots, most of all covers poiēsis.⁴⁶

The reason it is even possible for man to be saved is because the relationship between enframing and poiēsis, ‘technology’ and ‘poetry,’ is not of a dualistic nature; they are related to each other, entwined: “the rule of enframing cannot exhaust itself solely in blocking all lighting-up of every revealing, all appearing of truth. Rather, precisely the essence of technology must harbor in itself the growth of the saving power.”⁴⁷ The only way back to poiēsis is through the analysis of Gestell, whose contours were first made known to us by the investigation into the errors of metaphysics and the absence of a ground of the sciences, as Heidegger argues in “The Essence of Truth.” Before questioning into the essence of technology, man “does not grasp enframing as a claim;” in questioning it, he discovers the alien essence of his previous thinking. Once he discovers enframing as a distinct mode, he is then able to uncover the implication that it is not of his essence, and that there must be ‘alternatives.’ “We look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power.”⁴⁸ By thinking the nature of technology as a particular way of revealing, which had a start date, we come to discover through philosophical genealogy that technē once encompassed a broader meaning: in ancient Greek, technē meant instrumental tools, but it also meant the fine arts, understood not as mere aesthetic objects but as that “revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearance.” Technē was “a single, manifold revealing.” Rather than “a sector of cultural activity” where works were to be “enjoyed aesthetically,” art in this epoch was understood to have what we may call theurgic powers, abilities to call the divine to presence, making it just as epistemologically supreme and as revealing of ultimate reality as science and technology are thought to be in our era of planetary technology. Since Technē “brought forth and made present,” it “therefore belonged within poiēsis.”⁴⁹ Because enframing is not itself something technological, the only way to effectively reflect upon technology and have a “decisive confrontation” with it would not be to destroy it physically but to minimize its power through “a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.”⁵⁰ This realizing of the saving power is not immediate, we cannot “lay hold of the saving power immediately and without preparation,” because in our haste we would attempt to do it with the tools we are used to, namely representational thinking; we’d merely make a new system of challenging-forth, a new metaphysics. Or, with representational art, we would make a polemic in the guise of art with a so-that-we-can- conclusion, ensnaring us back into the logic of the will-to-will. Instead, we must “foster” the saving power “in its increase” “here and now and in little things,” which requires “holding always before our eyes the extreme danger.”⁵¹ The poet of the other-beginning must begin to attempt to practice active gelassenheit, purposeful releasement from will and an abiding concern with locality, remaining critical toward the social forces that try to pull us into unquenchable, pointless willing and fretting.

iii. Only a god

After quoting the “Patmos” lines about the danger and the saving power, Heidegger says: “What does it mean to “save”? Usually we think that it means only to seize hold of a thing threatened by ruin in order to secure it in its former continuance. But the verb “to save” says more. “To save” is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its proper appearing.”⁵² But how can something “fetch” itself? Would man not have to be fetched by something else? Otherwise man, having not been saved i.e., fetched home into his essence, will continue to encounter everywhere only Gestell even if he has questioned into it and become aware of it. In a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel that was not published until after his death (at his request), Heidegger famously pronounced that “Only a god can save us.”⁵³ There is much one can say about this statement in the context of his other works (not least the chapter “The Last God” in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) or (from Enowning)) also published posthumously), but I would like to examine one passage in particular. It is from his essay “What Are Poets For?” which takes its title from a line in Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” elegy: “and what are poets for in a destitute time?” The destitute time Hölderlin refers to there is interpreted by Heidegger as the “era to which we ourselves still belong,” the era where the gods have fled, and “the evening of the world’s age has been declining toward its night.” Similar to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the Death of God, Hölderlin’s “flight of the gods” reads secular modernity as a period not of optimistic enlightened maturity in the bliss of reason but rather as a period of fundamental abandonment, where the divine has departed from human affairs and we are left to grope in the dark, awaiting the gods’ return. This “default of God” means that the ground which grounds the world is discovered to be absent. In its place is only the abyss [Abgrund]: the complete absence of ground in which our world now hangs.⁵⁴ It is after saying this that Heidegger says the following:

Assuming that a turn still remains open for this destitute time at all, it can come some day only if the world turns about fundamentally—and that now means, unequivocally: if it turns away from the abyss. In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss.

The turning of the age does not take place by some new god, or the old one renewed, bursting into the world from ambush at some time or other. Where would he turn on his return if men had not first prepared an abode for him? How could there ever be for the god an abode fit for a god, if a divine radiance did not first begin to shine in everything that is?

The gods who “were once there,” “return” only at the “right time”—that is, when there has been a turn among men in the right place, in the right way. […] But there is a turn with mortals when these find the way to their own nature. That nature lies in this, that mortals reach into the abyss sooner than the heavenly powers. […] He among mortals who must, sooner than other mortals and otherwise than they, reach into the abyss, comes to know the marks that the abyss remarks. For the poet, these are the traces of the fugitive gods. […] Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. The ether, however, in which alone the gods are gods, is their godhead. The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy. The element of the ether for the coming of the fugitive gods, the holy, is the track of the fugitive gods. But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track? Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy. This is why, in Hölderlin’s language, the world’s night is the holy night.⁵⁵

Yes, it is where the danger of world technology grows that saving power also grows, but more than that, it grows in the most dangerous or “uncanny being,” who according to Sophocles is man, who precisely because of his dangerousness can both chance upon Gestell and grow the saving power. The gods are too holy to reach into the abyss. Yet mere man is also so dangerous, in the sense of being so ignorant of his essential nature, that he cannot find the marks of the fugitive gods left behind in the abyss. It is the artist who, by otherizing himself into the maker of the mediations between man and god, can find the track of the fugitive ones, which is the Holy itself, and thereby begin to build a dwelling for a god to return down and abide in. This propitiation is especially the task of the poet, for his art creates with that which is “the house of Being”—language:

Being, as itself, spans its own province, which is marked off (temnein, tempus) by Being’s being present in the world. Language is the precinct (templum), that is, the house of Being. The nature of language does not exhaust itself in signifying, nor is it merely something that has the character of sign or cipher. It is because language is the house of Being, that we reach what is by constantly going through this house. When we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word “well,” through the word “woods,” even if we do not speak the words and do not think of anything relating to language. […] All beings—objects of consciousness and things of the heart, men who impose themselves and men who are more daring—all beings, each in its own way, are qua beings in the precinct of language. This is why the return from the realm of objects and their representation into the innermost region of the heart’s space can be accomplished, if anywhere, only in this precinct.⁵⁶

If language is the house of being and can therefore call Being back to its home, then language (or rather our abuse of it) is equally responsible for the forgetting of being that occurred in the inception of metaphysics. For Heidegger, language (as logos), Truth (as aletheia), and Being (as physis) are all of one interplay: to Unconceal Physis is to poetically Say (art = truth for Heidegger, truth = unconcealment) Physis, which is the ‘ground’ or enabling factor of language and truth.

But this of course is far from easy, for as Heraclitus said, “Physis loves to hide.”⁵⁷ Much akin to Parmenides’s saying that Being and Thinking are one,⁵⁸ Heidegger dispenses with the ‘humanistic’ notion that thinking is either a “theoretical representation of Being and of man” or a set of “directives that can be readily applied to our active lives.” Rather, fundamental thinking, thinking that ponders the truth of Being,

is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes to pass before this distinction. Such thinking is, insofar as it is, recollection of being and nothing else. Belonging to Being, because thrown by Being into the preservation of its truth and claimed for such preservation, it thinks Being. Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is. But it is by saying its matter. Historically, only one saying [Sage] belongs to the matter of thinking, the one that is in each case appropriate to its matter. Its material relevance is essentially higher than the validity of the sciences, because it is freer. For it lets Being—Be.

Thinking builds upon the house of Being, the house in which the jointure of Being fatefully enjoins the essence of man to dwell in the truth of Being. This dwelling is the essence of “being-in-the-world.” The reference in Being and Time to “being-in” as “dwelling” is no etymological game. The same reference in the 1936 essay on Hölderlin’s verse, “Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth,” is no adornment of a thinking that rescues itself from science by means of poetry. The talk about the house of Being is no transfer of the image “house” to Being. But one day we will, by thinking the essence of Being in a way appropriate to its matter, more readily be able to think what “house” and “to dwell” are.⁵⁹

Nothing said here is intended to be metaphorical. The claim at the heart of our study in this essay, that there can be a poetry that is not symbolic or representational, would have to be as unmetaphorical as Heidegger’s conviction that language houses being, in the least figurative sense imaginable, and that within language we can and must think Being itself rather than represent beings in subjective fashion; just so—in fact, it is only through a poetry that verbally brings Being forth rather than sensuously representing beings-as-Ideas through symbols that this can be understood, for language used in the technic sense—such as in an academic essay—can only approximate the sense of this experience of Being, but cannot utter it. It is not just that there “can” be such a poetry and such a thinking, but that there must be if Being has been thought in the first place. For man to be saved from the technological plague infecting language, he must return language to its own homeland, the poetic, as Vico described in the most vivid way:

Of such natures must have been the first founders of gentile humanity when at last the sky fearfully rolled with thunder and flashed with lightning […] [they] were frightened and astonished by the great effect whose cause they did not know, and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky. And because in such a case the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect and because in that state their nature was that of men all robust bodily strength, who expressed their very violent passions by shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove, the first god of the so-called greater gentes, who meant to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and the clap of his thunder. And thus they began to exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of knowledge, and which, opening the mind of man, gives birth to wonder.⁶⁰

Compare this also to Hölderlin’s ode “The Gods”: “But you [gods] alone can feed with your deathless youth, / In those that truly love you, the childlike mind, / And never, when they stray or suffer, / Wholly let sadness becloud their genius.”⁶¹ Something like this is what Heidegger means by ‘shepherding’ being in the statement, “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.”⁶² Being can be sidelined by universalist technical how-reasoning, or it can be lit up by particularist poetic that-reasoning. Gestell forgets about the question of being and investigates beings instead, because Being is pesky, it cannot be pointed to, it can only be brought up in speech. Poetry and thought are its domain. Being is housed in language; man himself also dwells in language, and it is he who speaks it (or rather, language itself speaks, and hopefully mortals listen); so, like a shepherd, it is his lot to tend to Being and the “preservation of Being’s truth,” its manifestation or emergence; given man’s immense powers, as the most uncanny being who wields destructive technological instruments, man must see to it within his own philosophical cosmology that Being does not “sink” to the oblivion of “forgottenness”⁶³:

Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. […] Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech.⁶⁴

To put it crudely, the way that we speak greatly affects the way that we think, and the way that we think greatly affects the way that we interact with the world—and humanity, and thus human speech, has become so powerful that it possesses the power to literally destroy the earth and bring us to extinction. To retract the danger caused by the technological worldview, we must plunge into language—not language made “into one more object” by using it as a tool of “relat[ing] to beings in terms of representation and production,” but language as a “saying that really engages in saying” that which “by nature belongs to the province of language,” namely “particular beings as a whole.”⁶⁵ Language, poetically sculpted rather than technically used, will begin to attune humanity’s eyes to see, in neither in a wholly nostalgic “old” nor a groundlessly “new” way, the holy shimmering of particular things and locales and the essential dwelling of mankind, rather than universalist doctrines or “worldviews.” Language will call the god down, but it is the god’s coming down that enables this new seeing.

This novel way of seeing is what Mark Wrathall and Morganna Lambeth call “polydivinistic.” They developed the term in an essay on the previously mentioned “Last God,” a name which appears in both Heidegger’s Contributions and in The History of Beyng. To state from the very beginning, Wrathall and Lambeth do not think Heidegger conceived of the last god as a supernatural being. It is not a deity in the traditional sense. The last god is “something that’s already present but disguised by our technological projection of being.” In Contributions, Heidegger says the last god is “The totally other over against gods who have been, especially over against the Christian God.” He speaks of the last god’s “passing by,” not a lingering upon an absolute throne as the being of beings. He also speaks of the last god having its “essential swaying” within “the hint,” which he defines as “the onset and staying-away of the arrival as well as the flight of the gods who have been.” In other words, the essence of the last god lies in the history of philosophy and the history of religion—history is itself the hint.⁶⁶ “Hint” appears to be yet another word borrowed from Hölderlin, who in his ode “Rousseau” says, “For the yearning man / The hint [Der Wink] sufficed, because in hints from / Time immemorial the gods have spoken.”⁶⁷ Still more crucially, Heidegger says “The last god is not the end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history,” because it “stands outside those calculating determinations meant by titles such as “mono-theism,” “pan-theism,” and “a-theism.” “Monotheism” and all types of “theism” exist only since Judaeo-Christian “apologetics,” which has metaphysics as its intellectual presupposition. With the death of this god, all theisms collapse.” The destiny of the world hinges on the last god, because “Preparation for the appearing of the last god is the utmost venture of the truth of be-ing, by virtue of which alone man succeeds in restoring beings,” and man plays a decisive if ‘passive’ role in its appearing because its “greatest nearness” is “enowned when enowning [Ereignis] as hesitating self-refusal increases in not-granting.” This is also the moment of the “innermost distress of abandonment by being.”⁶⁸

Wrathall and Lambeth understand the last god as that which “will allow us to move beyond the age of metaphysics,” our era, which in The History of Beyng Heidegger terms Machenschaft, “and into the new era of Ereignis.”⁶⁹ Machenschaft, “machination,” formed out of the domination of the prior and primordial epoch, Aufgang or “whoosing up” [Dreyfus and Kelly’s translation, “Aufgang” itself being Heidegger’s transposition of phusis into German] which saw the cosmos as unstable and unpredictable, a realm where entities whooshed into existence and flittered away; humans felt themselves at the mercy of the gods and lived in an eternal present without any hope of predicting or controlling future events. During Aufgang, man prayed to the gods for mercy and miraculous intercession: their grace was a kind of primitive technology. Machenschaft arose precisely because humans sought more control over nature, so that their lives could become less unpredictable. This paradigm shift occurred gradually alongside the many technical discoveries, naturalist inquiries, and scientific studies that commenced in the pre-Socratic age of the Greeks, such as on the island of Samos under the reign of the tyrant Polycrates. Wrathall and Lambeth theorize that Ereignis will also come about as such a paradigm shift, something dramatically different from Machenschaft’s “world picture.” But this time we would be departing not the wilderness of nature but the nihilism of scientific materialism, not least from an exasperation with the incessant predictability and nullifying experiential sameness that is Gestell.⁷⁰ I add that it is not so much the predictability of life, routine as such, but the predictability of how we think the world, its origins, and its future that we are tired of. What we are looking for is not a return to the powerlessness of Aufgang, however, but a world of technics that is not consumed by their essence, a world where instrumentalization exists but is not domineering—a “free relationship” to technological instruments outside the Gestell revealing mode.

Wrathall notes that Heidegger repeatedly stressed how the word “Ereignis” was not to be taken in its dictionary sense as “event or occurrence,” but instead should have its meaning drawn from the verb “eignen,” meaning “to be suitable or fitted or apt for some purpose.” Hence Wrathall controversially translates “Ereignis” as “adaptation.” He understands adaptation as ‘beyng’ [seyn],⁷¹ defined as “whatever individuates and makes entities salient as things which can figure in our comportment to the world” counterposed against ‘being’ which is a “stable structure for determining the constitutive features” in a way that is “universal” and “uniform.”⁷² In the epoch of Ereignis, brought on by the “passing by of the last god,” there will no longer be an “overarching intelligibility with which everything must comply or cohere,” but instead meaning will emerge “as the particular elements of a situation develop relationships in a “dance” of mutual adaptation.”⁷³ In this sense, we will no longer conceptualize “entities” as parts of a “universal, uniform and stable conception of being.” We, adaptive and no longer machinistic, “will listen and allow particularities to guide into the salient relationships,” allowing the situation and its “sacred features” to impose demands on us. These particularities Heidegger called “the divinities,” and thus Wrathall calls the age of Ereignis “polydivinistic.” The divine within Ereignis will not be thought of as a miraculous intercession, good luck charms, as they were in Aufgang. The sacred particularities that will have emerged from the ruins of ‘objects’ are “beckoning messenger of the last god,” always reminding us to be “responsive to the situation around us,” and yet our response will only be a getting “pulled into a transient and local sense of the sacred.”⁷⁴ We can think of particularities as opposed to universals or individuals, the other two factors of Hegel’s logical syllogism. In Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the social realization of the Particular is in the institutions of civil society, such as nonprofits, charities, churches, unions, and administrative bureaucracies, but for Hölderlin the most obvious particular would be certain places, locales endowed with historical consciousness.

Warthall and Lambeth’s gloss on Ereignis is somewhat clarifying but also confused by the same latent pragmatism in the thinking of Warthall’s teacher Hubert Dreyfus. Another way of getting at the same thing is to read Kurt Leidecker’s handling of it in his translation of Heidegger’s “The Principle of Identity” (1957). Leidecker translates Ereignis as “concern,” harkening back to the term Sorge (“Care”) in Being and Time (1927). He translates a passage where Heidegger explains the term’s connection to seeing:

The word Ereignis (concern) has been lifted from organically developing language. Er-eignen (to con-cern) means, originally, to distinguish or discern with one’s eyes, see, and in seeing calling to oneself, ap-propriate. The word con-cern we shall now harness as a theme word in the service of thought, keeping in mind what has just been explained. As a theme word thus understood it may be translated with as little success as the Greek theme word logos and the Chinese Tao. In the present context the word concern no longer signifies what we otherwise call an affair or happening. We now use the word singulare tantum, in the singular merely. What it designates takes place only in the singular, nay, not even any longer numerically speaking, but uniquely. What we learn by way of the modern world of technology in the frame-work [Gestell] as a pattern of Being and Man, is merely prelude to what we call con-cern. Con-cern, however, does not necessarily persevere in its prelude. For in con-cern we are persuaded of the possibility of developing the mere sway of the frame-work into a more primitive solicitude. Such a development of the frame-work from concern to solicitude would bring about the eventful reduction (never initiated by Man himself alone) of the world of technology from lordship to servitude within the realm in which man more properly involves himself in con-cern. […]

Con-cern is the internally oscillating realm through which Man and Being touch each other in their essence and attain their essential nature by divesting themselves of these determinations which metaphysics imputed to them.

To think of concern as con-cern means constructively cooperating in this internally oscillating realm. The building material for this self-supporting structure is derived by thought from speech. For, speech is the most delicate, but also the most fitful all-suppressive vibration in the floating structure of concern. In so far as our being has alienated itself in speech, concern will be our dwelling place.⁷⁵

Ereignis is diametrically opposed to enframing’s challenging-forth, because present within it is not only the active Gelassenheit of inowning, but also the active and linguistic con-cern for things as they are in their essence rather than objects for subjective purposes, thises for thats, means for more means. As was said, the Turning (kehre) required to direct ourselves to this new mode of interfacing with things, the “saving,” was said to only be possible through the action of a god. For Wrathall and Lambeth, the reason why Heidegger says the last god “passes by” rather than “arrives” or “flees”—is neither present nor absent—is because, unlike previous gods who “would attune everyone to a certain sense of what is important,” the last god shall actively “refuse” to lay out a System of Values with a “singular notion of being.”⁷⁶ The last god is “last” because it “will counter us in such a way that we are no longer open to world-grounding beings,” it will permanently “jolt” us out of the ontotheological tradition, beyond ‘ideologies,’ beyond world-views and re-presentations, and hence “will pull us out of metaphysics” and “our technological age.”⁷⁷ In this way, the last god will not be a ‘deity’ in the sense of a “supernatural entity,” a being that starts a new order, but “something that’s already present but disguised by our technological projection of being,” namely the “experience of resistance and refusal,”⁷⁸ a process or movement of “countering” that exposes the vacuity of technology’s demand to turn the world into a mere standing-reserve and makes us attend instead. The last god is like a pure force of authenticity, that authenticates us regardless of our subjective ‘will,’ that forces us to become a being-toward-death, and commences the age of Ereignis as con-cern.

The temporalistically-bound rather than idea-bound poets, the Hölderlins of the future, will poetize on these sacred particulars in order to prepare our seeing for the “final” act of “the last god.” As Hölderlin writes in “Patmos”:

and here is the wand

Of song, signaling downward,

For nothing is common. The dead

He reawakens whom coarseness has not

Made captive yet. But many timid eyes

Are waiting to see the light.⁷⁹

iv. Technified Verse

It is the post-representational poet who can find our way back to the gods, but finding this way is not as simple as composing what passes for a “poem” today. It would require first a prolonged meditation in the midst of the destitute time, inwardly imbibing the destitution, and letting it seep onto the nature of poetry itself; these poets “must especially gather in poetry the nature of poetry.” The poet in poetizing on the essence of the river also simultaneously poetizes on the essence of man (the unhomely or “journeying” one) and on the essence of poets themselves, because every essential poetizing of something is also a poetizing on the essence of poetry. Through this meditation on unhomely man and homely-making rivers, poetry finds hints of its goal, because it is through defamiliarizing or “making strange” existence that poetic speech makes visible this hidden relationship between man and Being. More fundamentally, essential poets earn their title if they do not expediently grab for some already-existing theism or ideology but instead face squarely the flight of the gods, the nihilism of the situation, for, as Michael Gillespie puts it,

Heidegger believes that only on the basis of a real revelation or disclosure of the essence of nihilism, i.e., of the relationship of Being and nothing, is a true ethics and politics possible. Nihilism thus cannot be overcome by merely rejecting modernity in favor of antiquity but necessarily depends upon overcoming both modernity and antiquity and that means overcoming metaphysics and the west itself.⁸⁰

The readers of the poets, who “are on the way to the destiny of the world’s age,” must learn to listen to these poets’ sayings without “reckoning time merely in terms of that which is by dissecting that which is”⁸¹ and thereby deceiving themselves about the identity of this destitute time, but instead by grasping this time or age as the manifestation of an overpowering mode of revelation that must be destroyed.

In the essays “The Age of the World Picture” and QCT, Heidegger performs sketches of the history of Western metaphysics highly similar to the one we saw in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” but in these his aim is to attribute the modern scientific outlook, “Gestell,” to the Idea/matter metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, and the medieval scholastics. There is an intrinsic connection between modern art and technology for Heidegger, and both have historical connections to metaphysics and therefore to Hegel’s dialectic. As we now see, for Heidegger “aesthetics,” Gestell, and Hegel are in a sense all one. And likewise, if Hegel is the beginning of the end of metaphysics, and modern technology is Western metaphysics’ final form, then post-representational poetics are the solution to the problem of world technology. The poets who can properly be said to be practicing poiēsis, revealing a free relationship with technology, cannot be the subject-object symbol-material artists the Platonist West has known since its beginning. The poet, that Other, who will lift us out of the stupor of ontotheological representation and prepare an abode for the heavenly, must be both an essence poet, one who poetizes on the essences of particular things, and an “avant-gardist” who eschews the metaphysical poetic tradition. For while the essence of things can only appear with “signs from the tradition,” at the same time “nothing passed down [“tradition” from the Latin word “trāditiō” meaning “handing over,” “handing down”] to us can directly bestow what is essential.”⁸² This is why, despite the hundreds of thousands of “poets” active since the advent of scholasticism, none of them have been able to call down the “Last God” and fetch us back into our essence. This is exactly why Heidegger, at the very end of QCT, warns that art and the “fine arts” will only play the role of the saving power “if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth”⁸³ by middling in the domain of self-expression, which is just the modern iteration of Platonic expression. And hence, the Turn destroys the Hegelian end of art thesis.

If “our sheer aesthetic-mindedness” has been the cause behind our “no longer guard[ing] and preserv[ing] the essential unfolding of art,”⁸⁴ then the poetry of the aesthetic-minded, insofar as it has been symbolic, has been entirely technological. Representationalist art taken in an essential sense is technology. Insofar as a piece of literature, or any artwork for that matter, or any aesthetic doctrine, conceives of art as the implementation of an idea in sensuous form, it is technological. Technified verse and aesthetics think society, nature, and man as objects, and think the artist as a subject who, in their Genius, correctly interprets the objects with an Idea by which the artist attempts to master, “solve,” or “cure” the ‘human condition’ according to the same logic which scientific rationality follows in developing technological devices for use in the pursuit of the conquest of nature. Gestell cannot be halted by an aesthetic-minded poem that advances an Idea or thesis about “society” or “nature” and is received as a “human achievement”⁸⁵ “cultural achievement”⁸⁶ within the humanist canon, a front for the publishing industry since the Renaissance and for the bourgeois secularist-academic understanding of the humanities at large, any more than Gestell can be substantively challenged by a political order in an age where politics has receded under the confines of the administrative technocracy that manages the planetary imperialism of subjectivity. In other words, “Nihilism, as Heidegger understands it, cannot be overcome by the replacement of God by reason, progress, or an economic socialism that establishes mere democracy but necessarily depends upon a transformation of the essence of man himself.”⁸⁷ Aesthetics is the handmaid of such pseudo-politics, both being thin disguises of technological nihilism. As Heidegger says in “Ister” after a discussion of “aesthetics” as psycho-sentimental subjectivity: “The immeasurable superficiality of modern human beings here forgets only to ponder the fact that modern human beings nowhere have an originary “lived experience” of artworks anymore—granted that we could have a lived experience of artworks at all—but only of the machine and its destructive essence.”⁸⁸

Our sheer aesthetic-mindedness, despite the fact that it never stops rambling on about art and artists, neglects to regard the essential unfolding of art. “Yet,” Heidegger adds at the very end of QCT, “the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.”⁸⁹ The more we contemplate and meditate on the nature of the danger—the journeying of man around the earth, his flight from the Hearth and the gods’ flight from the world, his essence’s imminent destruction in the face of the looming threat of his being made into a technically-producible artifact—the more we begin to espy the alternative. Focusing on the silhouette of enframing will prevent “the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering” which enframing threatens. While “human activity can never directly counter this danger,” “human reflection can ponder the fact that all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it.”⁹⁰ And so, by ending “The Ister”with the lines “But what that one does, the Ister / No one knows,” Hölderlin was protecting the river from metaphysics and therefore also from technology. Essential poetry works to dispel “technology’s” hegemony over everyday life, but this can only be accomplished by repudiating the fundamental claims to totalizing knowledge made by enframing, in favor of a more fundamental mysteriousness.

But as I mentioned before, Heidegger’s perplexing change of mind at the end of the Third Part of the Ister lecture runs against this reading, which would fit perfectly with the rest of his philosophy. In fact, much of the Third Part degenerates from what is said in the First, and strays into a symbolic interpretation of the hymn’s lines. He throws away his chance to connect the “No one knows” line to his concept of being “open to the mystery”⁹¹ by arguing without evidence that Hölderlin, in the last lines of the Ister hymn, was talking about the Rhine River (I will quote nearly in full due to the passage’s odd nature preventing any selection):

The Ister is deprived of that superior freedom bestowed upon the origin and source of the Rhine. […] The Ister, by contrast, is not so freely or so highly born as to spring forth from favorable heights, that is, to plunge downward and from out of the force of such a plunge to be able at once to hasten away like the Rhine. In keeping with its lofty origin, the Rhine’s kingly soul drove this river “impatiently” (third strophe) toward the East. […] There is the other, the Rhine, quite other in its essence, which is poetized in the Rhine hymn […] What the vocation of the Ister is, and what it does as a son of the mother, it well knows, for without its mysterious whiling and dwelling near the origin […] there could in the future be nothing poetic for the Germans, and without this there could never be a historical dwelling in what is their ownmost, “near the hearth of the house.” By contrast, what that river, the Rhine “does” no one knows […] For the relations of the individual hymns among one another follow a law that is as yet concealed from us. Only if we can intimate this law will the Germans be capable of knowing which law of their history has been poetized for them and how their dwelling has already been poetically grounded. Kept in the right perspective, the Ister hymn provides us with essential points. Yet this very hymn is in many respects a draft and breaks off—just as though the essence of this poetry, whose poet is a sign, had to be attested to the extreme. The sign shows—and in showing, it makes manifest, yet in such a way that it simultaneously conceals. So mysteriously does Hölderlin say in the Ister hymn that he is “the” poet and knows what is fitting for his poetry, in his being “saddened” and only with difficulty finding the language he has almost lost so as, in saying to the word, to be the sign[.]⁹²

So now the Rhine’s essence is concealed? And the Ister’s essence is well known? What happened to the “concealed essence of rivers” plural that Hölderlin was poetizing upon? We know the river, but we do not have language? I thought it was our house, and it was beings we did not really know? And now the poet knows? So the poet is no one? Even in the most charitable possible reading of Heidegger, it would be nearly impossible not to think that these contradictions mount up here because he was driven to swerve toward some strange nationalistic appeal, and one that is scarcely intelligible at that. A political reading of the conclusion of this lecture is not hackneyed but unavoidable, given the continuous references to Germany (and we know he was not shy about inserting nationalistic ideas into this volume, given sections §10-13 of Part Two). It appears that the cohesion of his inquiry was spoiled by political concerns and motives. It does not even say what it seems to intend to say, but veers toward saying nothing. This mistake, so egregious when put up against the whole-and-complete argument he could have made, which would have tied up all the loose ends of his thought, ultimately signifies we must, in order to tie these ends, depart from the letter of Heidegger, and find the rest of the thread in another thinker and poet of the essential, as we shall see in the next part.

The mystery above all is the thing. Coming to understand that the meaning of Being is a mystery to us is at once the radiantly beautiful disclosing of it and the shepherding of it which protects it from the annihilating nihilism of representational epistemology and therefore the will-to-will. The post-Idea poetizing on rivers’ concealed essences, as was said above (section I.ii), reorients Dasein’s comportment away from seeing Being as beings or objects and itself as a subject who manipulates according to will, and toward a revealing of Being as a timebound experience of finitude which Dasein participates in by linguistically safeguarding it from the nihilistic abyss which it threatens in its forgetfulness of its essence by reminding it of its essence through a reflection on the essence of things. And for Dasein to be fetched into its essence is for Dasein to be saved. But only “a god” can do this fetching.

1. From Chapter 5, “History as Being” (Chicago: University Press of Chicago), 128-129.

2. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §11, 60-61.

3. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §13, 69.

4. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §10, 52; §12 b), 64-65.

5. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Concluding Remarks, 165-166.

6. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Concluding Remark, 166.

7. Emad, Parvis; Maly, Kenneth. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), “Translators’ Forward” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), xxi. Strangely, Parvis and Maly say that their translation of Ereignis as “Enowning” was chosen because, they claim, the “en-” prefix captures the enabling power, the lack of an appropriate content (an “un-possessing owning”), and “the always ongoing movement “in” and “through” without coming to rest in a “property” or “possession.” But it’s not the English prefix “en-” that has a negative sense; that would be the prefix “in-,” and so I translate Ereignis as “inowning.”

8. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §10, 55.

9. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §10, 55.

10. Pindar, “Olympian Ode III,” trans. William H. Race, (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1997).

11. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §10, 54.

12. Pindar, “Olympian Ode III,” trans. William H. Race, (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1997).

13. Hölderlin, “The Ister” in Poems and Fragments, translated by Michael Hamburger, 581-583.

14. “The lion is here found to have been the great ancient forest of the earth, burned down and brought under cultivation by Hercules, whom we find to have been the type of the political heroes who had to precede the military heroes.” Giambattista Vico, The New Science, “Idea of the Work,” trans. Thomas Godard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 4.

15. Pindar, “Pythian Ode X” trans. William H. Race, (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1997).

16. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §19 b), 113, as well as the whole of §18 and §19.

17. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Concluding Remark, 165.

18. Hölderlin, “The Ister” in Poems and Fragments, translated by Michael Hamburger, 583.

19. The Poetic Edda, translated by Henry Adams Bellows, 1936.

20. Hölderlin, “Patmos” in Poems and Fragments, translated by Michael Hamburger, 565.

21. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §25, 150-153.

22. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §25, 156.

23. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Concluding Remark, 166.

24. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §26, 164.

25. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §25, 155.

26. Letter on Humanism—more on this in section II.ii.

27. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §25, 156.

28. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §25, 155-156. The referenced lines from Hölderlin, also translated by William McNeil and Julia Davis, are as follows: “Yet of their own / Immortality the gods have enough, and if one thing / The heavenly require, / Then heroes and humans it is / And otherwise mortals. For since / The most blessed feel nothing of themselves, / There must presumably, if to say such / Is allowed, in the name of the gods / Another partake in feeling, / Him they need.”

29. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §26, 157.

30. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Concluding Remark, 166.

31. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Part III §24-26.

32. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Concluding Remark, 167.

33. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 325.

34. Heidegger, “The Principle of Identity” in Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference, trans. Kurt F. Leidecker (New York: Philosophical Library), 15.

35. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977).

36. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 325.

37. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 329.

38. Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 78.

39. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 332.

40. Editors, “Pátmos.” Encyclopedia Britannica, August 20, 2020. See Revelation 1:9: “I John, your brother and your partner in tribulation, and in the kingdom, and patience in Christ Jesus, was in the island, which is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus.” Douay-Rheims translation.

41. “The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism,” a fragment written in Hegel’s hand but which is thought to have been composed by his roommates Schelling and Hölderlin, contains the following lines: “For there will be no more philosophy, no history, Poesy alone will survive all others arts and sciences. At the same time we often hear that the masses must have a sensible religion. Not just the masses but the philosophers need this too. Monotheism of reason and the heart, polytheism of art and the imagination, that is what we need! […] A higher spirit sent from heaven must found this religion amongst us, it will be the last, the greatest task of humanity.” From Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin Classics), 342.

42. Heidegger, “On the and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1” in Pathmarks, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 197.

43. Heidegger, “The Principle of Identity” in Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference, translated by Kurt F. Leidecker, 17.

44. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 335.

45. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 334.

46. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 335.

47. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 334.

48. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 338.

49. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 339. Emphasis mine.

50. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 340.

51. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 338.

52. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 333.

53. “Only a God can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Heidegger.” Philosophy Today 20, no. 4 (Winter, 1976), 277.

54. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 89-91.

55. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 90-92.

56. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 129-130.

57. B123 Diels-Kranz.

58. Fragment 3, Diels-Kranz.

59. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977), 259-260.

60. Vico, The New Science, “Idea of the Work,” trans. Thomas Godard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), §377, 117-118.

61. Hölderlin, “The Gods” in Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, 189.

62. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, 245.

63. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth” in Basic Writings, 132.

64. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, 217.

65. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 134-135.

66. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), Chapter VII. – The Last God, epigraph, §253, and §256.

67. Hölderlin, “Rousseau” in Poems and Fragments, 181.

68. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), Chapter VII. – The Last God, §255-256.

69. Mark Wrathall and Morganna Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God” in Inquiry (Oslo: 54:2, 2011), 173.

70. Wrathall and Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God” in Inquiry, 173-176.

71. Wrathall and Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God” in Inquiry, 177.

72. Wrathall and Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God” in Inquiry, 173.

73. Wrathall and Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God” in Inquiry, 177.

74. Wrathall and Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God” in Inquiry, 181.

75. Heidegger, “The Principle of Identity” in Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference, trans. Kurt F. Leidecker (New York: Philosophical Library), 15-16.

76. Wrathall and Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God” in Inquiry, 178-179.

77. Wrathall and Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God” in Inquiry, 178.

78. Wrathall and Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God” in Inquiry, 178.

79. Hölderlin, “Patmos” in Poems and Fragments, 561.

80. Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 134.

81. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 92.

82. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §14 b), 81.

83. Heidegger, “The Questioning Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 340. Emphasis mine.

84. Heidegger, “The Questioning Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 340-341.

85. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §23 c), 146.

86. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §14 b), 82.

87. Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 132.

88. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §19 b), 114.

89. Heidegger, “The Questioning Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 341.

90. Heidegger, “The Questioning Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings, 339.

91. “Memorial Address” in Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 55: “That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery. Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it.”

92. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” §26 b), 162-165.