Hölderlin's holy word

Abstract

Heidegger's important comment on Hölderlin's anthem as a holiday raises a number of questions that concern Heidegger himself. We will put them aside. There are others that we must omit as well, for example this one: Heidegger's commentary follows the poem word for word, as careful, as detailed as a commentary that advances according to the methods of didactic scholarship could be. Is such an explanation legitimate? In what way is it? The commentator did not want to let us know, less in a hurry than Gundolf, who, when studying the great elegy The Archipelago, was careful to ruin his study from the starting point by remembering that a poem is a whole and that the contents of thought extracted from that everything has no reality in itself. And henceforth Gundolf was content to question the song as a whole. Heidegger's test interrogates each word, each comma, and demands from all isolated elements, taken consecutively, a complete answer, isolatable itself. The impression is often quite strange. However, ultimately, there is more appearance than reality in it; This question certainly has the exorbitant aspect of a question that calls each part of the poem to account and forces it to justify itself analytically Martin Heidegger's analysis, by progressing according to his own circular march, ultimately leads, not to recompose the general sense starting from all the particular meanings that it specifies, but to rediscover at each moment the passage of the entire poem under the form in which it has momentarily been arranged and stopped.