The Tower Between Being and Time

by Scott Horton

July 16, 2007

Friedrich Hölderlin, a contemporary engraving

On July 5, I posted a little piece on Martin Heidegger’s cabin in the woods, located outside of Freiburg, drawing on a wonderful essay written by Leland de la Durantaye, a Harvard philosophy professor, in Cabinet Magazine. In it, Durantaye notes that Heidegger was very fond of hiking allusions, and he cites several, but he missed the significance of one which is very important—the reference to the handful of deep thinkers who live scattered on mountain tops—which was of course drawn from the poetry of Heidegger’s fellow Swabian, Friedrich Hölderlin.

Just as Heidegger can be marked by his “Waldhütte,” Hölderlin can be defined with his tower—a very sad spot down by the river Neckar in the ancient university town of Tübingen where he spent much of his final days in internment. After a brilliant period of productivity, Hölderlin went crazy (how inelegant–the Germans have such a poetic expression for this: er ist in die Umnachtung gegangen, they say, as if he were enshrouded by the darkness of night). He was locked up in this little tower for 36 years while he struggled with sanity. Hölderlin was, of course, Nietzsche’s favorite poet, and Nietzsche followed his path—also falling into the clutches of mental darkness.

Hölderlin’s Tower on the Neckar River in Tübingen

In the meantime, I have received a number of notes from readers asking me what, specifically, I was thinking about. The poem in question is called “Patmos.” It dates to 1803, and it is certainly one of Hölderlin’s greatest works—perhaps indeed his greatest. The poem may have the most famous opening of any poem in the German language not by Goethe; it is haunting. (“God is near/Yet hard to seize./Where there is danger,/The rescue grows as well.”) It involves the manipulation of extremely powerful images, it draws very heavily on the classical Greek of the Gospels, and it is filled with the concepts that Heidegger brilliantly develops elsewhere: starting with a fascinating series of juxtapositions of space, time and deeds.

Heidegger has picked up on these concepts and played them out in a way that seems to me to be true to Hölderlin to a certain extent—though there is surely much to distinguish the two.

Start by remembering that Hölderlin, like his fellow students at the Tübingen Stift, read classical Greek fluently and was extremely well read in the classics of antiquity as well as religious texts. I posted earlier this week on another educational institution of the little duchy of Württemberg–the Karlsschule–but the school in Tübingen was still more famous and equally prolific in the training of genius. Consider that one of Hölderlin’s roommates was Hegel.

Read More