Abstract
Wars, disease, famines, genocides, world economic collapse, and the prospect of global nuclear annihilation..these are our everyday norms. We return to Heidegger’s historical present of 1942 to see how Heidegger’s reflections on ‘poetizing the essence of poetry’ (Heidegger, 1996, p. vii) in Hölderlin’s works can help us weave through several aporias of our own historical present: the impossibility to sustain historical movement as the incessant destruction of meaning and life is more than nihilism; it becomes pure possibility to clear a space for thinking what is most critical in an age that heaps crises upon crises. Living in the historical present of torment is ontologically distinct from the torment of not being able to think at all when human suffering reaches unprecedented levels of magnitude. Heidegger’s reflections that link the ‘holy’ and the ‘essence of poetry’(Heidegger, 1996, p. vii) with aporetic structures of history- the impossibility of discovering the philosophical truth of history as historical suspension beyond the concept of truth and its (Western) history - come into focus for our time. We will read Heidegger’s text on Hölderlin with a view to deepen his earlier ontological considerations of ‘temporality, movement and historicality’ in Chapter V of Division Two of Being and Time (Heidegger, 1962, p. 427). What the later Heidegger tries to unfold as a sense of the ‘holy’ (Heidegger, 1996, p. vii), we will graft other possibilities back into the earlier Heidegger's Being and Time. Our creative aim of developing a silhouette of the missing Division Three of the existential analytic- the would-be bedrock of fundamental ontology that remains incomplete to this day - calls us to hear what remains silent in both the early and later Heidegger, and therefore Heidegger’s thought as a whole.