“We though Sing from the Indus:” Hölderlin’s Philosophical Response to Heidegger

Central concepts of Heidegger’s later work emerge from his engagement with Hölderlin’s poetry. Therefore, commentators frequently take Hölderlin to be a patron of Heidegger's later philosophy. That Heidegger’s imaginative reading of Hölderlin is not exegetically faithful is well-known. In this paper, we critically appraise Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin on philosophical rather than exegetical grounds. We maintain that the ontology that can be derived from Hölderlin’s river poetry runs counter to Heidegger’s appropriation of these poems, which we show with respect to three main concepts: locality, journeying, and the distinction between “one's own” and the foreign. While Heidegger gives ontological priority to home, origins, and “one's own,” Hölderlin's philosophical vision of the “free use of one's own” does not prioritize these notions and instead remains radically open to the presence of the other. This, we argue, makes Hölderlin a philosophical opponent rather than a patron of Heidegger's thought.