NATELA KHINCHIGASHVILI - Tbilisi State University

that we would concern ourselves with our own affairs. “When gods withdraw,
man arises”, claims Heidegger (Heidegger 1989: 279).
By his reasoning, Heidegger devotedly sought to express this precise view
on the human circumstances in the world. To put it differently, within a medium
of rational metaphysics, he sought to expose a profundity, i.e. the mythical
structure of one’s being; mythical and nonetheless encompassing withdrawn
gods. Evidently, rational language and thought was not enough for such
purposes. That was why Heidegger started to refer to poetry, especially the
poetry of Hölderlin. The fact that Hölderlin attracted the attention of Heidegger
was clearly not mere chance ∗ . Hölderlin‘s relation to myth is obvious but he
was not just a poet praising the myths of the past. He was a personality of
particular sensitivity, who wrote about the lack of gods and the emptiness they
left in the current world. This view was fully in accord with the insights of
Heidegger, who called himself a commentator of poetry (and especially
Hölderlin’s poetry). Through philosophical but not classical rationalist
language, Heidegger sought to reveal what Hölderlin talked about in his poetry,
i.e. the fate of humanity and its strange history, starting from the moment when
it was abandoned by gods.
What is the structure of this history? It can be defined by three main
categories: 1) The origins of the history of humanity. This is a mythical state
where people live together with gods or, as claims Hesiod in the works Homer,
these are the times when gods appear to humans „in full light“. This state of
humanity was celebrated by its witnesses and participants – ancient poets, steeping
their poetic language in myths that are nothing other than a conversation
with gods. Today this state of humanity is scientifically, i.e. rationally, examined
by mythology. Is rational investigation of myths adequate for them? Does
such an investigation not mean killing myths, bleeding myths, removing their
essence and examining them as some researchers would examine a cadaver
claiming to study human being? This is a question everyone interested in myth
should ask oneself: is rational investigation of myth adequate for revealing its
truth? 2) The second feature, characterising the history of humanity is the memory
of gods. Humanity holds a faded memory of its life with gods. If gods
appeared to humans “in full light”; this should have left a trace. Upon withdrawal,
gods left their trace in the memory of people. This trace manifests itself
as longing for divinity, an attempt to fill in the emptiness left by gods. In “the
night of the world” this longing calls us to come back to “the day of the gods”,
as claimed by Hölderlin and Heidegger. Once again, we try to examine the
longing rationally: both rational theology and rational psychology seek to
provide a form and an explanation of the longing for gods but everyone who is
interested in the essence of a human should ask: can rational method explain
everything that happens within a human? 3) The third characteristic of the
∗ Classical and influential work, examining the relationship between Heidegger and Hölderlin is
Allemann B. Hölderlin und Heidegger. Zürich-Freiburg, Atlantis, 1954.
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