1. Why do you link the exposition of your thinking with interpretations of texts?
2. What does it mean to engage in philological disputation while at the same time rejecting philological criticism?
HEIDEGGER: Perhaps it is best if I begin from the apparently most external question that you have posed: namely, that the poem has been transmitted as a prose text in Waiblinger’s novel Phaethon and was only later divided into verses. Philologically, it cannot be demonstrated that the poem stems from Hölderlin. Nevertheless, this is absolutely certain, indeed down to every single word. A Swiss scholar pointed this out in 1904.
I grant that one can say it has not been transmitted in Hölderlin’s own hand. But if one takes everything into account, especially the late hymns, and if one observes that much transmitted by Waiblinger later proved entirely reliable on the basis of the manuscripts, then it seems to me that there can be no doubt. Even supposing it were not by Hölderlin — the poem is not true because it is by Hölderlin; rather, the reverse is the case: Hölderlin sang it only because it is true, in the sense of poetic saying. Here as well I have only selected fragments. And this—both the fragmentary selection and, more generally, the tendency you correctly noted, namely, to move almost entirely within interpretations — arises in essential part from an embarrassment [Verlegenheit]: because I hesitate to say directly what perhaps I might still be able to say; I hesitate because, in the present age, it would at once become something current and thereby distorted. It is, so to speak, a protective measure. In my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching, I have spoken only once or twice about my own matters. I have never given a so-called systematic lecture course, because I did not dare to do so, since I believe that we (and this is the other motive, the more positive and impersonal one) — must first learn once again how to read.