Abstract

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 1, pp 39 - 59 The question of Hölderlin’s influence on Heidegger’s thinking has long preoccupied philosophers. In this essay I attempt to situate the Hölderlin-reception in Germany during the 1930s and show how he comes to offer his own reflections on poetic dwelling that open an ethical relation within his work. There are deeply ethical moments that emerge in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, moments marked by polarities between an assertion of the German Volk’s exceptionalist singularity _and_ an awareness of the need to authentically encounter the “other,” the “alien,” the “foreign,” and the “stranger.” The Hölderlin lectures take place in this space of contention, strife, and upheaval. In and through his conversation with Hölderlin, Heidegger begins to think an originary ethics of dwelling attuned to the _poietic_ power of _beyng_. It is in this _ethos_ of poetic dwelling, one that comes to language in Hölderlin’s late hymns, that Heidegger rethinks Dasein as _Aufenthalt_, abode, and ἦθος.