The Unsayable Mystery of the Holy: Hölderlin’s Late Poetry

Abstract

Being is given many designations in Hölderlin’s poetry, but we will focus on the question of Being as the holy. Being as the holy bespeaks the poet in a message to which he responds by articulating the address in words. Following Heidegger’s thought that poetry (poiesis) is the essence of language and of all arts, and juxtaposing it with Wittgenstein’s view of language, we will find out that to trace the mystery of language back to its origin means placing ourselves outside of the world, passing thus into the realm of silence. Drawing an analogy between Hölderlin’s idea of the holy as the immediate and Wittgenstein’s conception of the mystical, my thesis assumes that language is precisely what poetry cannot name.