Need Delimited: The Creative Otherness of Heidegger’s Demigods

Abstract

This paper offers a close analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of the demigod in his 1934/35 lecture course, Holderlins Hymnen “Germanien}” und} “Der Rhein}” (Gesamtausgabe 39). Focusing on Holderlin’s two different versions of Strophe VIII of “The Rhine” hymn, it traces through Heidegger’s inaugural insights into the structure of need (Brauch}) articulated in the “The Rhine” hymn as the gods’ need and use of the demigods to “feel something of themselves.” Contrasting this with Plato’s analysis of the demigod in the Symposium, the paper argues that for Heidegger the between is original in first founding the limit between gods and human beings through the creation of a new kind of otherness. It then goes on to follow out this insight through Heidegger’s interpretation of the counterturning course of the Rhine river in relationship to its origin, asserting that what is at stake in that analysis is Heidegger’s working out of a new conception of creativity realized through the river’s dwelling poetically.