The Techne Of Homecoming

Based upon a close investigation of some of Heidegger’s texts, this article attempts to show two main approaches Heidegger took to interpret Holderlin’s poems: one is from the "political" perspective, which dealt with the question of a closer understanding of the original politics by discussing the topic of "Homecoming"; another is taken from the perspective of "being" or "the history of being"——given that Heidegger’s philosophy as "the philosophy of being in the time of technology" is itself profoundly related to modern experience of "homelessness"——which, with the help of Holderlin’s poetic discourse, more concretely concerned with the problem of "techne" from the ancient Greece and it’s modern "turning"The first part of this article is consisted of the first two chapters, whose theme could be generalized as "the politics of homecoming", firstly, according to Holderlin, in order to achieve the authentic homeland being, one has to leave his hometown, in the light of this statement, Heidegger developed his thought of original ontic-politics, which is to say that in order to ground for the genuine historical condition, one has to get away from the present-at-hand historical context and thus listen to the calling from the abyss of being; secondly,"das Heilige(the sacred)" in Holderlin’s poems refers to the experience of the absence of Gods, from which Heidegger had learned the attitude towards "Gotlosigkeit(Godlessness)":facing the absence of God and yet anticipating the advent of Gods in the absence of God——because the absence of God just means the concealing-unconcealing fruitfulness of the sacred.The last two chapters made the second part of this article, with the topic of "the questioning of thechnology". So the problem of "homecoming" discussed above has changed into the question below:whether the modern technology which is derived from its Greek origin of "techne" could ever go back to its homeland of Greece again, which at the same time means the turning from the first beginning to the second beginning in the history of being. In this part we will investigate how Holderlin’s concept of "Titan" in his new-mythology has inspired Heidegger’s thought on the essence of modem technology. And as Holderlin put it,"where there is danger, there is the salvation", but will the salvation finally come? The only way to expect its fatal advent is constantly thinking over the essence of technology in depth. What’s more, Heidegger also stressed the importance of the role poetry and art played in facing the problem of technology——not in a literal-aesthetic sense, but in the sense of original politics whose core issue is a proper understanding of the concealing-unconcealing character of the truth of beying and thus ground for the authentic dwelling.Strictly speaking, it’s not very proper to divide Heidegger’s approach to Holderlin into two parts, we can tell from the assertions above that this two parts are originally one, it is merely for the sake of the convenience of explaining and understanding that we have to deal with them separately. Our conclusion is also open: rather than declaring that Heidegger had found a detailed model for the operation of the original politics or that he had developed a plan to overcome the crisis of modern technology, we can only say that with the interpretation of Holderlin’s poems, Heidegger had uncovered the fact that, after all, homecoming does not mean going back to a certain position or place, it just means that homecoming is always a problem which worth questioning.