twentieth century, enjoyed the reputation of being one of Germany's
greatest poets, his recognition as an important philosophical figure
is more recent. The revival of an interest in German Idealism, and the
philosophical developments from Kant's critical period to Hegel's
mature thought, have ensured that Hölderlin is given his due for his
important philosophical insights. Hölderlin's life was marked by
theological training, together with Hegel and Schelling, followed by a
period of simultaneous philosophical and poetic activity. Eventually,
Hölderlin concentrated on poetry as a superior form of access to the
truth. His theoretical philosophy is marked by an anti-foundationalist
rebuttal of Fichte's first principle. The key idea is that nothing can
be said about what grounds the possibility of the subject-object
relation, a primordial unity which Hölderlin calls Absolute Being.
This central idea was crucial to the development of Schelling's
thought. Hölderlin's ethical views emphasize an understanding of life
as torn between two principles: a hankering after this original unity
and freedom's desire to constantly assert itself. His novel Hyperion
illustrates this struggle and how the integration of these two
principles is set as a goal for life. The superiority of poetry over
philosophy in pointing to the truth is suggested through this novel
plus several poems, and this theme was of particular interest for
Heidegger's later thought.
1. Overview
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin is well known as a key figure of
German romantic poetry. This recognition was, however, late to come,
and it is chiefly in the first half of the twentieth century that he
acquires his status as one of Germany's greatest poets, and, in
particular, became a key figure in Heidegger's later thought.
Hölderlin's own contribution to philosophy, both in theoretical and
literary form, has taken much longer to be acknowledged. It is of
great importance, however, both for an understanding of the
development of German Idealism and in relation to contemporary
philosophical issues. Although Hölderlin left little published
material of direct philosophical relevance, his personal acquaintance
with Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel ensured the
dissemination of his ideas among his immediate contemporaries. In the
second half of the twentieth century, two factors have been decisive
in the renewed interest in Hölderlin as a philosopher. On the one
hand, there has been a striking growth of scholarship in the
philosophy that marks the transition from Kant to Hegel, chiefly
through philosophers such as Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank. On the
other, a short philosophical text came to light in 1961, which for the
first time presented key central tenets of Hölderlin's thought in a
concise form.
2. Life and Philosophical Background
Hölderlin was born in 1770 in Swabia in South-Western Germany. He
studied theology and was originally destined for a career in the
Lutheran church. His studies eventually took him, at the age of
eighteen, to the famous Tübingen seminary where he studied with Hegel,
as well as with his old school friend Schelling. Hölderlin came to
Jena in 1794, after Fichte had taken over the chair of philosophy from
Reinhold. During that period, Hölderlin was a staunch supporter of the
French Revolution, which was seen by many German intellectuals as a
source of hope for the future. Hölderlin found a position as a private
tutor and fell passionately in love with his pupils' mother, Susette
Gontard. She was to be the inspiration behind the Diotima of his novel
Hyperion. The emotional upheaval caused by the end of the impossible
liaison with Susette had a detrimental effect on his health. In 1800,
after his disillusionment with philosophy that led him to abandon any
plans to find an academic position, he spent a year recovering in
Switzerland and decided to devote the rest of his life to writing
poetry. In 1802, the news of Susette's death, however, drove him to
near insanity. Treatment enabled him to continue writing at intervals
while working as a librarian in Homburg until 1807 when he became
insane (though harmless). In 1805, he was one of a group of Jacobin
militants, led by his friend Isaac von Sinclair, involved in a
conspiracy against the Elector of Württemberg. Hölderlin was accused
of high treason, but thereafter was released on grounds of diminished
mental capacity. He was taken to Tübingen where he lived until his
death in 1843. Some form of poetic output continued in Tübingen,
although these later poems are significantly marked by Hölderlin's
mental illness.
Hölderlin's original philosophical thought emerged before his move to
Jena: the main poetic work of philosophical interest, Hyperion, was
started in Tübingen in 1792, and after the publication of a fragment
in Schiller's review Thalia, the full work was later published in two
volumes in Jena. It is, however, in Jena that Hölderlin's
philosophical ideas took their definitive form, partly as a result of
its bustling intellectual climate.
The philosophical background to his philosophical ideas can be traced
back to Reinhold's lectures and publications on Kant's philosophy in
the late 1780's and early 1790's. Reinhold, who was one of the main
expositors of Kantian critical thought of that period, developed a
philosophical system essentially aimed at providing Kant's critical
philosophy with a first principle. The need to underpin Kant's system
with such a ground was to prove a fundamental, but contentious, issue
for the philosophical developments of the 1790's in Germany.
Fichte echoed some of the criticisms that were to be addressed in the
specifics of Reinhold's first principle, the principle of
consciousness (e.g. in Schulze's Aenesidemus, see Giovanni and Harris,
2000), but agreed with the need for such a grounding and set out to
provide his own first principle instead. The resulting system, the
Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of science), first published in 1794, was
Fichte's attempt to develop a philosophical doctrine that would
respect the spirit, if not the letter, of Kant's critical philosophy.
The first principle of this philosophy expressed a relation of the I
to itself: "The I posits its own being unconditionally" (Fichte,
1994). Against any such grounding attempts, the circle of Jena
philosophers around Niethammer claimed, in line with earlier criticism
of Kant by Jacobi, that such an enterprise was flawed in principle;
since any principle requires justification beyond itself, an infinite
regress ensues. As a result, philosophy, for Niethammer's circle, is
an unending enterprise that approaches the truth but can never reach
it.
This anti-foundationalist line became Hölderlin's when he rejected
Fichte's philosophy in the mid-1790s, but the philosophical ideas that
Hölderlin developed during this period were also motivated by other
concerns. To understand these, we must turn to moral philosophy.
Kant's ethics had a profound influence on many writers of the time,
and Schiller's response is particularly important. In 1793, Schiller
showed enthusiasm for Kant's ethics of duty while querying the
rigorism which some Kantian statements strongly suggest. Hence,
Schiller's famous joke that it seems Kant prefers the agent who would
do his duty with displeasure, to one whose inclinations are in line
with the commands of the moral law. Schiller claimed that a harmony of
duty and inclination represented the highest ideal of morality, while
Kant found inclinations to be worthless. In his letters, "On the
Aesthetic Education of Man" (Schiller, 1982), he argues for the moral
value of the aesthetic ideal of grace (Anmut). For Schiller, "grace"
describes the moral beauty of an agent whose emotions have been
educated by reason. Given Schiller's endorsement of the basic tenets
of Kant's ethics, this notion of the "beautiful soul" is problematic.
Indeed, it implies a purported reconciliation between the sublimity
that attaches to the dutiful agent who, in his freedom, places the
moral law above all inclinations, and the beauty of a harmony of
inclinations and duty. Since the moral law, however, requires that the
agent act out of duty regardless of what inclines her, this is hardly
compatible with an ideal of harmony between duty and inclinations. As
a result of the tension between the freedom of the moral agent and
this ideal of harmony, the cogency of the proposed moral value of the
beautiful soul becomes questionable.
3. Unity and Freedom
Hölderlin, in fact, sees these two aspects of human life, the
"all-desiring, all-subjugating dangerous side of man," i.e. freedom,
and the "most beautiful condition he can achieve," i.e. unity (preface
to Hyperion in Thalia, 1794) as representing the essence of the human
condition. This accounts for his understanding of human life as man's
"eccentric path": an unreflective unity constitutes the core of our
existence, but we cannot remain within it. Rather, it becomes
something we strive towards with our freedom.
With this bi-polarity in mind, we can now appreciate Hölderlin's
contribution to the theoretical debate around Fichte's attempts to
find a foundational principle for philosophy. Fichte had proposed to
ground philosophy on the pure relation of the I to itself. In Über
Urtheil und Seyn (On Judgment and Being), a short manuscript that was
only first published in 1961 (Hölderlin, 1972), Hölderlin points out
that subjectivity cannot provide the first principle of philosophy
since the I is always defined in relation to an object of judgment.
This criticism of Fichte's system may appear unfair as, in the 1797
edition of the Doctrine of Knowledge, he does discuss the fact that
there must be a pre-reflective form of self-awareness. However, Fichte
does not draw all the consequences from this observation. Hölderlin's
point is that such self-consciousness cannot be accounted for in terms
of the I of judgment. The ground for the I's reflective
self-consciousness must, thus, be sought beyond the division between
the subject 'I' and an object which this presupposes. Such a ground,
Hölderlin calls "absolute Being." This is, moreover, the ground for
all judgments in which the subject 'I' is distinguished from an
object.
An original unity of subject and object in Being is what underpins
their separation in judgment. Hölderlin, thus, defines Being as
follows: "Where Subject and Object are absolutely, not just partially
united…there and not otherwise can we talk of an absolute Being, as is
the case in intellectual intuition (ibid., p. 515)." He understands
judgment as the original cleavage of object from subject: "Judgment:
is in the highest and strictest sense the original sundering of
Subject and Object most intimately united in intellectual intuition,
the very sundering which first makes Object and Subject possible
(ibid., p.516)." Of Being, no further knowledge is possible. It is
only known as the original unity that underpins all judgments. It,
therefore, functions as a postulated ground rather than as a first
principle.
4. The Self and Human Life
In terms of the understanding of the self, there are two types of
self-awareness. In one sense, when I reflect upon myself, I am
distinct from the object of my awareness. In another, I must
understand myself as belonging to an original pre-reflective unity.
The first provides the ground for the freedom of the I to raise itself
above anything that is given in the empirical world. The second
provides the self with an ideal of unity characterised by a belonging
to Being. The "eccentric path" of life is, therefore, torn between
these two poles of unity and freedom. The latter takes us away from
the original unity while being grounded in it. The task of integrating
the two poles in one's life is that of bringing freedom to recognize
the greater unity of Being, but this can only be a progressive and
never-ending enterprise.
The novel Hyperion presents different practical approaches to dealing
with the bi-polarity of the "eccentric path." This novel is a
collection of letters, mostly written by the novel's modern Greek
hero, Hyperion, to his German friend, Bellarmin, in which he recounts
his adventures, states of mind, and longings. The original unity which
Hyperion was, from the outset, keen to recapture, is understood in
different ways by Hyperion at different stages of his life.
Ultimately, he will realize that none of these is satisfactory, but
that they represented ways of approaching that which is the underlying
unity, i.e. Being, throughout the course of his life.
These different representations of unity are of ancient Greece (also
reflected in childhood), of modern Greece liberated from Turkish rule,
and of aesthetic beauty. This trilogy is not random but corresponds to
different temporal understandings of the idea of the fundamental unity
of Being. It is first grasped as belonging to the past
(Childhood/Ancient Greece), then the future (liberated Greece), and
finally the present (immediacy of aesthetic beauty). Each way of life
is exemplified by a character with whom Hyperion is connected,
respectively through a master-pupil relationship (Adamas), friendship
(Alabanda) and love (Diotima).
In each case, Hyperion attempts to fully adopt the corresponding way
of being only to find its limitations and be confronted with the need
to move on. Thus, with Adamas, Hyperion feels compelled to leave his
master and seek another way of life because of man's lack of
contentment and constant desire to go beyond his current condition:
"We delight in flinging ourselves into the night of the unknown, into
the cold strangeness of any other world, and, if we could, we would
leave the realm of the sun and rush headlong beyond the comet's track"
(Hölderlin, 1990, p. 10) ["Wir haben unsre Lust daran, uns in die
Nacht des Unbekannten, in die kalte Fremde irgend einer andern Welt zu
stürzen, und wär' es möglich, wir verlieβen der Sonne Gebiet und
stürmten über des Irrsterns Grenzen hinaus" (Hölderlin, 1999, p.492)].
After leaving home and learning about the world, his encounter with
Alabanda is that of a soul-mate who has fought his way to freedom.
Together, they plan noble and heroic deeds, but Hyperion's world
crumbles when he realizes the dark side of such purported moral
ambition. Alabanda's friends are ruthless revolutionaries who seek to
overthrow the present powers by violent means: "The cold sword is
forged from hot metal" (ibid., p.26) ["Aus heiβem Metalle wird das
kalte Schwert geschmieden" (ibid., p. 510)]. Through this experience,
Hyperion grasps something of the conflictual nature of human life: "If
the life of the world consists in an alteration between opening and
closing, between going forth and returning, why is it not even so with
the heart of man" (ibid., p.29) ["Bestehet ja das Leben der Welt im
Wechsel des Entfaltens und Vershlieβens, in Ausflug und in Rückkehr zu
sich selbst, warum nicht auch das Herz des Menschen" (ibid., p.514)]?
However, it is by encountering beauty in the person and life of
Diotima (Book II of Volume I) that Hyperion believes he has found what
he is looking for, i.e. the Unity he is after: "I have seen it once,
the one thing that my soul sought, and the perfection that we put
somewhere far away above the stars, that we put off until the end of
time – I have felt it in its living presence" (ibid., p.41) ["Ich habe
es Einmal gesehen, das Einzige, das meine Seele suchte, und die
Vollendung die wir über die Sterne hinauf entfernen, die wir
hinausscheben bis ans Ende der Zeit, die hab' ich gegenwärtig gefühlt"
(ibid., p.529)]. A period of bliss ensues, but Diotima understands
that Hyperion is "born for higher things" (ibid., p.72) ["zu höhern
Dingen geboren" (ibid., p.566)], that the simple harmony of her life
is not for him. He must go out and bring beauty to those places where
it is lacking. Having grasped this (Book I of Volume II), Hyperion
answers Alabanda's call to join him in battle to free Greece.
Hyperion's departure for battle is followed by several letters
addressed to Diotima and a couple of her replies. After initial
success in the fight against the Turks, Hyperion's men are delayed by
the long siege of Mistra. Nonetheless, as they finally enter the town,
they go on a]rampage, pillaging and killing indiscriminately. Rather
than face the enemy, Hyperion's army disperses once its lust for
plunder is satisfied. This leads to the death of forty Russian
soldiers who stood alone fighting the common foe. Hyperion takes his
army's dishonour to make him unworthy, in his eyes, for Diotima's
love: "I must advise you to give me up, my Diotima" (ibid., p.98)
["ich muβ dir raten, daβ du mich verlässest, meine Diotima" (ibid.,
p.597)]. In letters to Bellarmin, we discover more details of the
battles fought by Hyperion and Alabanda. Their friendship flourished
again, but Alabanda's lust for battle eventually came to an end, thus
pointing once more to the limits of his way of life. In a letter from
Diotima that arrives later, it emerges that she lost her will to live
as her lover did not return, and she finally let herself die. In a
development which reflects Hölderlin's understanding of human life,
the effortless harmony of Diotima's world of beauty, once disturbed by
the fire of Hyperion's free aspiration to noble deeds, could not
simply return to its original form. Rather, it became something to aim
for, something Diotima thought Hyperion could achieve for her: "You
drew my life away from the Earth, but you would also have had power to
bind me to the Earth" (ibid., p.122) ["Du entzogst main Leben der
Erde, du hättest auch Macht gehabt, mich an die Erde zu fesseln"
(ibid., p.626)]. It is, thus, through its very destruction, that
Diotima's way of life ceases to represent that which Hyperion could
have sought to take refuge in. Diotima's words illustrate the whole
problem of life as an "eccentric path," but her death, apparently,
only leaves Hyperion confused: "as I am now, I have no names for
things and all before me is uncertainty" (ibid., p.126) ["wie ich
jetzt bin, hab ich keinen Namen für die Dinge, und es ist mir alles
ungewiβ" (ibid., p.632)]. At the end of the novel, however, the beauty
of Nature once again fills Hyperion with joy, and this poetic sense of
oneness reaches beyond separation and death to Alabanda and Diotima.
Somehow, he has made some sense of his experiences. Thus, after all
these tragedies, an overall feeling of unity prevails: "You springs of
earth! you flowers! and you woods and you eagles and you brotherly
light! how old and new is our love!- We are free, we are not narrowly
alike in outward semblance; how should the Mode of life not vary? yet
we love the ether, all of us, and in the inmost of our inmost selves
we are alike" (ibid., p.133) ["Ihr Quellen der Erd! Ihr Blumen! Und
ihr Wälder und ihr Adler und du brüderliches Licht! Wie alt und neu
ist unsere Liebe! – Frei sind wir, gleichen uns nicht ängstig von
auβen; wie sollte nicht wechseln die Weise des Lebens? Wir lieben den
Äther doch all und innigst im Innersten gleichen wir uns" (ibid.,
p.639-640)]. However, the last words of the novel suggest an open
ending: "So I thought. More soon" (ibid., p.133) ["So dacht' ich.
Nächstens mehr" (ibid., p.640)]. Thus, after all the ordeals that he
has worked through in these letters, Hyperion's life goes on. This
seems to point to new experiences and the possibility of revisiting
his interpretation of his life thus far.
The poetic contemplation of our oneness with Nature, which is
prominent in the novel's final letter, points to an understanding
which philosophy cannot reach. Hyperion hints at this when he
complains about the Germans: "Is not the air that you drink in better
than your chatter? Are not the sun's rays nobler than all of you in
your cleverness" (ibid., p.129) ["Ist besser, denn euer Geschwätz, die
Luft nicht, die ihr trinkt? Der Sonne Strahlen, sind sie edler nicht,
denn all' ihr Klugen" (ibid., p.635)]? Hölderlin's life confirms his
endorsement of the superiority of poetry. After the Jena period, he
finally followed the advice his friend Schiller had given him in 1796
and never returned to philosophical argumentation, rather seeking to
show something of the greater unity of Being in poetic form.
In line with his understanding of Being as lying beyond our ken,
Hölderlin developed a theory of tonal modulations (Wechseltonlehre)
that is illustrated in much of his poetic output. According to this
theory, there are three fundamental poetic tones: the naïve, the
heroic and the ideal. A tone, however, cannot be expressed in its pure
form but only through a tension with its medium, a tension created by
the work of art. Thus, the poem becomes what Hölderlin calls an
"extended metaphor" of what cannot be said directly (Hölderlin, 1990).
5. Hölderlin's Influence
Because of his small philosophical output, it is important to indicate
in what way Hölderlin's ideas have influenced his contemporaries and
later thinkers. It was Hölderlin whose ideas showed Hegel that he
could not continue to work on the applications of philosophy to
politics without first addressing certain theoretical issues. In 1801,
this led Hegel to move to Jena where he was to write the Phenomenology
of Spirit. It could be argued, however, that Hegel's (1977) view of
poetry as belonging to the past and his dismissal of the Romantic
movement, show a lack of a grasp of the kind of point Hölderlin was
making.
Schelling's early work amounts to a development of Hölderlin's concept
of Being in terms of a notion of a prior identity of thought and
object in his Philosophy of Identity (Schelling, 1994). This
philosophy apparently makes knowledge of the Absolute (i.e. the
absolute ground) impossible, and Schelling wrestles with the
possibility of articulating how the Absolute amounts to knowledge of
itself in Hegelian fashion. However, his later philosophy clearly
distinguishes itself from Hegel's in that it claims that the ground of
the understanding contained in a philosophical system such as Hegel's
is "what is above all understanding" and can, therefore, "never become
comprehensible" (ibid., p.162). This endorsement of a claim related to
Hölderlin's about the unknowability of the ultimate ground of
conceptual discourse draws to a close the efforts of German Idealism
to grasp the whole of reality in conceptual terms. Finally, we must
note that Heidegger saw in Hölderlin a prophetic figure, but it was
Hölderlin the poet, not the philosopher, whom Heidegger had in mind.
In Being and Time, Heidegger first introduces his key idea of the
forgetting of the question of Being. His later thought develops this
idea which leads to the thought that poetry announces a new clearing
of Being. This echoes Hölderlin's privileging of poetry with respect
to conceptual thought. For Heidegger, poetry cannot name the
unnameable, but it can keep open the space for it (Heidegger, 1996,
2000). However, Heidegger understands Hölderlin as showing the way to
a future clearing of Being. We note that Heidegger's interpretation is
controversial and has been criticised, in particular by Henrich (1992,
1997), for whom Hölderlin is a "recollective" poet. For Henrich,
Hölderlin's work is turned to the past, and to our longings, both for
a sense of original unity and for the freedom of the self.
6. Conclusion
Hölderlin's philosophically relevant output, although very small, is
central to a proper understanding of the development of German
Idealism from its source in the task of providing a ground for Kant's
critical system to its later attempts to give an all-encompassing
philosophical account of reality. Hölderlin's insights in his
theoretical text On Judgment and Being can be seen as relevant to this
development. The consequent privileging of poetry over philosophy, of
which Hölderlin's career provides a striking illustration, resonates
into the twentieth century in Heidegger's later thought, but central
to Hölderlin's philosophical contribution is also the practical
correlate of his theoretical thought: his novel Hyperion provides a
profound insight into his understanding of life's "eccentric path" as
a struggle between the harmony of a lost, original unity and the drive
of human beings' free spirit always to seek the overcoming of any
given limits.
7. References and Further Reading
Adorno, T.W. (1992) Parataxis: On Hölderlin's late poetry, in Adorno,
Notes to Literature Vol. 2, transl. S.W.Nicholsen, Columbia University
Press, New York, pp. 109-149.
Ameriks, K. (ed.) (2000) The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Constantine, D. (1988) Hölderlin, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Donelan, J.H. (2002) Hölderlin's poetic self-consciousness, Philosophy
and Literature, 26, 125-142.
Fichte, J.G. (1994) Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other
Writings (1797-1800), ed. and transl. D. Breazeale, Hackett,
Indianapolis/Cambridge.
Förster, E. (1995) 'To lend wings to physics once again': Hölderlin
and the 'Oldest System Program of German Idealism', European Journal
of Philosophy, 3(2), 174-198.
di Giovanni, G. and Harris, H.S., editors, (2000) From Kant to Hegel:
Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, Hackett,
Indianapolis Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, transl.
A.V.Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Heidegger, M. (2000) Elucidations of Hölderlin's poetry, transl.
K.Hoeller, Humanity Books, New York.
Heidegger, M. (1996) Holderlin's Hymn "the Ister", Indiana University
Press, Indianapolis.
Henrich, D. (1992) Der Grund im Bewuβtsein: Untersuchungen zu
Hölderlin's Denken, 1794-1795, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart.
Henrich, D. (1997) The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on
Hölderlin, ed. E. Förster, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Hölderlin, F. (1972) Über Urtheil und Seyn (On Judgment and Being), in
H.S. Harris: 'Hegel's Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770-1801',
Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Hölderlin, F. (1990) Hyperion and selected poems, ed. Eric L. Santner,
Continuum, New York.
Hölderlin, F. (1999) Sämtliche Gedichte und Hyperion, Insel Verlag,
Frankfurt-am-Main.
Ryan, L. (1960) Hölderlin's Lehre vom Wechsel der Töne, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart.
Schelling, F.W.J. (1994) On the History of Modern Philosophy, transl.
A. Bowie, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Schiller, F. (1982) On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of
letters, ed. & transl. E.M.Wilkinson & L.A. Willoughby, Clarendon
Press, Oxford.
Waibel, V. (2000) Hölderlin und Fichte: 1794-1800, Paderborn.
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