The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  13.4 HÖLDERLIN

  If one judges according to standard views about what counts as philosophical writing Hölderlin’s philosophical output is miniscule, consisting of a single page, written front and back in 1795, known by the title given to it by Friedrich Beißner, one of the editors of the Stuttgart edition of Hölderlin’s work. “Urteil und Sein” (StA IV: 216–17) does not stand completely alone, however, if one includes as philosophical the epistolary novel Hyperion (particularly its preface), several lyric poems, and short texts composed in poetics that are often read in conjunction with the lyrics. So powerful and elusive are these latter materials that some among Hölderlin’s philosophical admirers accord them preemptory status. Hölderlin began his studies at the Lutheran theological seminary in Tübingen, where he developed his interests in companionship with his friends and roommates Schelling and Hegel. The three were well-matched: Schelling was the lightning-quick best boy, Hegel the stolid but slightly slower hale fellow and Hölderlin the one soulful in temperament. Hölderlin, like his two friends, was formed by two primary intellectual forces at the seminary and by one monumental historical event. The first of the intellectual forces could hardly have been avoided, short of the students being completely cloistered: a book of letters written by F. H. Jacobi (1743–1819) to the great Jewish Enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) on the alleged deathbed “conversion” of G. E. Lessing (1729–81) to Spinozism. Whatever one thought about the veracity of the report, Jacobi’s publication was a bombshell detonated in the midst of an already volatile situation, unleashing the idea that Lessing, a paragon of the Christian German Enlightenment, was an “atheist” and “nihilist.”19 A second influence was an interpretation of the ramifications of Kant’s “critical philosophy” for the relation of faith to reason forwarded by a “repeater” at Tübingen, Carl Immanuel Diez.20 The combined effect of these two sets of considerations was to heighten the sense among the gifted fellow students that they were preparing for the wrong careers—both Hölderlin and Hegel considered leaving the seminary to study law elsewhere, although they both in the end persisted and received their degrees from the Stift. This sense could only have been deepened by the political events in France that found their way even into Swabian seminary life; all three celebrated the early stages of the French Revolution as emancipating and fervently hoped to see revolutionary political thought extend eastward.

  As crucial as Hölderlin’s friendships with Schelling and Hegel were for his development, it was his slightly older friend from the Stift, Niethammer, who helped Hölderlin find a path out of the confines of the seminary after his graduation in 1793. Hölderlin had secured a post as a family tutor in lower Franconia thanks to a recommendation from Schiller. He was isolated there, however, and quickly sought a way out. Niethammer had taken up teaching duties at the university in Jena and facilitated Hölderlin’s immersion in the philosophical and literary life there. Hölderlin reacquainted himself with Schiller and, in quick order, met Goethe and Novalis, and attended Fichte’s inaugural lectures on his just-published first version of the Wissenschaftslehre, which Hölderlin had read avidly. Schiller published part of what was to become the novel Hyperion in the journal Thalia, and Niethammer did the same with several of Hölderlin’s essays in his Philosophisches Journal. Hölderlin remained in Jena for a six-month period, during which time his philosophical thought jells.

  Niethammer was no mere go-between; we saw already that his circle of anti-foundationalists were more or less inured to the attractions of more systematic, first-principle driven philosophy, and they provided a ready social receptacle for the young Hölderlin. There is evidence in scattered correspondence that Hölderlin found this way of thinking about Fichte significant, although he was not at all dismissive of Fichte’s attempts to further systematize Kant’s philosophy in a subjective principle and the precise impact of Niethammer’s thought is difficult to measure. What is certain is that Hölderlin comes to reject the very idea that the source of subjectivity might be an unconditioned principle from which one can draw inferences which both explain and justify discrete modes of experience; this is the core doctrine of “Urteil und Sein,” written during a time when Hölderlin is still embroiled in Fichte’s Jena thought.21 Hölderlin begins by accepting, perhaps arguendo, that self-consciousness is a necessary, unifying condition on consciousness. In doing so, he aligns himself with Fichte, and against Kant’s more modest position that the possibility of self-consciousness is a requirement on consciousness. What Fichte means by “self-consciousness” here is not of course what Kant means by it. For Kant self-consciousness is a reflective state that takes the content of conscious states as its objects; such self-consciousness might be implicit, but it can always be made explicit by drawing attention to itself. For Fichte, some self-consciousness can be as Kant construes it, but basic self-consciousness is implicit, even unconscious, structurally expressing the tripartite form of self-positing. Self-positing is itself a posit: something the philosopher is bound to accept, on pains of incoherence in her account of how discrete conscious states which take discrete objects as their content, are so much as possible. This is a philosophical construct and cannot be an experience. (This is why Fichte does not believe that requiring actual self-consciousness to accompany each and every mental state is in contravention of Kant’s requirement that each state be such that one may be self-conscious of it.) From the requirement that the unity of consciousness involve self-consciousness Hölderlin reasons that the unity requires a distinction between subject of consciousness and object of consciousness, even where object of consciousness is the subject. In this way two orders of unity are brought into tension. On the one hand, there is a demand that consciousness be unified prior to reflective awareness of that unity and, on the other, any reflective self-consciousness will unify the subject via diversity between subject and object. In effect, these two “orders,” as I have called them, track Fichte’s conception of basic self-consciousness, in the first instance, and Kant’s, in the second. Fichte holds that the second order must presuppose the first, and Hölderlin seems to agree. But any subjective state or activity, even an unconscious one of the posits, is diverse at least to the extent that the state or activity entails a distinction or “separation” (Teilung) between subject and object. This will be true, Hölderlin seems to hold, regardless of how much one attempts to evaporate out of the structure of subjectivity such a separation. Subjectivity cannot itself be a unified condition; to be a subject at all, even minimally conceived, is to be “reflective” and thus self-separated.

  Now, one might stop here; and if one did, one might well revert to mere Kantianism. It is constitutive of subjectivity that there is this separation, no matter how much one might wish otherwise, but one cannot press beyond this except by speculation that will never yield a principle. In this sense, one might see Kant as forwarding a “tragic” idealism. But Hölderlin does not stop here. He banks the results: (1) that there can be no subjective principle upon which to base a philosophical “science” of human experience and knowledge and (2) that, moreover, there can be no principle whatsoever, subjective or objective, for that basis and then asks after the value and status of the human impetus to foundational thought in light of those findings. He concludes that he has something qualified that he can say further, which involves conceiving of the ground of thought otherwise than as a principle. Hölderlin’s thought involves, as did Schlegel’s and Novalis’, a reconceiving of the idea of a ground (Grund) for philosophical reflection.

  This distinction between principle and ground can seem more explicit in Hölderlin than in Schlegel and Novalis, and there is a reason for this. Such a ground, Hölderlin holds, would have to be one in which all forms of separation were unified in such a way that there is no differentiation. The ground would be, thus, not itself subjective, nor would it be objective. Nor would it merely ground subjectivity, nor objectivity in terms of subjectivity. It would ground independently both subjectivity and
objectivity. The ground would be such that the division between subjective and objective would arise from it without characterizing it; objects and subjects are thus not merely extrusions of other less canonically subjective or objective aspects of the ground. Such division disrupts (stört) the unity of the absolute; things do not merely emerge from it in terms of their latency. Since the unity of subjects is already at a remove from this aboriginal unity in oneness, subjects at even their most unified qua subjects (or objects in the same way) are products of the disruption. Hölderlin uses the term “being” (Seyn) to refer to this absolute that is neither subject nor object, yet comprehends the source of both. Moreover, Hölderlin treats discursivity even at minimal and basic levels as a species of judgment. Judgment can have no access to this ground; judgment arises from a fundamental separation of what is unified at the most basic ontological stratum, a state of affairs that Hölderlin attempts to capture when he suggests whimsically that the etymology of the German word meaning judgment, “Urteilung,” signifies a primordial separation (i.e. Ur-Teilung) (StA IV: 216). To be grounded in this way is, thus, to lack a cognitive path back to the ground from which spring understanding, experience, and nature. As did Novalis and Schlegel in their own ways, Hölderlin holds that the best sense within the sphere of the finite that finite beings can have of being is the product of procedures enacted experientially such that they become principles of subjective synthesis and that, as much as is possible, will “recollect” in experience the felt proximity and distance from the absolute.

  Hölderlin had been at work on Hyperion on and off for three years prior to his stay in Jena, and it is reasonable to read that work in close connection with the “Urteil und Sein” text. In it, three main aspects of this sort of recollection become apparent. First, although Hölderlin is addressing a problem of self-integration known at least since Herder’s and Schiller’s writings, he does not counsel, as does Schiller at times, hope for a complete, restful harmony of the elements of subjectivity. Instead, the path of experience is a matter of negotiating various sorts of balance of two aspects of experience that will always be in conflict with one another.22 These aspects correspond to and find their source in two ways in which being must impact on subjects. One aspect involves an impetus to immerse oneself in life in order to counter the constitutive effects of being separated from being. Of course one cannot be oneself amidst pure being—being oneself involves individuation, and pure being is ontologically prior to that. But one can still harbor a yearning for finding in everything commonality by reducing objective bearing and “identifying” with all else that has come forth from being. The vehicle for such identification will not be finding conceptual affinities between entities; the requisite identification will take the form of activity an only approximate mimetic process, in which one effaces as much as one can one’s individuality and sinks into the flow of existence. On the other hand, it is also constitutive of my subjectivity that I desire to orient myself in the world as the subject that is me over and against other objects that are radically not-me. The contrast provided by the first-person accusative in the formulation above illustrates the point: I am I, but as an object I am me. This is another form of identification, this time in virtue of my reflective capacity to distance myself from things enough to judge them and, to that extent, to rise above them and be “free.” Hyperion initially feels pulled apart by these two conflicting aspects of experience and attempts to modulate his life, first, in the direction of immersion at the expense of reflection and, then, the other way around. The second aspect of recollection involves just this issue of experience as a process in which the conflicting drives interact. As Hyperion gains more experience he better appreciates the reciprocity of the two constitutive factors and does so in a way that does not paper over that the factors are “opposites”: that they pull in opposing directions. The process of experience works itself out in terms of opposition of mutually dependent elements, and progress is measured in terms of narrowing the obtrusive reaction to the conflict on the part of the subject by coming to understand the constitutive nature of that very conflict. At first, subjects react to their “unity in difference” as alien to what they take to be the nature of their identity. They tend to try to resolve the conflict absolutely. While the conflict is constitutive and cannot be ultimately resolved in achieving perfect unity with oneself or the world, there can be asymptotic approach to such a state. It is very important to be clear about the nature of this “infinite approach.” One should not conceive of it as the approximation to a limit, where there is incremental near-realization of a final end that preempts conflict by reaching forward to a point of unity without conflict. (This is closer to Hegel’s view of the matter.) “Resolution” is perhaps not the best word to use, then, to refer to a subject’s sense of progression through life; conflict persists but the subject’s grasp on its constitutive force has a haunted lucidity, and this brings with it a measure of autonomy, not in freedom from conflict but in freedom to rightly live with it. Third, the effect of this “eccentric path” on the subject is to root her in a ground, the opacity of which she will never overcome and the attitude towards which is one of “thankfulness” (Dank). Hölderlin, again indulging etymological fantasy, drives this verb toward the phonetically similar verb for thinking (denken), in order to show that when thought turns back on itself to ask after its source, thought of that source must take the form of thanks for a source beyond thought’s resources. In later writings Hölderlin mints the neologism Bildsamkeit to chart the idea that subjects are cut out for formation antecedent to their competence to undertake “formation” (Bildung) (StA IV: 156).

  Hölderlin’s literary work after his period in Jena has fascinated many. For reasons that remain unknown and that may foreshadow Hölderlin’s final mental breakdown in 1806, he suddenly leaves Jena in 1795 to return home to his mother. He took with him drafts of several translation projects, drafts of essays left incomplete that he had promised to Niethammer for publication in the Philosophisches Journal, and several planned and perhaps partly executed translations of ancient Greek poetry. Isolation again set in, allayed only a bit by the occasional meeting with Schelling. Hölderlin moved to Frankfurt am Main in early 1796 to take up a new tutoring position, this time in the household of a wealthy banker. Hölderlin there began a clandestine affair with the banker’s wife, Susette Gontard, who is the model for the character of Diotima in several poems and Hyperion. Hegel joined Hölderlin in Frankfurt a year later, and the reunited pair formed a circle for philosophical discussion that included their mutual friend and correspondent Isaac von Sinclair and Jakob Zwilling, whom they knew as a student in Jena.23 The tenor of the discussions among this new circle can be partly inferred from correspondence and changes in Hegel’s philosophical position away from his youthful Kantianism. The surmise is that Hölderlin’s idea that dialectical thought is to be modeled on his understanding of the structure of love was crucial to his own conception of dialectic (although Hegel’s next phase as amanuensis to Schelling would be equally important in this regard). Hölderlin published the first volume of his novel in April of 1797, sending a copy to Schiller, who relayed it in turn to Goethe, who was fairly unimpressed. Goethe nevertheless met with Hölderlin later that year, counseling him to concentrate on lyric. This Frankfurt period lasted for Hölderlin only two and a half years; by September 1798 he had resigned his post and by 1799 was on his way. Again, the precise catalyst is unknown, although his affair with Gontard was not exactly a secret. He relocated to Homburg, where Sinclair had an important administrative post, and he intermittently met with Gontard.

  Hölderlin in the meantime had begun work on a tragedy, Empedokles, in 1797, and this and other work centered in antiquity took on a new importance for him (particularly translation from Pindar). The second volume of Hyperion was published in October of 1799, but that success was more than offset by Hölderlin’s failure to receive donations toward a new journal he wished to found, Iduna, from his former
supporters Schiller and Goethe and his friend Schelling. He was forced by his finances to take on private tutoring again, first in Switzerland and then in Bordeaux. The move to France in 1802, a journey he made on foot, is considered by many scholars to be the point of no return for Hölderlin. Hölderlin felt the move from German-speaking lands to France to be deracinating, one thrust on him by yet another round of asking for support from his former mentors and friends with no response. In his important correspondence with C. U. Böhlendorff he writes of being emptied out and useless in Germany.24 He remained in Bordeaux for a mere three months, returning, again on foot, to Stuttgart very ill. He learnt of Susette Gontard’s death later that year, and it broke him. He returned to his family home and was put in the care of a doctor. He continued work on both his poetry and his poetic theory throughout this period.

  Hölderlin was never to regain what fragile mental stability he once enjoyed. During the years 1802–5, he wrote many of the poems that have come under philosophical scrutiny, for example, “Patmos” (1802/3), “Remembrance” (1803–5?), “The Ister” (1803–5?). There are also several drafts and fragments of other lyrics from this period.25 He also published translations of Oedipus and Antigone (both 1804). The final straw perhaps was that he and his friend Sinclair were arrested as possible co-conspirators in a plot to assassinate the Elector of Württemburg, which strained their relationship. Sinclair was exonerated; Hölderlin was judged mentally incompetent to stand trial. Some have speculated that Hölderlin accentuated his mental illness for purposes of avoiding conviction. Be that as it may, it is not unknown that the stress of doing so would in fact increase the severity of the illness. And so it did. Hölderlin was relocated to a psychiatric clinic in the university town from which he had begun his intellectual journey, Tübingen, where he was treated for upwards of a year in the clinic of the physician J. H. F. Autenrieth. Autenrieth was a follower of the new, “American” humanitarian reforms in treating mental illness instituted by Benjamin Rush, whose book on the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793 he had translated into German. As it turned out the treatment was not so very humanitarian, involving the administration of belladonna and the use of iron masks, and was judged in the end “unsuccessful.” Hölderlin was then released into the care of a local carpenter, Ernst Zimmer and lived in the “tower” of the Zimmer family house for 36 years, dying in 1843.