Fundamentación Científica

Friedrich Hdlderlin, Die Gedichte: samtliche Gedichte und »Hyperion«, (ed.) Jochen Schmidt, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig, 1999, p.559.

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‘Here, [ie. in Seyn, Urtheil...] even before idealism spread its wings, the self- sufficiency of consciousness is contested, in solidarity with Jacobi. ...It is not consciousness that determines Being, but Being that determines consciousness. ...In this sketch of the argument... we have the first consummate expression of what I call “early Philosophical Romanticism” - not the dismissal of the theme of self-consciousness, but rather, its relegation to a status secondary to that of Being.’55

In philosophical terms, by doing this, Hdlderlin has pushed back beyond any ‘first principle’, just as any contemporary critic of Kant would have wished. But he has done so without tempting us into any potentially infinite regress in search of an even more fundamental principle, the problem faced by all philosophies of first principle. He also resolved the problem of how a first principle could be different in kind from what philosophers might wish to deduce from it. Being transcends consciousness, and leaves us, as conscious creatures, unable to describe or explore it adequately, even though we continue to use our understanding to pursue this infinite task.56 In fact, we shall see that Hdlderlin does not limit humanity only to using the understanding for this purpose. We obsessively use every means of thinking and feeling in order to become aware of or explore Being. The primary condition of Being precedes and unites subjectivity and objectivity. Indeed, it is very hard to separate out discussion of the significance of Being from discussion of every other aspect of what Hdlderlin wrote throughout the 1790s.

However, while Seyn, Urtheil... may have exposed an axiomatic pre-supposition, it did not in itself demonstrate that Being was anything more than a necessary, logical assumption, and it was not a proof of existence. One of the aims of Holderlin’s theory of

55 Manfred Frank, Philosophical Foundations o f Early German Idealism, (tr.) Elizabeth Mill&n-Zaibert, Albany: SUNY Press, 2004, p. 107.

J. Chr. F. Hdlderlin, ‘Seyn, Urtheil...’, in (ed.) Johann Kreuzer, Friedrich Hdlderlin: Theoretische Schriften, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998, pp.7,8.

56 Manfred Frank, Philosophical Foundations o f Early German Idealism, (tr.) Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, Albany: SUNY Press, 2004, p. 108.

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poetry is to eliminate the subjective grounding set up by the Kantian aesthetics and its theory o f nature. A presupposition inherent in our subjective reasoning could not in itself achieve this. If we were to try and separate or distinguish Being, or distinguish the essence o f anything from Being, this would destroy its unity.57 Only immediate,

unmediated, unconditioned Being meets the criteria of absolute unity, as is also the case in intellectual intuition.58 Frank is perturbed by these two statements, especially since Holderlin took his terminology from Spinoza and Jacobi who both had a conception of Being that was thicker than an ‘intellectual intuition’.59 However, although Seyn,

Urtheil... is itself expressed in analytical terms, for Hdlderlin the logical priority of Sein was a presupposition that brought together the critical philosophy and his pantheistic background belief in the en kaipan, that he was able to live, and which he saw confirmed around him every day, in just the way Jacobi might have wished.60 Thus, without

Holderlin’s already existing cosmological or metaphysical conception of the nature of the world and existence, the presupposition of Being would have been nothing more than that, but, since the more theological side of Holderlin’s thought cohered with the implications he had newly recognised in the critical philosophy, the two positions confirmed each other.

Having reached a synthesis of this kind, Holderlin’s subsequent philosophical thought was an amplification of detail. A partial early draft of his novel, Hyperion, was

57 J. Chr. F. Hdlderlin, ‘Seyn, Urtheil...’, in (ed.) Johann Kreuzer, Friedrich Hdlderlin: Theoretische Schriften, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998, p.7.

58 J. Chr. F. Hdlderlin, ‘Seyn, Urtheil...’, in (ed.) Johann Kreuzer, Friedrich Hdlderlin: Theoretische Schriften, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998, p.7.

59 Manfred Frank, Philosophical Foundations o f Early German Idealism, (tr.) Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, Albany: SUNY Press, 2004, p. 125.

60 Though, o f course, Jacobi himself was not involved, or even interested in, these intellectual developments personally.

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published in Schiller’s periodical, Thalia, in 1794. Frank points out that a passage in the introduction, that refers to the resolution of the varied conflicts that drive us through life in search o f peace, may seem to anticipate the condition of being

harmonischentgegengesetzt, that Holderlin later described,61 but that, since it pre-dates Seyn, Urtheil..., that passage does not reflect Holderlin’s considered conclusion regarding the nature o f the ultimate unity. However, according to the timescale suggested here, Seyn, Urteil... did not change Holderlin’s interpretation of life. The poems and all post- ‘95 versions of Hyperion fit the same scenario, as also do his analysis of time, and his poetology. Seyn, Urtheil... provides a logical justification for ‘pantheism’, but the living, moving and omnipresent divine, in which Hdlderlin had long believed, is still,

nevertheless, like a metaphorical shimmer that occasionally catches the light of thought, reason or experience, and reveals the enormity o f existence to us. From Kant and from Schiller, Hdlderlin gained the notion of the importance of harmony and balance. From Kant, Schiller and Fichte he gained the imagery o f opposition and productive conflict. He adjusted and adapted these factors to construct his own multi-relational notion of

harmonious opposition, reinforced by the contemporary organic theory of the natural sciences.63 Whatever specific doctrines influenced Hdlderlin, however, he situated them firmly in the simultaneously pantheistic and logical framework of all-encompassing

61 J. Ch. F. Hdlderlin, ‘Wenn der Dichter einmal...’, in (ed.) Johann Kreuzer, Friedrich Hdlderlin: Theoretische Schriften, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998, p.43.

This essay was not written until about 1800.

62 Manfred Frank, Philosophical Foundations o f Early German Idealism, (tr.) Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, Albany: SUNY Press, 2004, p.l 16.

63Frederick C Beiser, German Idealism: The struggle against subjectivism, Cambridge MA; London, Harvard University Press, 2002, p.366.

See also chapter 9 below.

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Being; a framework acquired before 1795, and which he continued to explore in his literary work until his breakdown in 1805.

If Holderlin is to be taken seriously as an aesthetic thinker, it must be possible to integrate the several strands of thought that influenced him. Some commentators have tended to present him as a man in touch with a supernatural, inexpressible and

tantalisingly unreachable ‘One and AH’ that merges into the Platonic World of Forms, the Christian God and the gods of antiquity.64 On this account he would become an

appropriate candidate for criticism in the same terms that Kant levelled against

Schwedenborg, as a pedlar of Schwarmerei,65 much as Kneller does.66 On the other hand, commentators from the generation of Henrich and Frank were excited by the discovery of the Seyn, Urtheil... manuscript, and have emphasised the logical status of Being and the way Holderlin thought this resolved the post-Kantian search for axiomatic foundations. They thus elevate Holderlin as a philosophical thinker in the Kantian / idealist tradition. While Frank believes that Seyn, Urtheil... provides the missing piece that enables us to make sense of ideas hinted at in Holderlin’s creative work, he also emphasises the unknowability of Being. In fact, he is not really able to explain how this notion of Being relates to Holderlin’s poetry at all. Seyn, Urtheil... sets up a notion of pre-conscious Being that,prima facie, has no practical implications for poetry, life, nature or the way

64 Manfred Frank, Philosophical Foundations o f Early German Idealism, (tr.) Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, Albany: SUNY Press, 2004, p. 126.

Stefanie Hdlscher, ‘Schiller and Hdlderlin: from Beauty to Religion’, in Publications o f the English Goethe Society, vol.LXXV, part ii, 2006.

65 Martin Schdnfeld, "Kant's Philosophical Development", in (ed.) Edward N. Zalta, The Stanford Encyclopedia o f Philosophy (Spring 2007 Edition). Available at:

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/kant-development/ [accessed 15.07.08].

66 Jane E. Kneller, ‘Romantic Conceptions o f the S e lf , in (ed.) David E. Klemm & Gunther Zdller, Figuring the Self, Albany NY: State University o f N ew York Press, 1997.

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life is lived. Neither does it explain why mankind should wish to return to the state of Being - or indeed, why anyone should think we ‘came’ from Being in anything other than a logical sense in the first place.

Yet the notions of going forth and returning to are central motifs in Holderlin’s oeuvre. Kneller’s article, misguidedly, I believe, claims that Holderlin’s search for reconciliation in life is ultimately a search for oblivion, but at least she shows what a strange doctrine Hdlderlin would appear to be propounding, if Seyn, Urtheil... were the key to everything he wrote. In Holderlin’s poems and Hyperion, however, the One and All, which Beiser is inclined to use as an expression interchangeable with Being, and which we may presume Frank also thought synonymous with Being, clearly has a

standing that makes it relevant to our perception of the world, and which pervades the life we lead and the nature of the universe, and which, in addition, has some kind of

normative relevance to the kind of life we should choose to live. We cannot ignore the passages in Hdlderlin in which he points to our ability to have experiences of the One and All, and to the way in which we come close to knowing it. It is clearly something more than a logical presupposition.

When Hdlderlin stated that he wished to go further than Kant, one way in which he appears to have intended this statement to be taken, is that he wanted to avoid the ‘as if in the Third Critique. He wanted to show that the two views, firstly that objects possess the quality of, for instance, beauty and, secondly, that nature has purpose, are more than metaphor, and rest on something more than an argument from analogy. So long as aesthetics, whether for audience or creative artist, originates solely in the subject, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do this. One of the consequences of having

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explained how the pure Being of Seyn, Urtheil... is integrated with the notion of the One and All, is that any similarities between the behaviour of mankind (including the

production of art), and nature (including the beauties of God’s natural creation) become structural, rather than analogous, thus fulfilling Holderlin’s intentions. His theory of history flows into his theory of poetry and into the lessons for life exemplified in his writings. It has to be said that the account of the One and All, abandoning as it does the rational tradition within which it was first set out by Spinoza, lacks some logical rigour, in just the same way that Seyn, Urtheil... lacks any practical dimension. But, given that religious belief of any kind can have an acceptable place in the human world, Holderlin has succeeded in fusing the rather disparate elements in his intellectual background into a theory o f general philosophical and aesthetic unity. The next chapter will consider the role of memory within this general philosophy, so that we may then examine the further implications arising from Hdlderlin’s rejection of the Kantian ‘as if, and how he dealt with them.

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CHAPTER 7

MEMORY, AND ITS STRUCTURAL ROLE IN HOLDERLIN’S