Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Germanic Languages and Literatures

First Advisor

Campe, Rüdiger

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Friedrich Hölderlin’s engagement with human self-relating to the natural world in the wake of Kantian rethinking of the human being as a normative subject. While it has often been noted that following the Pantheism controversy of the 1780s, a generation of poets and thinkers looked towards Spinozistic monism to overcome the dualisms and limitations of Kant’s Copernican revolution, the relevance of this development to moral concerns has received less consideration. This study proposes that the recurrent theme of “unification with nature” in Hölderlin’s literary and theoretical writings signifies a yearning for moral community¬—rather than metaphysical union—with the natural world. This preoccupation represents not a rejection of Kantian moral self-understanding, but its development. It argues that Hölderlin acknowledged the significance of autonomy with respect to nature as the guiding principle of human action, but also drew attention to its status as a contingent ideal ultimately unsuitable for a life lived in the natural world, leading to sorrow and alienation from one’s natural environment. This is possible because for Hölderlin our interpretation of human agency as autonomy from nature is a result of our standpoint of first personal reflection. To this he opposes the standpoint of the whole (“unendlichen Gesichtspunkt”), from which human life appears as a self-conscious part of nature. The first chapter shows how the Thalia fragment of Hyperion challenges the Kantian picture of human agency as founded in autonomy from nature. It suggests that Hyperion’s existential sorrow in the fragment is due to a self-conception of separation from nature which is revealed as an interpretation rather than a description of human agency. Hyperion’s beloved Melite points him towards an alternative self-understanding that is not sorrowful but acknowledges and rejoices in one’s undeniable connection to the natural world. The second chapter shows that the question of the meaning of human existence reappears in the Hyperion novel as a question of the telos or the end of one’s deeply felt self-relation to the natural environment. Two possible answers to this question drives its dynamic. On the one hand, one is too aware of the singularity of human existence in which alone one’s relation to the natural world can be freed from the bonds of impelling necessity. This awareness leads to a desire to endow the higher human existence in the world with shape and permanence. Hyperion, propelled by his love of the natural world, harbours the heroic aspiration of founding a new socio-political order where one’s free self-relation to nature would at the same time serve as the principle of association. But Hyperion aims to achieve this by means of a heroic deed that would immortalize him and thereby become the beginning of a new political order. To this is opposed Diotima’s vision of a socio-political order that does not aim to be the perfection of the natural world, but is a celebration in choral song and dance of the procession of nature that is already perfected. In Diotima’s vision Hyperion figures not as a hero who beyond the bounds of nature gains immortality, but a public poet and teacher of the people as a priest of nature. The third chapter then discusses how poetry can bring about a transformation of the poet’s and the audience’s inner life through an engagement with Hölderlin’s poetological essay Wenn der Dichter einmal des Geistes mächtig.... The chapter argues that the unity of a truly unified poetic work for Hölderlin requires that a poet overcome his or her subjective standpoint and attain to a non-finite standpoint of unity with natural world. But such transcendence does not entail a negation of individuality. Rather, the poem is the product of the poet’s free and individual self-relation to an outer sphere from such a non-finite standpoint. Chapter four discusses modern tragedy as a post-Kantian genre in relation with Hölderlin’s tragic theoretical text Grund zum Empedokles. It shows how Hölderlin saw in tragedy the possibility of a reconciliation of human beings in their social self-understanding and the natural world. The path to such a reconciliation runs through a series of oppositions between relatively purposive human action and relatively counterpurposive nature. The chapter lays out these oppositions between human action and nature with reference to Kant’s third Critique. The fifth chapter then explains more concretely how the poet philosopher Empedocles’ freely chosen sacrificial death brings about such an reconciliation.

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