Poetology as Symptom in Friedrich Hölderlin

Abstract

I argue that Friedrich Hölderlin's theoretical texts are marked by a paradox: namely, Hölderlin attempts to achieve in them the work of unification he assigns to poetry alone. This unification is his specifically post‐Kantian response to a more general worry about the linking of mind and world. Hölderlin understands that the desire for unification within and between human subjects and the external world is a fundamental anthropological tendency even as the desire remains unfulfillable. I draw out thematic and metatextual features of Hölderlin's theoretical texts that show him making a strong distinction between poetic and theoretical language; engaging with problems of the connection between mind and world; and, finally, attempting to perform the unifications he denies discursive language in the theoretical texts themselves. I close the article with a reading of the late poem “Lebensalter” to show that, for Hölderlin, poetry can effect unifications that theory cannot.

Hölderlin’s Higher Enlightenment

“…as a symptom of anxiety about the political, moral, and aesthetic problem of fnding a modern world to be a home for fnite human subjectivity." 33 It is thus a matter of disenchantment in modernity: the usual ties (family and religion) lose their ability to provide meaning for the worldly human subject. Placing Hölderlin's worries "in the post-Kantian landscape" with its concern for how the human mind relates to the external world, Vandegrift Eldridge argues that Hölderlin recognizes "the desire for infnite knowledge and at the same time the impossibility of that knowledge."…”