Mortal Thought: Hölderlin and Philosophy 9781474238182, 9781474238175, 9781474238205, 1474238181, 1474238173

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Mortal Thought

bloomsbury studies in continental philosophy Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Bloomsbury. The series features first-​class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastiar Morgan Adorno’s Poetics of Critique, Steven Helmling Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach Crisis in Continental Philosophy, Robert Piercey Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-​Rihan Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Jay Lampert Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts, edited by Mary Caputi and Vincent J. Del Casino Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure, Nicole Anderson Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri Encountering Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Foucault’s Legacy, C. G. Prado Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope, Jill Graper Hernandez Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi Gadamer’s Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics, John Arthos Gilles Deleuze, Constantin V. Boundas Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy Heidegger, History and the Holocaust, Mahon O’Brien Heidegger and Happiness, Matthew King Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael Lewis Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality, Susi Ferrarello In the Shadow of Phenomenology, Stephen H. Watson Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas Jean-​Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness: Philosophy and Powers of Existence, Daniele Rugo

Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics, Edward Willatt Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer Michel Henry, Jeffrey Hanson Nietzsche and the Anglo-​Saxon Tradition, Louise Mabille Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, James Luchte Phenomenology, Institution and History, Stephen H. Watson Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy, Matthew R. McLennan Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Simultaneity and Delay, Jay Lampert Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant, Edward Willatt Towards the Critique of Violence, edited by Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani Zizek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman

Mortal Thought Hölderlin and Philosophy JAMES LUCHTE

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © James Luchte, 2016 James Luchte has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​4742-​3818-​2 ePDF: 978-​1-​4742-​3817-​5 ePub: 978-​1-​4742-​3820-​5 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

CONTENTS Opening: Mortal thought  1

PART ONE  Hölderlin and the poetics of thought  7 1 2 3 4 5

The unity of philosophy in Kant  9 Transcendental poetics and the doctrine of reflection  25 Holderlin: Poetics beyond reflection  47 Hölderlin and the tragic sublime  59 Mortal thought: The poetics of Being and existence  73

PART TWO  Hölderlin’s child: Nietzsche  87 6 Hyperion and The Birth of Tragedy  89 7 Tragic poetry and the thread of Ariadne  101 8 Empedocles and the Death of Zarathustra  117

PART THREE  Hölderlin and contemporary philosophy  129 9 10 11 12 13

Hölderlin and the Frankfurt School  131 Heidegger and the question of Being  139 Heidegger’s Poetic Turn  147 Hölderlin and the poetics of deconstruction  161 All in all: The poetics of intimacy  175

Epilogue: The revolution of the mortal  183 Notes  185 Bibliography  195 Index  199

Opening: Mortal thought The ecstasy of Kronos

It has been said by the poets, servants of the Highest: Kronos, subduer of his sublime father Uranus, Was exiled to the abyssal depths in the wake of His double defeat at the hands of his wife and son. Kronos castrated the god of the eternal Heavens, and Aphrodite, goddess of Earthly Love, born of the phallus, Rose naked from bloody foam upon the surface of the sea. With the usurpation, haunted by ominous prophesy of his Overthrow by his child, Kronos began to consume Each of his children just after their births. His first defeat came from the wrath of his Wife Rhea, in revenge for his ingestion of Her children, as he sought to flee his Fate. Rhea saved her youngest child, Zeus, by Deception, giving Kronos, after the birth, A stone, wrapped in swaddling clothes. After his upbringing by nymphs and goddesses, Zeus returned with their arts, and giving Kronos A poison, made him vomit up his immortal children. Liberated, his brothers and sisters ascended to Olympus, whereupon Zeus cast his defeated Father into the abysmal depths of Tartarus. The second defeat of Kronos occurred when he and his fellow Titans rose in insurrection and war against the Olympians, their attempt Narrowly suppressed, the Titans again consigned to the nebulous abyss. Kronos endured his time, witnessing the centuries of fidelity

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To his immortal children until their worship was silenced by Agitators of a narrative of salvation, of God made flesh. Mouths spread the story of Eternity descending into time, Of a heroic god conquering Time and Death, with Promises of salvation for the mortals of the Word. The ancient stories of the gods were cast into oblivion, Along with their wisdom, for one thousand years by the Poets of the god-​man, proclaiming him to be the final truth. Yet, with their proclamation, Truth, herself, awakens, contesting The hubris of the new claim as just another fleeting illusion of time, As with all stories of mortals, children of Prometheus, the Titan. The goddess of truth set them each upon the other, In the agon, the One God, who commanded There shall be no other gods, descended into Chaos. The stories of the God proliferated in strife, as a hydra, The new religion shattered amidst the inexorable flux Of the Nameless, the god made flesh, captive of time. Seizing the moment of his liberation, in his ecstasy, Kronos again castrates Eternity, repeating his first Godlike act, giving to mortals their allotment of memory. A goddess again ascends from bloody foam, Historia, The youngest daughter of Kronos, who inhabits the Vortex of love and strife, a still monstrous site. Agitators of denial still fight to the death over that Which must forever remain incomprehensible, destroying What is Holy in the name of a religiosity of hubris. Religions of power, unholy politics of the soul, the Poets of immortal illusions still seek to poison Time and Earth, the Kronian revolution still on its way. Yet, there are other poets, however, who are still here, Amid the strife of mortal existence, who maintain The remembrance of the Holy, and of the gods. Traces remain of that which is nearest, and in intimacy Seek to incite the urgency and intensity of a feeling That awakens the ecstatic openness of the possible.1 Mortal Thought is about the relationship of thought and temporality, an intimate and radical, even overwhelming, relationship. Mortal thought discloses to itself the finite and deadly status of its own existence—​it opens up to a world where it will be a temporary inhabitant. This work is also about honesty, of the acknowledgment of the necessarily uncertain and contingent status of our existence. Regardless of any religious ideas one may entertain, each will necessarily die. Such is our inescapable fate: we stand amid the incomprehensible and sublime event that each of us is alive. Such an event is a life moreover that can end at any moment, whether through

Opening: Mortal thought

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violence, accident, disease, or free-​choice. Yet, within the horizons of this fate, we are free and equal before mortality, one to another—​which includes all of the others who have been and will be, those whose Fate is oblivion. It is such mortal thoughts that will be explored in the following pages, beginning with a meditation upon the thought of Friedrich Hölderlin, a philosopher and poet of tragic existence, of our mortality, and his radical, though unacknowledged influence upon the next two centuries of philosophical thought. It may seem on the surface that what is regarded as Hölderlin’s philosophical thought consists of intimations, fragments, incomplete essays, even rumors, remaining for us as the ruins of Greece, which he invokes in his writing—​as traces of remembrance, but only with an aura of mystery; something of the riddle abides in all of the work. All that is left, as some storytellers muse, are myriad fragments of an eccentric project, a narrative of incompletion, fatal loss, missing pages, tragic love, unfulfilled intentions, madness, decades of solitude, and death. Yet, such an attitude would be to misunderstand Hölderlin’s entire project, already setting before our eyes in the form of his literary works, his novel Hyperion, which comprehends beauty in terms of the logos of Heraclitus; his myriad published poetry; translations of Sophocles’ tragic dramas Oedipus Rex and Antigone; and his incomplete tragedy The Death of Empedocles—​not to mention his personal essays and letters to numerous individuals. Foucault has suggested, as we will explore below, that Hölderlin was uniquely indicative of the era of division, of the schizophrenia and nihilism that was to descend upon the West. Yet, before we acquiesce to this trajectory of interpretation, one that wallows in speculation and anonymous strategies, let us take a step back, away from the damaging and tangential misunderstandings surrounding the name “Hölderlin,” and seek, first, to understand his thought from his work, now that it lies extant before us. One of the purposes of this present writing is to reveal why Hölderlin’s literary works are philosophical texts, and what they are seeking to communicate to us. In Hölderlin’s own era, poetic and literary philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-​Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, would have never had to question their right to be called philosophers. These latter found the situation in quite a different way amid the analytic and scientific hegemony of a worldview that systematically excluded poetics and literature in favor of mathematics and logic. Nevertheless, even these latter metaphors of thought have fallen away as leaves from a tree in autumn, and in radical forgetfulness, contemporary philosophy remains trapped in the same dilemma as it did in the late eighteenth century, of the Cartesian and Kantian dilemma of subjectivism, and its overcoming. That which is forgotten, or perhaps remains wholly unacknowledged, is the reception of early Greek thought, of logos as the unity of opposites in contradistinction to the res cogito of René Descartes, by Hölderlin, F.  W. J.  Schelling, and others, a conception of thought that displaced the

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subjectivist problematic. It was this reception that underlined the return of radical poetics as a practice of philosophy oriented to tragic truth. In relation to Hölderlin’s displacement of Kantian “reason,” we will explore the significance of poetics as a fundamentally expressive and artistic element in the very meaning of his philosophy. We will explore the tragic thought of Hölderlin in the following chapters, taking special note of his radical contestation of not only the secularized posture of “Modernist” philosophy, but also the Christianity and Platonism of the dominant romantic writers, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, whose use of poetry was authorized by Kantian reason, and was subject to its legislation. With Hölderlin’s dissolution of Kantian reason, on the contrary, poetics becomes the essential mechane of philosophical expression.2 The difficulty in providing a penetrating interpretation of Hölderlin’s philosophy is that the overt philosophical pathway to Hölderlin’s poetico-​ phenomenological thinking has been nearly cancelled out by the fulfilment of the project. Yet, traces, clues, or hints remain that would allow us to travel along Hölderlin’s philosophical path, and, in this manner, the following work seeks to reconstruct Hölderlin’s philosophical thought in its completeness and as it was enacted in the midst of its context of emergence, including its political, social, and cultural contexts. This study of Hölderlin’s mortal thought is steeped in his writings—​ his novel, poetry, essays, fragments, and translations—​and is organized, on the one hand, retrospectively, in relation to Hölderlin’s context of emergence in the post-​Kantian debates, of the influences of Johann Gottleib Fichte, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Niethammer, and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and prospectively, in relation to his massive and undeniable influence upon Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and the post-​structuralists. The tragic was the project of Hölderlin and Nietzsche, threads of which were picked up in the twentieth century by the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, Heidegger, existentialism, and post-​ structuralism. One could look toward the contemporary relevance of Hölderlin in, for instance, David Farrell Krell’s translation of Hölderlin’s unfinished tragic drama, or “mourning play,” upon the early Greek thinker Empedocles. Tragedy has at its core a meditation upon temporality, upon the predicament of mortality and the inexorability of Fate, a common feature of tragic poetics. The short story is that reason itself emerges through the self-​suppression of the imagination, which, stretched to its limits, creates its redemptive artwork—​ Reason—​one that is a “Noble Lie.” With the flawed “authorization” of reason, imagination is subjected, placed into service to its own creation, losing its freedom and voice in the process. Yet, one can still trace, from Immanuel Kant’s own text, and radically from the critical perspective of Hölderlin in “Urteil und Seyn,” the temporal taint of this “spontaneity” of reason, revealing a thought irretrievably temporal and sensuous, or, in other words, for Hölderlin, tragic—​despite its misdirection and smoke and mirrors in its terror before nothingness.

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The Hölderlinian contestation of the rationalist “solution” of the Kantian sublime reveals a radical temporalization of thought, one that had an undeniable and irreversible impact upon early nineteenth-​century philosophy in the work of Schelling, in which history and art become the dominant threads of an uncertain knowledge, one embedded in a world composed of a unity of opposites, modulated by the unconscious, the unknown agent of our existence—​or upon Georg Hegel and his “Master-​Slave dialectic” in his Phenomenology of Spirit as the “unity of opposites,” of strife and negativity as the radical temporality of the community, in which, and from which, each becomes individualized as a citizen, in the manner of the Apollonian principle of individuation of the finite self. Indeed, for Hölderlin, we are mistaken to believe the mortal subject has the character given to it by either Descartes, or by Kant, or that “reason” exists, at all, in any purity. In the wake of the displacement of the constructivist criteria of an ideological and secularized Christian subject, that which remains is the tragic sublime and the philosophical poiesis of immanence. We will see that Hölderlin’s rediscovery of the tragic, and of the Heraclitean logos as it pertained to the subjectivism of “modernist” philosophy, had a profound impact upon thought. What we will find, contrary or divergent from the grain of interpretation for the last century, is that Hölderlin is everyone’s “black hole,” as the one who reintroduced radical temporality (in the manner of the early Tragic Greeks) into thought, our mortal thought, with his rejection of Kant’s rationalist solution to the sublime. The tragic sublime reemerges with Hölderlin, and with this return of the Heraclitean flux, and, of the logos, we witness the “return of time,” of historicity, to Western thought, a cataclysm to which the latter still is seeking to respond, to escape from the contingency and uncertainty of “Reality.”

PART ONE

Hölderlin and the poetics of thought

CHAPTER ONE

The unity of philosophy in Kant

In this opening chapter, I will contend that, for the most part, Kant has not been read properly, since the emergence of Neo-​Kantianism at the end of the nineteenth century, which turned Kant into a formal exercise of analysis, dismembering him according to the division of labor of theoretical philosophy (ontology), ethics (moral or practical philosophy), and aesthetics (philosophy of art). While Kant did pay heed to the traditional divisions in philosophy, he considered all the operations of our several faculties of knowledge and thought as acting simultaneously under the auspices of a rational and existential unity. In this light, I will argue that any interpretation of early German romanticism and German idealism—​and specifically, any consideration of Hölderlin—​must take into view the entirety of the Critical Project and, most urgently, the Critique of Judgment as the unifying text of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.

Prologue: Hölderlin contra Kant If we are to understand Hölderlin as a philosopher, we must excavate the appropriate context in which to understand the specificity of his thought. Hölderlin, in his extant work—​ much of which persists in a tragically and for the most part unintentionally fragmentary character—​enacted a multi-​genre/​discipline revolutionary event. The revolutionary character of his poetics, including his novel Hyperion, prose, and his translations of Sophocles and Pindar, among others, can be comprehended in the context

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of his own response to the meaning and possibilities of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” as he traveled intimately through and participated in this revolutionary transformation of thought. Hölderlin was enmeshed in the post-​ Kantian debates; attended the lectures of Fichte; and maintained regular contact with major thinkers such as Niethammer, Schelling, Hegel, and Schiller, among others. Hölderlin regarded his own thought as intimately related to the cultural, political, and intellectual revolution in process, and emerged at the fateful time in which he could not only apprehend, in a synoptic manner, a quite vibrant and documented history of the present, of the revolution in philosophy enacted by Kant’s transcendental project, but also participate with others in the creation of a second European renaissance of thought that reached its apotheosis in the nineteenth century and in the event of the death of God. Scholarly focus upon the intricacies of this period has cultivated a literature of critical mass since the early twentieth century, beginning with the various works of Stefan George, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger, traversing a second generation in the works of the postwar era by Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and the third generation of researchers such as Veronique Foti, Frederick Beiser, Andrew Bowie, and David Farrell Krell. These latter scholars have constructed a rigorous philology of the texts of early German romanticism and have provided the beginnings of a more complex picture of the development of German idealism. This work has been greatly facilitated by the discovery of new materials, a plethora of translations, which has not only expanded the “archive,” but also provided the conditions for an interpretation of the radical core of this historical moment that seeks a deeper comprehension of its philosophies. The current study is oriented specifically to Hölderlin, who has not yet received adequate interpretive treatment in terms of his context of emergence in Kantian and post-​Kantian philosophy. Yet, in this disclosure of the mortal thought of the philosopher Hölderlin, we will once again see others, such as the romantics, in a new light. Hölderlin is generally regarded as a philosophical poet, who shared “ideas” with the early German romantics, was in association with Hegel and Schelling, and has been labeled as an early German romantic. But is this story true? Was Hölderlin a romantic? Hölderlin is, for example, associated with Kant’s Critique of Judgment in many accounts, but with little or no elaboration, and is credited with the critical philosophical move that gave rise to the possibility of an Absolute that did not reside in the subject, as with Fichte, nor in the object, as with the Platonic rationalists, but as an Absolute, in which are immersed “subject” and “object.” Indeed, this binary opposition was, for Hölderlin, only a heuristic, illusory product of reflection—​the severance of judgment. Our true situation is revealed in the feeling of mortality, temporality in the face of the nothing, in the goat song of the Chorus in tragic art.

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Indeed, for Hölderlin, as we see in his essay “Urteil und Seyn,” subjective reflection is incapable of accessing primordial being (Seyn), but remains necessarily turreted inside mere consciousness. The subjective notion of limitation, confined within the attributes of thought and extension, echoes the impact of Spinoza upon Hölderlin, brought to his attention through Jacobi’s work, in this case, in the attempt to counteract, as Beiser relates, Kantian-​Fichtean “subjectivism”—​just as had Spinoza sought to counteract Cartesian “subjectivism.” Yet, it is also suggested in these accounts of Hölderlin’s poetic thought that, amid the temporal world, there is an apprehension of Being itself, through an intellectual intuition, and this feature of his thought has placed him in the proximity of the romantics. But, at once, it is also suggested that Hölderlin specifically regarded Ancient Greek Tragedy as an “intellectual intuition.” Yet, if we look more closely, are these attributions to Hölderlin consistent? Does not an intellectual intuition of Being qua Being transgress that which can be disclosed for mortal thought in tragic drama and feeling, as the apprehension of limitation forecloses upon, as a nefas, any intuition of the Absolute qua Absolute? In light of such questions, I will seek to explicate, in the following pages, the severe manner in which Hölderlin’s philosophy radically diverges, shifts from that of romanticism. Holderlin’s episteme is radically opened amid his intimate lifeworld, nature, phusis, as is the significance of his thought and its means of expression, with regard to his overt displacement of the Kantian notion of Reason. David Farrell Krell has greatly contributed to the interpretation of Hölderlin as a tragic philosopher in The Tragic Absolute and The Death of Empedocles, and Veronique Foti casts into relief a brilliant image of Holderlin’s philosophy of tragedy in her Epochal Discordance, but there is as yet no contextualized interpretation that casts his poetic philosophy into clear relief, in relation to both Kant, the post-​Kantian debates, and the romantics, not only his mortal thought as such, but also why he regarded it as absolutely necessary to disseminate his philosophy through poetry. Hölderlin said that he was influenced by the Critique of Judgment, but in what specific sense? He was an advocate of “intellectual intuition,” but in what sense, as words rarely have the same meanings between philosophers and often must be defined within the context of their usage.1 In the following pages, I intend to dig deeper and explicate Hölderlin’s philosophy in detail in the context of Kant’s Critique of Judgment—​and in relation to the early German romantics to gather together the traces of this seminal moment in the historicity of mortal thought and creativity and amid a “period” of radical political emancipatory events. It would seem indeed that we have only scratched the surface, an eternal surface perhaps as in Mark Tansy’s painting Robbe-​Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight, a topography upon which an old man on his knees brushes the tiniest fragments that remain, a desolate terrain being gently unveiled in a time of desolation and forgetfulness.

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The unity of philosophy in Kant: Reading Kant backward Just as the French Revolution, the awakening of the Titans, of will and power under the guidance of Promethean fire, could be regarded as simultaneously a liberation and a trauma for France, the rest of Europe, and the World, the “Copernican Revolution” of Kant enacted the intellectual equivalent in Germany, Europe, and in the nations of the imperial United Kingdom. Felix Mendelssohn, a “rationalist,” termed Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason a catastrophe, calling Kant the “all-​ destroyer” (Allzermalmer), while others saw the first Critique, published in its first edition in 1781, as abiding many hopes: a vindication of empiricism, of others of faith, or of moral freedom. Others like Johann Hamann, in his unpublished “Meta-​ Critique of Pure Reason,” an advocate of the unity of opposites, saw in Kant a mystical negative theology, at the center of which was the transcendental imagination. The post-​ Kantian debates, begun in earnest upon Kant’s publication, inevitably distorted the reception of a philosophy that was to have three critical divisions, and was only meant to be a preparatory work for the creation of a “system of reason.” Yet, these debates, led by Christian agitator Jacobi and such Neo-​ Humeans as G.  E. Schulze and Salomon Maimon, provided the occasion for the emergence of Fichte and the onset of the trajectory through which Hölderlin traveled in the articulation of his own tragic philosophy in his poetry, novel, translations, and personal essays. These debates, from our own standpoint, reveal that Kant’s philosophy was radically misunderstood, his notions of experience and object were misconstrued along Humean lines. These debates took place seemingly unaware or unconcerned that Kant had still to publish two additional Critiques in his transcendental project. Yet, they are radically incoherent from the beginning in light of the lack of consideration of the necessary second work, the Critique of Practical Reason, on freedom, which Kant regarded as preeminent in relation to the first Critique, and as its prerequisite ground, from a transcendental standpoint. Kant’s philosophy, despite its vast impact, never had the time for a proper reception and assessment, even before the quest for the Holy Grail of the “system of reason” commenced. In our own era, Kant’s thought lies vivisected upon the examiner’s table, drained of life, relevance, and meaning. In analogy to the division of labor of the political-​economic dominion, and with the expropriated assent from the publicist of the founder of the Academy, Kant is laid out on the table as theoretical philosophy, moral philosophy, and aesthetics. The Neo-​Kantian epistemological and analytic interpretations and subsequent academic treatments have formalized and institutionalized his originally cosmopolitan goals. Kant has not been understood properly for nearly two centuries—​in other words, he has rarely been understood at all. Not even until this day, but this lack of understanding incites our present search.

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Kant laid out a plan for a critical matrix of work that would prepare the enaction of a future “system of reason.” The postulation of such a system was the last transcendental act of Kant, and seduced many young philosophers. One such philosopher was Fichte, and the subsequent contestations, reformulations by Schelling and Hegel. Hölderlin’s contribution of the Heraclitean logos to the conversation is never mentioned by his friends, both of whom remained in institutional settings in their careers as professional philosophers. Another, of course, was the classicist receptions of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, the latter attracted to Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic freedom, and the former to his aesthetic approach to Nature. Yet, Hölderlin, intervening against the subjectivist impasse of the Kantean-​Fichtean systematic, disclosed the mortal truths that would change everything—​beauty as the “unity of opposites,” the harmony of the opposed, and the tragic sublime, the failure of art as what we are, as our mortal character. There is no triumphant soldier to transcend the ultimate double bind of the tragic situation. The artwork of tragic sublimity, as an archetype of the mortal scenario, moira, poiesis, logos, discloses that Fate is the limit of the world of flux, of the “unity of opposites,” the harmonious play of Beauty, under the ultimate limit of the tragic Sublime. In this situation of terror, we are compelled, through our own “forced choice,” by the practical considerations of the Christian meta-​narrative, to create “reason” through an intellectual suppression of the sensus communis, ourselves, our temporal-​ spatial existence, our bodies, or aspects, drives of ourselves, for the sake of “ourselves”—​or, an ideological type of “ourselves” in the creation of “necessary illusions,” an “act” that the next generations inexorably forget, thus allowing the illusions to establish a foothold. In times of the event, of revolution, such a meta-​narrative may be displaced by another mythos. All of this is art, language, poiesis, after all, words expressed, articulated in the names that commemorate an event, of beauty or of horror, these events that reveal to us our timely home in the world of Nature, and our terminal incomprehension of Being—​even as it reminds us with each death that its law remains in force. Hölderlin would regard any philosophy of which Seyn was not at its apogee as merely the idle chatter of the marketplace and the training schools. What though is Seyn, and what does such a sign signify—​if anything at all? Hölderlin writes, in “Mnemosyne,”:  “We are a sign, meaningless.”2 But, perhaps we have arrived at the “question of being”3 too soon, and we must instead seek to come to an adequate and clear understanding of Hölderlin in terms of his contestation of Kant. All we can really do is tell a story. And it begins with Kant. At first our story will seem to lead to infinity, with the romantics, but will, with Hölderlin, dive into the abyss. Hölderlin offers something that is a quite different than the aesthetic idea of Kant, and enacts a transformation of the sacred from an orientation on the monotheistic permanence of the personal soul (and its spiritual slavery

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to an ideological “dogmatics”) to a philosophical intuition of the Tragic, a reawakening to a living topography of the Holy, the Open, as the primordial context of emergence. In such a context, poetry becomes the shelter not only of an orientation to the fundamental experience of mortality, but also of that context in which we are originally awakened to our diverse powers, susceptibilities, named and further specified by the poets. It will be on this basis that we will not only, in the next chapter, begin to comprehend the significance of early German romanticism, of Novalis and the Schlegel brothers, for instance, but also lay the ground for an explication of Hölderlin’s radical critique of Kant and the latter’s many followers. The irony of this philosophical revolution (within the Copernican revolution) is that it is a project, articulated in the manner of poetry, and by a poet, and is oriented to truth, that of the mortal situation of human existence, and not like Kant and his successors (and rationalist predecessors) to either human purposiveness or to moral sublimity. Indeed, it will be on the aesthetic idea of the sublime that the radical severance will occur between the Christo-​Platonic philosophy of Kant and the Greek Pagan philosophy of Hölderlin, exhibited and articulated in his creative affinity to Heraclitus, Empedocles, the Epic poets, the tragic poets, in both lyrical and dramatic forms. That philosophy not only can be (as in the doctrine of reflection of the romantics), but must be interpreted as poetics will be the task of this book, as the articulation of a Dionysian, mortal thought, one that lives attuned to the aorgic. The task outlines a general poetic and musical economy of tragic existence as the prerequisite creative mechane that sustains the restricted economy of the Apollonian organization.

Kant and the philosophy of the “As If” If we are to understand the emergence of Hölderlin’s philosophy, we must have a more precise sketch of the philosophy of Kant. In other words, the transfiguration of Kant’s philosophy requires a prerequisite account of this philosophy in flux as it would have appeared to Hölderlin. As we have noted, the proper distance, as Kant suggests when looking at the Egyptian pyramids, was not permitted or possible during such a revolutionary context and the argumentative reception that received the Critical philosophy, from rationalists, empiricists, skeptics, fanatics, and enthusiasts. Hölderlin, among his other influences, most of whom were already influenced, in one way or another, by Kant, had, as I have suggested, the fate of having begun his philosophical exploration after the entire Critical project was published. It is not clear if Hölderlin ever considered the revisions between the first and second edition of the first Critique, although he did read Kant’s work. Yet, given its impact upon Goethe and Schiller, it is quite likely that Hölderlin would have read the Critique of Judgment before the other two Critiques, and perhaps in a manner in which to counter the centrality of the second

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Critique for Fichte. The Critique of Judgment served to enact the completion of the critical project with the unification of Kant’s critical apparatus, unity in the sense of a transcendental grounding of the function of judgment itself, in both its reflective and determinative typologies. In the following, we will begin with an introduction that lays out the entirety of Kant’s philosophy as it emerged retrospectively, not only as a synoptic view of the interaction between the three Critiques themselves, but also with a more specific focus upon the third Critique as the transcendental ground of the critical philosophy itself in its provision of a genealogy (not a physiological derivation in the sense of Locke or Hume) of the revelation of the faculties, powers, or susceptibilities of human consciousness and self-​consciousness, articulated through precise types of stipulated language. In this way, we could suggest to the student of Kant that he or she should begin their study with the third Critique. Indeed, if the Critique of Judgment is read in the way I am suggesting, the first and second Critiques become appendices of the Critique of Judgment as the primary text, with the Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason as specifications or elaborations of the original philosophy expressed in the third Critique. In this way, I am contesting the metaphor of bridging the gulf between the first and second Critiques, between the phenomena and noumena, and am instead suggesting that, from a transcendental perspective, judgment is the root of the stems of theoretical and practical reason, both of which are derivative and determinative exercises of those powers that have only been “established” in the third Critique. For Kant, it is the peculiar power of judgment that lies at the root of philosophy and it is from there that we must begin. Judgment, and the third Critique therefore, is not an afterthought, but is that which is present in each of the specified fields as the central agency. In this light, the third Critique is seen by Kant as the condition of possibility for the first two Critiques. The Critique of Judgment (a book ostensibly about art, aesthetics, and the teleological language with respect to Nature) recapitulates, in its own way, a transcendental genealogy of the emergence not of the “faculties” themselves, inferences of their existence, not as factual capacities or powers that exist as either actual/​potential or as a substance, but as a power or susceptibility to a thinking that abides within language. Kant lays out what it means to think and the status of the “faculties,” of the words we use in this text, while the other two Critiques simply assumed the positive existence of the “faculties,” sensibility (imagination), understanding, and reason. Yet, it is important to be clear what the status of these words are: not only as such, as these are variously revealed to us in different activities or situations, but especially in terms of the meta-​narrative that establishes a criteria for decision making and the very existence of these “faculties” or powers. This meta-​narrative will seem to compel our assent that thought is as Kant suggests it ought to be, for the sake of human purposiveness and dignity. In this way, a further irony emerges to the extent that a book on aesthetics turns out to be the

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central text of pure philosophy and the one that allowed for the emergence of the romantics, Schelling, Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, and Nietzsche—​and all that follows from these thinkers. The Critique of Judgment begins, in its seminal introduction, with the distinction between determinative and reflective judgments. In this text, which assumes the extantness of the first and second Critiques, determinative judgment (that type of judgment exercised in the latter Critiques) serves as contrasting type of judgment to that of the reflective judgment. Yet, it is clear that determinative judgment would not have been possible without the prerequisite acts of reflective judgment, a power that has the task of revealing the powers of thought, of consciousness. It is only on the basis of what we are that such powers may then be disseminated in other fields, such as theoretical philosophy or practical philosophy. Prior to the third Critique, the facultative character, sensibility, imagination, understanding, and reason were merely provisional, and transcendentally ungrounded. Reading Kant forward or approaching Kant from the perspective of the first two Critiques in succession, one will interpret his meaning from the context of the argumentative contingency of a fluctuating “tradition” or “period.” We use the words “rationalism,” “empiricism,” and rehearse Kant’s waking from his dogmatic slumber by David Hume, and we interpret his first Critique as a partial, though significant, concession to Hume. Yet, that which distinguishes Kant’s philosophical revolution was the maintenance of the authority of reason (brought into unity with matter via the intermediaries of imagination and understanding) and of Copernican subjectivity, with its creative, though limited, reflective consciousness. Given his taking sides in the pantheism controversy, it will be our task to clearly excavate the lowly origins of Kantian reason. In this light, the story that the third Critique is a formal exercise of unifying, bridging the two serious Critiques via the unity of judgment in its various modalities is inadequate for an understanding not only of Kant, but also the sheer illusion of his proposals. We seek instead to comprehend the meaning of the revolution of Copernican subjectivity, revealing its intrinsic Platonism and Christianity. Erring on the side of error, Kant sets forth a philosophy transcendentally “grounded” upon a meta-​ narrative of the triumphant conquest of Nature by Reason, and fashioned as an inquisition of Nature by theoretical philosophy. He moreover grounds theoretical philosophy upon a practical philosophy or morality that is populated by the hypothetical postulations of freedom, the existence of God, and immortality of the rational soul. Both of these in turn are grounded in the tale of triumph in the Analytic of the Sublime. In this way, Kant’s Critical Philosophy is thus revealed to be a hypothetical theology, a “secularizing” philosophy, conceived as the displacement of any positive theology, allowing for the progress of scientific thought, within the horizons of possible experience, and an unconditional morality, as the direct determination of the will by reason alone.

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Kant insists in the third Critique that the propaedeutic to all philosophy is the study of judgment, specifically reflective judgment—​and constantly in distinction from the determinate judgment of science and morality. Reflective judgment is an act that takes place in a social, public context, in the world, and Kant assumes (an act he undertakes frequently in the context of his transcendental argumentation) that all human beings are capable of reflection. Yet, Kant is also concerned with the historical status of our reflective powers and makes frequent references to the historical progress of human thought through the various events or phenomena that awakened or revealed in us our own powers. This is the journey upon which Kant takes us, and we will read his work as an allegory of human cultural evolution, a history of freedom. To some extent, we could see this transcendental genealogy as having a striking similarity with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which begins in sense certainty and ends with the Absolute Idea, conceived as a historical process of the revelation of the divine. This would articulate a dynamic, progressive Spinozism in which the divine is revealed through historical events in which eras take on phenomenal shapes, limited to the horizons of possibility of a particular era or continuously extant practices or traditions. Yet, to see what Kant is doing in the first half of the third Critique, the “Critique of Aesthetical Judgment,” we must resist all-​too-​ hasty identifications and seek to explore the specificity of Kant’s precise method, enacted according to his own criteria. We begin with reflecting human beings, mortals in the world who, prior to concepts, but with language, apprehend, sense, live, and die in the “world.” Such a beginning could be described as an intimate, though unconscious, phenomenology of mortal existence. Kant calls this disposition “subjective” and further states that all reflection is ultimately subjective and contingent—​ though as expected he will show us a means to acquire the dignity of one who behaves as if he can determine desires, objects, and practices. But, we—​ the sensus communis (public mortals) did not know this at first—​the dignity or freedom of human existence must be achieved historically, and thus, with reflection upon events, we conceive of the notion of development or progress. Such notions will arise when humans have built their own world in which they can muster the self-​esteem of the Copernican human being. We are the desiring, wilful being, embodied, ageing, aware of our own mortality. Spinoza, in his Ethics, tells us that being is desire itself. But, for Kant, we are also the reflecting being, something that makes us specifically capable of seeking to comprehend what we are as mortal beings in a situation characterized by earth, sky, water, fire amid a recurrent cyclic process of diurnal/​nocturnal repetitions and seasonal recurrences. Yet, in the midst of this eternal recurrence of the same, one notes that while the variations recur, as in a symphony, the specific participants of each variation are either different or they are new or they are older. We exist in and as the flux of reality, yet, we seem to be linear while all else circular. This is the situation of Nature, of the overwhelming.

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In our allegory, the primeval mortals felt, like ourselves, complex emotions, pondered the significance of death and developed arts of health and pleasure. This would be the epoch of the agreeable, of sensation and cultivated pleasure prior to the concept, one that, as human, had already achieved an intense existential awakening amid its struggles with death, pain, ageing, and feelings of loss, profound insecurity, but also love, joy, and ecstasy. In this way, our original incapacity and susceptibility for pain was tempered by pleasure (which is distinct from merely the alleviation of pain). One could imagine that at this stage, pain and pleasure were the primary attributes of thought—​ and that the agreeable (to follow Kant’s usage) was our first positive idea, linked to pleasure, and was a hint to human beings of their freedom and of their capacity to not only avoid pain, but also to achieve pleasure in a manner attuned with their desires. In this way, to find something agreeable, as an aesthetic idea, entails the active cultivation of pleasure in the human community, which has achieved the power to begin to direct the course of human existence and its relations with a seemingly indifferent world. We will continue with this metaphor of human cultural evolution for the sake of comprehending, analogically, the meaning of Kant’s philosophy, and interpret the four aesthetic ideas as stages in the development of human thought. What is clear is that we began in self-​doubt and fear—​in terror and pain at the world around us, a point Kant makes in his discussion of the sublime. It is perhaps death and the decomposition of the body of the beloved that gave rise to the first thought—​a painful astonishment echoed hundreds of thousands of years later by Aristotle’s passionless, and inverted version of the question “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” The inversion of the originary version of astonishment was not about being, but about nothing—​their question:  why is there nothing, death, for mortals, when there is recurrence of the day from night, of the seasons of the year, for Nature (phusis); in the winter the tree appears dead, but with the spring, the tree seems to come back to life, the sap begins to run again and it rejuvenates under the light of the sun. Life is held in suspension, reborn with the only apparent death of winter, of the apparent death of the sun with each evening and night. We reflect upon this nothingness and its immanence and inevitability and begin to speak of mortals amid an overwhelming world of myriad powers, some friendly to the mortals, but others hostile. We begin to sense an order of things, events, a regularity upon which the community may depend, and with the growth of the powers of the community to further direct the course of the organizational pattern in relation to the aorgic flux, which, in its seeming indifference, metes out its gifts and poisons with the same hand. Such an acute awareness of an order or pattern to the mortal predicament reveals another, the next aesthetic idea in, continuing our historical metaphor, the epoch of Beauty. Beauty concerns for Kant an order or configuration of relations that is exhibited by an existent, and is indicated by the word “beautiful.” This is

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beautiful for the community and for the individual, as the sensus communis is the site of homogeneity. Hölderlin maintained the notion of the beautiful, as he expresses it in his novel Hyperion, is that of the logos, the relation of the One and Many, and the unity of opposites—​the harmony of Heraclitus and the Love and Strife of Empedocles. Kant describes the beautiful as that which displays purposiveness for the human community (the “subject”) and is composed, as with Plato, by a configuration that activates our powers of thought. The aesthetic idea of Beauty reveals, for Kant, according to his transcendental procedure of reflection, the harmonious play of the “faculties” or powers of imagination and understanding. In other words, in addition to sensation and imagination, an additional susceptibility is revealed and is articulated as the understanding. That which is beautiful is not merely agreeable as with the sensation of pleasure, but also reveals for our gaze a purposiveness that is suited to the sustained existence of the human community. Such a beautiful configuration would be an organization that, by assuring our reproductive existence, provides the human with self-​confidence that the world is compatible, indefinitely, with fulfilling its desires. In light of our radical historicity, moreover, these latter desires have broadened to include not only physical pleasure (health and joy) and the skill or arts to avoid or channel pain, but also the existential satisfaction that one feels with the apprehension and the comprehension of the beautiful. We could say that there is no preestablished harmony, but one that is established by the revelation of our susceptibility to comprehend that existence is fit for our purposes. Such a thoughtful appreciation of the beautiful, of the purposive, especially in Nature, would be for Kant an inherent susceptibility of human consciousness, but one that must be awakened in reflection as a feeling of pleasure in the purposiveness, the compatibility of the world with our desires not only to comprehend our situation, but also to understand that human existence undergoes the same spiralic process as the rest of nature. Individual death becomes one aspect of a greater whole, of the continuation of the human community as an organization that is capable of anticipating and subduing challenges. In the epoch of the beautiful, we learn to accept and anticipate necessities that become or will become manifest according to the order of Fate. We acquiesce to and comprehend our situation, and upon reflection, find it to be beautiful. At this point in our narrative, our human community has unveiled many of its powers, its susceptibilities in the context of the culturally evolving orientation of its own organization, its ethos, or way of life, its logos, its language and thought, and in its mythos that consists of the stories or narratives that shelter the revealed susceptibilities in oral transmission, and later written dissemination, its powers, in the midst of the storm of its primordial historicity. Yet, despite the relative stability and durability of the community—​the seeming beauty of a world that seems amenable to human existence—​there are events and situations, such as disease, war, or natural/​cosmic disasters that once again, upon reflection, incite us to see

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the specific predicament or the world itself as counter-​purposive to human desires, whether of a sensual, existential, or intellectual character. That which incites terror, threatens utter annihilation, provokes incomprehension—​ disorientation with the seemingly harmonious play of opposites, of an orderly One and Many, beckons, according to our metaphor, the epoch of the Sublime, an aesthetic idea, arising from reflection upon the facelessness of that which is counter to our purposes and which, given the facticity of mortal existence, threatens us with utter humiliation and extinction in the wake of our helplessness. Yet, the aesthetic idea of the sublime is not tragic for Kant, but is a feeling of triumph and overwhelming power of the human community, and by deduction, the power of each member of the community. Indeed, it is not that which threatens which is sublime—​sublimity is a feeling of pleasure in our dignity and power in the face of a threat that, as another susceptibility is revealed, is miniscule in the face of our power of Reason. If the thoughtful apprehension of Beauty as purposiveness is grounded transcendentally, through reflection, upon the harmonious play of the imagination and understanding, the sublime is transcendentally deduced as, Kant asserts, a conflict between the “faculties” or powers of imagination and reason. Kant, moreover, invokes the soldier as an image of a victorious warrior against the threat to the community, as an image of the sublime in courage and dignity of the human being in the face of, for instance, death or the tragic abyss in which we seem to find ourselves. Kant, assuming our victory, writes ironically that Beauty is more important than the Sublime, which would seem to be the lynchpin of his entire “argument.” The sublime, as a feeling, reveals the susceptibility of Reason, as a power that confirms our dignity, and with its crucial relation with the fourth aesthetic idea of the Good and the Moral Law, guarantees our freedom, immortality, and the existence of God. Kant’s philosophy is based upon a belief in a reason that assures his ideological desires. Yet, when we look more closely at the text, we find a different, more complicated and ambiguous story with regard to the alleged “grounding” of reason. Kant, in the “Analytic of the Sublime,” according to his usual manner, divides his investigation of the Sublime into two parts, the mathematical and the dynamic, the former dealing with quantity and quality, and the latter dealing with relation and modality—​according to the schema laid down originally in the “Table of Pure Concepts of the Understanding” in the first Critique. In the former division, Kant lays out a scenario in which the imagination seeks to comprehend that which is great, in quantity and quality, but, as Kant suggests, it “breaks down,” never achieving its own ideal of totality. The imagination fails to comprehend the absolutely great, and it is in this failure that there is revealed the susceptibility of reason, which comprehends in itself the notion of the totality, of the infinite, without the need for measurement or description. Yet, we cannot assume that this reason was simply there, intact, just waiting to be discovered. Indeed, Kant describes what could be called a

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self-​suppression, or, in his words, self-​sacrifice of the imagination, an act by the imagination upon itself, which reveals, constructs, the susceptibility to reason. The imagination, Kant reveals, enacts violence against itself, in, for instance, removing the time condition, thus allowing for synchronic, spatial apprehension. By then removing the space condition, in this emptiness, nothingness, reason is postulated as a power, unconstrained by imagination, which is free to comprehend infinity as an idea of its own, to be discharged in the theoretical domain and, in the practical domain, as the Wille.4 Reason is given not only the authority to directly determine the individual will as Wilkur and to legislate the moral law as practical reason for the community, it may also create regulative ideas, such as that of an organic nature, which then can become a field for specification (theoretical science).

Transitions It is thus on the basis of this transcendental genealogy of the aesthetic ideas of reflective judgment that we have given an account of the emergence of the faculties, and this is why the third Critique, as explicating the transcendental conditions of possibility for the unity of theoretical and practical reason, is not a bridge, but is instead a plane of revelation of the susceptibilities of human consciousness, in a manner that resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of concept creation, upon the plane of thought.5 It is the decisive revelation of reason in the sublime that allows for the intrinsic unity of Kant’s philosophy to be disclosed, the possibility of which being the self-​ sacrifice of the imagination, of time, space, and of beauty as the play of understanding and imagination, in order to forge a reason that provides for the conditions for theoretical and practical philosophy in its demand for regulative principles (transcendental judgments) for empirical science (of phenomenon, appearances) and in its orientation to the Good, in the orchestration of the moral regulation of the community from the perspective of the liberated (non-​mortal) reason. As alluded earlier, we will commence a sustained and fundamental criticism of Kant in Chapter three, yet, it is vital to point out that Kant is not only laying out the conditions (aesthetic ideas) for the revelation of the powers of consciousness (a phenomenology), but he is, with respect to his Platonic-​monotheistic meta-​narrative, laying out a very specific picture of human existence that seems more concerned with how Kant thinks the world ought to be than it is in its truth—​illusions for the sake of human subjective confidence and dignity (personality), and thus for hedonistic and narcissistic intentions. Kant’s assertion of authority of reason is not orientated to the truth of our tragic predicament. He instead offers us a Spinozian “order of encounters”6 that allows us to “assume,” “presuppose,” for the sake of a feeling, an attitude, that the character of the world is that which, as Rousseau said, we so keenly desire, despite the open truth of the

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situation, of the Real, in Lacan’s sense. From this perspective, Kant is a monotheistic theologian in denial—​one who has not only recoiled in the face of the abyss, but has dressed up his falsification, suppression of the truth, with necessary illusions and comfortable lies for the sake of a pious feeling. The authentic meaning of Copernican man is revealed in his own susceptibility to violence against himself to produce an intense capacity for redemptive illusion. Art as the symbol of morality, moral freedom—​a political, theological, and ontological situation—​is an art that is in the service not only of the state, religion, but also civil society as we do not exist as mere homogeneity but as heterogeneity amid our condition of “chaotic universality.”7 Yet, the spirit or state of freedom that, giving ear to the other two of Kant’s Critiques, which we temporally, heuristically, sequestered as Appendices, is operative as the idea of freedom, especially as articulated in the second Critique, is in its Kantian sense that of the triumph of reason over nature. This triumph of reflective judgment is narrated as the method of freedom of an emancipated reason. We will see the fruits of this emancipation in the next chapter, in which we will consider the early German romantics, whom we should recall, while greatly elaborating various aspects or imagined possibilities, susceptibilities in the Kantian text, and dialogical nexus surrounding him, did not, in the end, ever question his rationalist solution to the Sublime. In this light, far from being irrationalists as some would have it, the romantics remained on rational grounds with respect to their allusions to feelings, in the manner in which Kant speaks of feelings. The work of the early romantics—​including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (and whether Kantian or Spinozian)—​betrays a decided decision in favour of an aesthetic Reason, conceived either in the sense of freedom or as morality, as we will see in the next chapter. Our Kantian genealogy of the emergent faculties or powers, and their subsequent application as determinative judgment, has shown that the imagination is at the center of judgment—​as in Schematism (Transcendental Judgment) in the Critique of Pure Reason, negatively and tacitly in the Critique of Practical Reason. The methodology of the judgment of reflection is prior to the concept (is not determinative, within a disclosed field). It begins with the particular and seeks a name, an idea, which is the creation of reflection as an act of imagination, of poetics. The first two Critiques are transcendentally grounded in the Critique of Judgment, not only in terms of manifestation, via poetics, of reason itself, but also as the creative, poetic power per se, imagination (Einbildungkraft), which, in terms of practical morality or freedom, is harnessed for the ends of Copernican reason. Kant’s diverse narratives upon the jurisdictions of reason are therefore “grounded” in his own meta-​narrative of triumphant reason, which is the answer to his own self-​articulated question, one asked according to his own rules and criteria of purposiveness: the noumenal is necessary as there

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must be postulates of a reality, which heuristically, poetically establish the possibility, the Idea, of our freedom and immortality, of a soul, which, as with its Reason’s own regulative idea or principle of substance, persists eternally amid the succession of its attributes. Indeed, as we have seen, the myriad succession, the abyss, which provoked the revelation of the susceptibility of Reason in the sublime, was not a feeling of terror, but, for Kant, of a sublime confidence of one’s own power, together with the dignity and self-​ esteem that complements this event. The revealed triumph of Reason over Nature articulates not merely the possibility, but also the necessity of the comprehension and transformation of Nature, for the sake of rational purposiveness, according to the ends of the sensus communis.

CHAPTER TWO

Transcendental poetics and the doctrine of reflection Upon the topography of the previous exploration of reflective judgment, of the genealogy of imagination, understanding and reason in the Critique of Judgment, I will examine the specifically poetic character (the most free of the arts) of aesthetic ideas as indices for a transcendental poetics, operative throughout Kant’s Critical Project. Such a transcendental poetics cleared the path for the emergence of early German romanticism, exemplified in this chapter in the works of the poet-​philosophers Novalis, Hymns to the Night (1800), and Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments (1971, 1799),1 described by Walter Benjamin as a reflective poetics, one that is rooted in the reflective judgment of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

We are reflecting beings, embodied and fated to death. We are mortals and our predicament is mortality. Yet, that may only be, as Kant alludes and Schlegel affirms, the way life appears as a phenomenon. The early German romantics, Hölderlin, the German Idealists—​these all-​too-​many analytical labels—​emerged in a context in which Kant was already a classic thinker (though still alive), controversial though he was (as the censor banned his books for political reasons). In the Critique of Judgment, Kant explicated and enacted the significance of poetics in the philosophical interpretation and expression of existence. As poetry was, in this era, the preeminent art, and one regarded as the most free, the third Critique is not only (or not even) a treatise on aesthetics, but a discourse on poetics and mortality, and the diverse revelation of our powers and of our practices relating to poetics

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and art more generally as the phenomenal, linguistic dwelling and womb of not just art, but—​after the poet lays out that which remains—​of theoretical and practical philosophy. Poetry, in this paradigm, is the synthetic and creative projection of feelings, with the tags of Beauty, Sublime, Good, articulated according to poetic, reflective methodology, and simultaneously “legislated” by a meta-​narrative (monotheism, Zoroastrianism) that “love should triumph over hate (death),” that the soul triumphs over nature in its freedom—​indeed this very triumph is “proof” of its freedom (in a subjective and aesthetic sense). For, we do not deny that Kant’s narrative is “reasonable”—​yet his meta-​narrative (Christianity), the criteria by which he makes his decisions—​is an ideologically distinct typology of thought that structures and anticipates the very decisions that are to be made in his articulation. Kant regards himself as free to simply assert the necessity of his Ideas, without which what he wants would not be possible. Moreover, he insists, for the sake of the very possibility of knowledge and morality, that we follow him in the mere application of his philosophy for all times. Given his assertions of freedom and his reflective methodology at the most intimate levels of human existence, it is difficult not to claim that Kant had, as with Socrates, his own irony. Just as with Spinoza, with his “God, or Nature”2 there remains an ambiguity in Kant’s thought with respect to freedom—​is it merely morality in the conventional sense, or is it freedom in an existential sense? It would seem that with the free application of “fundamental heuristic thinking” in all domains of his philosophy—​only properly revealed in the third Critique—​that we can find the real death of rationalism as the play of merely dogmatic concepts amid a dogmatic world. Susceptibilities are revealed amid the phenomenal world as the result of our own experience and agency—​that which Kant attributed to our noumenal selves and the causality that is peculiar to free beings. Despite the controversies and criticism that characterized the various receptions of Transcendental Philosophy, it is obvious that Kant’s doctrine of freedom struck a broad chord in his revolutionary generation, the age of criticism, as Kant articulated in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”3 Goethe, Schiller, the early German and British romantics—​Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley—​were all devotees of the Critical Philosophy, as were the academic philosophers in Germany—​ Karl Leonhard Reinold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. There emerged an immediate and sustained consensus that a new paradigm had been achieved, and that there was need of not only the enactment of the potentialities of the new paradigm, but also to formulate a “system of reason,” a demand made by Kant in the first Critique. There were various attempts to articulate an explicitly critical system or systematic integration of the various jurisdictions of reason in the critical project and its relationship to our other “faculties” or powers within the domain of conscious embodied and creative life. Of course, we must not forget those others, as was the case with Niethammer, Jacobi, Hölderlin, and Schlegel, who were contemporaneously claiming, against Reinhold and

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Fichte, that there is neither a unitary “foundation” at all, nor need there be. Such abysmal thoughts were pivotal for the emergence of German Idealism and must be considered integral participants of this tradition. With these previous considerations, I have sought to highlight the rapid acquiescence of diverse artists and philosophers to a novel paradigm with Kant at it center. Our concern in the following will be to disclose specific examples of the impact of Kantian philosophy in its critical potential upon his contemporaries and successors whose topos of activity became that of the “Copernican Revolution.”

Kant and the trajectory of the romantic revolution During the ten years of silence in which Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, the American Revolutionary War began, one inspired by the philosophical ideas of John Locke and Thomas Paine. Kant’s own idea of freedom was in accord with the republican ideals of self-​governance of the incipient United States, even though his own political preference was constitutional monarchy. Yet, only one year after his Critique of Practical Reason in 1788 (hardly a revolutionary pamphlet in appearance), the truth event of the French Revolution inaugurated a jubilant and tragic period of history in which an abjectly decadent and despotic world was confronted by the power and resistance of the republican hope for freedom, equality, and community. The republican revolution seemed already assured of its possibility by the already revolutionary character of the age, one of political and economic transformation, revolutionary success in America, but also by the power of the new ideas that were being articulated by those who participated in this historical moment. These poetic-​ philosophical ideas and ideals were revealed (Kantian critical freedom, criticism, dynamic, progressive Spinozism) in the form of a systematic or an a-​systematic context of a historical human existence, in the manner of the tradition of philosophical treatises, but also, given the intellectual license of the Kantian aesthetic philosophy of existence, in works of literature, the novel, lyric poetry, music, and works of art in a movement in which genres collapsed or merged, novel genres were developed, in which poetry and philosophy spoke the same message of the ideals of freedom, of agency, from self-​governance amid the world of the light4 to the total art work of Wagner’s operas. As we have intimated, in the emergence of a transcendental poetics in the work of Kant, the poetic imagination was put into the service of Freedom, the Beautiful, and the Good in the “Dialectic of Aesthetical Judgment” of the third Critique. Freedom, in the sense of reason, necessitated that art be put in the service of the moral enlightenment of the sensus communis. Not

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only would art and aesthetics be written into philosophical systems, such as with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but it would also serve the ends of the practical, art as education. In such genres as poetry, aphorism, and the novel, a composition serves as a complex aesthetic idea or allegory of a specific reflective operation, such as in the sublime or the beautiful. Others, such as Novalis and Schlegel took the new reflective or transcen­ dental poetics to their logical conclusion, enacting works of philosophy as poetry, aphorism, novels, and dialogues, or combinations thereof, and the fragment. This shift to an explicitly philosophical poetics (and to Greek models) will also be the case with regard to the work of Hölderlin, but in his work, the significance of poetics is transfigured in its intrinsic philosophical meaning. In the wake of his revolutionary work upon the tragic thought of the early Greek thinkers, such as Heraclitus and Empedocles, the tragic dramatists and poets, most notably Sophocles and Pindar, respectively, Hölderlin—​as Walter Benjamin leaves as a pregnant invocation in a note to his work, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”—​is something quite distinct from Novalis and Schlegel, a revolutionary difference that we will explore in the next chapter. In this chapter, we will explore the early romantic response to the New World of permanent revolution, infinite progress, in Novalis and Schlegel, who created a transcendental poetics of beauty and, conceived within the bounds of the Kantian-​Spinozian paradigm and the coincident literature, was exemplified by the “romantic confusion” of genre and the creation of new genres, such as the intentional fragment. It is significant that the meaning of “Art” in the eighteenth century was foremost concerned with poetry—​that poetry was the highest art, and that poets were in tune with “Reality.” That which is pivotal to early romanticism is the conflict between the apparent world of succession and death and the real world of eternal life. Novalis, Schlegel, as well as being stimulated by the Kantian idea of Freedom, were also devotees of the Platonic Idea of Beauty. Indeed, such was the characteristic response of the early German romantics to the problems and questions surrounding Fichtean philosophy in the wake of persistent Neo-​Humean criticism. Platonism, Spinozism, already subsumed within the philosophy of Kant, provided, in the thoughts of the romantics, a complex notion of objectivity, of appearance, as Nature, and as Ideas of Reason that demonstrate our access to the infinite, and indeed, for Novalis and Schlegel our destiny as beings who are immortal. Novalis and Schlegel sought to express the power of the soul in its creative self-​reflection and spiritual development. In contrast to temporality, spatiality, and the concepts of the understanding, reason is free, it has, as the Good Soldier ought, conquered Nature, a field laid out as the articulation of the poetic inferences of Nature itself, organicity and teleology, transcendentally grounded in the faculties of understanding and reason, with imagination as the power of manifestation. On the basis of this grounding, the romantics sought a romanticization of Nature, for the sake of the creating a world that had at its center the

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freedom of reason, triumphant, in the battle recorded by the poet Kant in his narrative of the sublime. The romantics augment this narrative of emancipation with the free play of words, which are mutable just as the flux of the abyss of existence. We are free to play in this sense, to stylize the fragmentary, as Kant incites his readers to create allegories of the Good. We are also free from all this apparent world, as the romantics contend, even as our imagination strains to comprehend we are already immortal, as with the god, even though the specific Spinozian casing gives us only a fragment. We are always in the middle. As mortal, we are forbidden access to the things themselves, but as noumenal beings, as souls or spirits, we have the power to come immediately into touch with the Absolute or with noumenal beings, such as in the practice of necromancy. Novalis and Schlegel are clear examples of the reflective poetic potential laid out in Kant in relation to his philosophy—​as if his thought itself provoked a literature that was attuned with his conception of morality as freedom, and in the case of the romantics, of individual freedom and the significance of the moment and its aspects. Beyond the now categorical aesthetic ideas, there is an elaboration of the various possibilities of these ideas. Moreover, given the context of freedom and creativity outlined by Kant (and others before and after him) art works themselves are each examples of the aesthetic ideas, conjurations of the various possibilities of thought. Aesthetic ideas are revealed amid the temporal conflict of existence, articulated in works of poetic art, conceived in its broadest sense. It is in this sense that poetry is philosophy—​primordial philosophy, creative thought itself—​as it articulates our repeated astonishments amid the revolutions of our cultures, as with each threat that would throw us into disorientation and destruction, a new power is revealed to and for us as redemption, a susceptibility, a saving power, an aspect of our being that was previously concealed, but is now in the burning Apollonian light. The philosophy of the “As If” suggests, in its integral message, for the romantics, an infinite and indefinite awakening also to the powers of the dark, of the Night, of death and “spirit.”

Novalis—​Hymns to the Night The theme for the composition of Hymns to the Night was, as with many poets of this time—​ a time of revolution, war, death from disease, the transformation of the state and the political-​social economy—​of death, of mortality and the pain, though eclipsed by the infinite, which was inextricably linked with the pleasure of love, and of Novalis’ reunion with his deceased love. Novalis intimates his world, the texture of his spiritual dwelling: Infinite and mysterious, Thrills through us a sweet trembling—​ As if from far there echoed thus

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A sigh, our grief resembling. Our loved ones yearn as well as we, And sent to us this longing breeze.5 She is no longer in the light, amid the phenomena, but as spirit in the noumenal, sends “this longing breeze,” as she yearns for him from beyond the grave, and in which there is magical contact. Through his magical poetics, Novalis works to displace the world of temporal existence, the double bind of tragedy with a new possibility. For Novalis, mortal existence, the world of the light and meaningless industry, remains a veil upon the true world of the Night, a symbol that intimates the unity and eternity of the true world. Poetry is the wand of a magical idealism through which Novalis believed he communicated with his eternal beloved. Beyond intimations of his poetic comportment and the traces of his life and death, we need not travel. The specific occasion for the Hymns to the Night was the death of Sophie, his very young wife, from tuberculosis, a disease that would take Novalis two years later. Yet, his response to her death could not be considered tragic, nor was her death regarded by him as a tragedy, since he was assured that he and the rest of humanity are spared, due to our freedom, from the utter annihilation of death. Indeed, one may regard Novalis’ Hymns to the Night as a poetic articulation of Kant’s doctrine of the Sublime, a reflective poetics that articulates the aesthetic idea of the sublimity of Reason in the face of the abyss. Such a poetic treatment of the sublime, in its orientation to the Moral Law (the Holy) and its cultivation of longing for the Good can be regarded as an aesthetic narration of an idea, and as an artwork would be an example of art that has as its meaning not only the spiritual purposiveness of nature, but moreover the illusory status of the phenomenal world, the world of Light. In the Hymns to the Night, the poetic voice inhabits the Day, the world of temporal, Apollonian Light, and is initially enamored of the world of Light. Yet, he soon came to know and yearn for the mysteries of the Night. Novalis writes: How poor and childish a thing seems to me now the Light—​how joyous and welcome the departure of the day—​because the Night turns away from thee thy servants, you now strew in the gulfs of space those flashing globes, to proclaim thy omnipotence.6 And, Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-​visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love’s hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.—​Endless is the duration of sleep.7

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In this complex poetics, Novalis is associating the Light, Day, the burning sun, unholy activity, despotism, the finitude of Light, of the individuated objects of the phenomenal world over and against that of the Night, the world of darkness, of indistinction, communion, of “love’s hidden sacrifice,” of a fire that burns eternally: a world of imagination, desire, and fantasy. In his poetic elaboration of the subjective Kantian aesthetics, Novalis declares Love to be the Daughter of Night and the true light. Novalis, in his poem “Longing for Death,” which we have already quoted, speaks of death as desirable, a chance to join the beloved, and not to be feared as death “dashes our chains apart,” returns us to “Jesus” and “lays us upon the Father’s lap.” Death frees us from the world of Light, Nature, tragic limitation. With the extinguishing of the Light, the immortal soul returns home to an infinite God. Hymns to the Night is an ostensibly Orphic recapitulation of the theogony of the Gods in which Night arises first from Chaos and is the “subduer of Gods and Men,” and the birth of Love. Novalis, however, was not a Pagan, but a Christian intimating the death of the gods by the oldest, Night, who will extinguish the temporal world of Day, and whose coming is that which is the “New.” Novalis reiterates the Kantian triumph of Freedom over Necessity, the Rational Soul over Nature, Christianity over Paganism. In his “Analytic of the Sublime,” Kant has given us license, within the context of the sensus communis to create, cultivate the conditions for genius as we are freely reflective and creative beings. The power of reflective judgment, as pointed out by Benjamin in his essay on the German romantics, becomes, in this way, the mode of operation of the romantic poets in the elaboration of a “progressive universal poetry.”8 The powers of our existence, as susceptibilities revealed in primordial events, such as those indicated in the aesthetic ideas of beauty or the sublime, not only (if we accept Kant’s presentation, together with its Christian meta-​ narrative of the soul), establishes the Idea of Freedom of the noumenal self, which has legitimate agency in the phenomenal world, but also establishes the idea of the noumenal itself, of autonomy, immortality, and the existence of God—​and the agency that erupts with noumenal causality. Such self-​assertion of reason by thinkers and poets of the sensus communis establishes the basis for the “dignity” of human existence, but also specifies the configuration and conditions of possibility for the fulfilment of this “normative” status of human existence within Nature. With this dignity, the sensus communis is authorized to demand that Nature fulfil its desires. Hence, in this light, there is neither any reason to fear death nor to hasten it (unless one seeks to embrace the beloved in the Night), but instead, to allow the noumenal eternity in which we also exist (or more truly, according to the narrative, where we only exist) to infect the phenomenal world through our creative agency. In this way, it is simple to understand the “magical” or “thaumaturgic”9 idealism of Novalis—​an idea and practice deduced from the Kantian idea of freedom, in relation to the critical metaphysics of a creative community, a heuristic poetics oriented to

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subjective purposiveness. Novalis writes, as an indication of his conception of creative possibility: Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.10

Friedich Schlegel—​Lucinde and Fragments Fragments, Ideas, Aphorisms—​Schlegel’s multi-​genre “romantic confusion” influenced by Plato and French aphorists and the Bible, stylistic precedents for the work of Nietzsche—​these are the eccentric tropes of his endeavors. Each idea is an expression of the ultimate double bind, of mortal conflict, events that reveal, as Kant disclosed, our powers, susceptibilities. We are in the middle, amid the “unity of opposites,” the logos and mythos of the Limited and the Unlimited, the Love and Strife of mortal existence. Schlegel describes his method of orientation in the wake of the discussion of post-​ Kantian systematics in his era. Resonating with Niethammer, and other anti-​ foundationalists, Schlegel writes: Philosophy must have at its basis not only an alternating proof [Wechselbeweis] but also an alternating concept [Wechselbegriff]. In the case of every concept, as in the case of every proof, one can in turn ask for a concept and a proof of the same. For this reason, philosophy, like an epic poem, must start in the middle, and it is impossible to pursue philosophy piece by piece starting from a first piece which is grounded and explained completely in and through itself. It is a whole, and thus the path to recognizing it is no straight line but a circle.11 As we are born into “the middle,” we do not know the end of the beginning. Schlegel sought to annunciate this situation of the middle, of mortality, of ceaseless fragmentation—​he sought to mirror the temporal world, but through his revelations, to change the world; yet, not through the magic of Novalis, in his conjuration of his beloved, his necromancy of Love amid the Night, but through political, cultural transgression, alternative construction, dissemination—​seeking to incite the longing and action toward the Ideal, of a remembrance that provokes the realization that the future is undecided, in the hands of mortals. The path toward the Ideal in any seemingly fragmentary life is embedded in the conflicts of succession, in “the middle,” and, as an infinite project that can never be completed in a single life. This is irony, and it brings us face to face with the Kantian sublime. The irony of the irony is that Kant, beginning from critical premises, and in tow with the philosophies and lexicons of the day (rationalism, empiricism, non-​foundationalism, etc.), gives, with his assertion of reason, licence to the construction of a subjectivist metaphysics, one grounded upon nothing more than poetic words that emerge as articulations, names, and relations, of inferences amid existential events—​aesthetic ideas, regulative

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ideas directly lead to the radical freedom of poesy, of interpretation, exploration, creation—​yet, just as the seasons change, words, seeds, born out the instant, mystify the reader who thinks that what he or she is reading is actually “true,” settled. The penny has dropped in the third Critique, although the effort is maintained to seek some semblance of necessity and universality, contingent and subjective though it be—​for at the end the day, the flagrant irony of Kant is not only that given to Schlegel, of the infinite (and therefore illusory) struggle, but also the higher utilitarianism and hedonism at work in his writings—​regardless of his claims to the a priori status of his concepts, ideas, faculties, and architectonic. All of these ideas and regulative principles are merely heuristic, examples and expressions of logos (language), oriented according to the criteria of an operative meta-​narrative, or the mythos of the immortality of the soul. Aesthetic ideas, allegories, are, in this case, legitimized by a criterion that asserts their necessity and universality due to their role in the orchestration of a unity of feeling, a rational faith, in the sensus communis amid the flux of mortality. Lucinde (together with Schlegel’s essay “On the Incomprehensible”) expresses and symbolizes in the fragment the intimate conditions and fulfilment of Life, of the mortal. As with our exploration of the progressive susceptibilities discovered amid various aesthetic (mortal) events in the “progression” of human existence, we witness, in Schlegel’s novel, the temporal reality of Julius, the narrator, in which various truths are revealed to him throughout his apprenticeship in existence, and which lead him to reflect that he, as a lover, as one who desires, must have a beloved, and must procreate, etcetera. The necessity, for Schlegel, is that we must acquiesce to Nature itself as plants, a quip that receives scorn from Nietzsche. The plant is passive, as the flowers in the meadow of which Jesus speaks, and in this vein, Schlegel contrasts the divine work of Nature to the falsity of human endeavor, the futile activity of the Light. Schlegel celebrates Nature as the creation of divinity, as did Wordsworth, and witnessed it, as the creation/​ self-​creation of the divine, as that toward which we must seek to progress—​ from finitude toward the infinite, enacting the creative Wechselbegriff, undertaking the exploration that will reveal further susceptibilities of our existence in a progressive trajectory toward the eternal. While there are distinctions from Novalis in the specifics of the narrative of redemption, of longing for the eternal, both remain in the ultimately Platonic/​Christian, Kantian/​Spinozian context of the theological and spiritual notion of the infinite or the eternal. That which is developing here is the mortal world as the fragment for the progressive rumination of reality, through history, as the temporal topography of human existence, as the unity of opposites, as the tragic. Yet, such romantic longing seeks to break the tragic coil of Fate with the laughter of the new—​even if such a project is merely ironic, as Kant suggests. An ironic adherence to an eternal project sets not upon a ground, but hovers

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over an abyss—​an abyss that symbolizes the perversity of a human existence not attuned to the eternal. In this way, Schlegel characterizes all literature, except the tragedians of Greece, as romantic as he rejects tragedy as a perversity that lies in ruins, just as its mortal art would have it. The romantics, including the English Coleridge and Wordsworth, were each and all oriented by a notion of eternity, or infinity. From this perspective, that of mortality and its longing for the eternal, amid the abyss of temporality, it hardly matters if the scenario is that of Kant or Spinoza, or any of the variations or syntheses therefrom. That which is vital is the notion of the negative, fragmentary revelation of the divine, as with Gottfried Leibniz’s monad, amid a shattered mortality and the presumption that such a notion, a poetics of desire, warrants an ontological constitution for human existence that was grounded in a communion, union, with the divine. Such a state of affairs would suspend the ultimate reality of mortality, permitting the mortal to be liberated from the tragic, and to transcend the fragment, toward the divinity of Nature, of the Night, of the invisible, unseen, the Eternal. Lucinde is a romantic novel of allegories and one which make play (out of poetic malice and revenge) of the “Modern” and modern life (in all of its barbaric ugliness) as an allegory for its own emptiness. Indeed, this juxtaposition, also found in Hölderlin, reveals not only the radical discordance and diremption of historical existence, but also to plumb the depths of the abyss to make manifest a deeper Reality. Lucinde is the public revelation of the romantic love of Julius for Lucinde, of the “I and Thou” and of his vast journey to this state of bliss. The journey begins in the rat race of the modern middle, and of successive encounters with various girls and women, which lead him toward a search for the truth of human nature. The primary role played in this novel by woman is due to her kinship, for Schlegel, with creativity of Nature, Love, Beauty, fertility. Love is an allegory for the exploration of the concrete longing of the mortal being, two together, for the eternal. The novel provoked a scandal (the same year as Fichte’s dismissal for “Atheism”), criticized for its “pornography,” obscenity, etcetera. Indeed, it is evident that the work has a unique style, abounds with carnality and lust, fantasy, intoxication, passion, and seduction (and of course, elements of this novel would still be scandalous). Yet, the scandal itself reveals that the novel was misunderstood, or as Nietzsche would perhaps say, read poorly. It is clear that this litany of the body and indeed of the modern counter-​ culture and underground is meant, not only as wit, but also as irony. We are mortal beings, in which abides “spiritual fire,” and we blunder through life and its pleasures and pains, joys, and sorrows—​and just as in Kant’s aesthetic reflection, we progress to an ever greater awareness of our own powers of creativity in the context of the community, but specifically in intimate relations of the lover with the beloved. In a manner similar to Goldmond in Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmond, Julian travels from one woman to another, each encounter revealing myriad aspects of human

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nature and mortal existence. Truth is not an individual woman, but all women, Nature herself, and the journey undertaken by Julian, often deemed autobiographical (but perhaps more an allegory of the age itself), is the story of his discovery of his beloved as a remembrance, as their love always is eternal in the infinite. Indeed, in this way, each of our lives, as fragments, and the world itself, is an allegory for the divine and the forgetfulness, our ensnarement in the Apollonian world of labor and pain, a temporal mask, which severs us from the divine. Schlegel, through the eyes of Julius, describes Lucinde, the destination of his many travels and his beloved: She also belonged to that part of mankind that doesn’t inhabit the ordinary world but rather a world that it conceives and creates for itself. Only whatever she loved and respected in her heart had any true reality for her; everything else was spurious: and she knew what was valuable. Also she had renounced all ties and social rules daringly and decisively and lived a completely free and independent life.12 Schlegel describes the transformation of his perspective and art in the wake of his union with Lucinde in their mutual love, confessing that their Platonic love, their sober, yet, sensual and passionate union, has enhanced his artistic powers, severed from the “bacchantic frenzy,” his life has itself become a work of art. Schlegel describes Julius’ epiphany: A light entered his soul: he saw and surveyed all the parts of his life and the structure of the whole clearly and truly because he stood at its center. He felt that he would never lose this unity; the mystery of his life had been resolved and he had found the Word. It seemed to him that everything in his life had been predestined and created since the beginning of time so that he would find the answer in love, in the love for which with youthful incomprehension he had considered himself too clumsy.13 In light of his new revelation of romantic love between himself and Lucinde, Julius amplifies Diotima’s characterization of Love from a mere “longing for eternity” to a “holy enjoyment,” thus, giving to romantic love the sensuality of a sacred union. He writes, “It is not merely a mixture, a transition from mortal to immortal: rather it is the total union of both.”14 On the basis of his overt endorsement of Plato, and with his liberalization of the “tragic” Diotima, Schlegel turns his Christian polemical focus specifically upon the early Greek tragic thinkers, and explicitly in this case, to Empedocles. He writes: Not hate, as the wise men say, but love, separates living creatures, and shapes the world; and only in love’s light can you find this and observe it. Only in the answer of its “you” can every “I” wholly feel its boundless unity.15

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Romantic love displaces tragic love in its divine revelation of the “holy enjoyment of a divine presence,” a poetics authorized by Kant’s doctrine of freedom, which could be regarded as a transcendental deduction of the Christian epoch. Lucinde reveals the new dispensation of freedom as the love between the lover and beloved and the creative fruits of this love, one that is an allegory and intimation of the love of the universal spirit of the divine.

Madonna and child In the first of Two Letters, Julian writes to Lucinde, who has announced to him that she is with child. He writes to her: What existed between us before was only love and passion. Now nature has tied us more closely together, more completely and inextricably. Nature alone is the true priestess of joy; only she knows how to tie the knot of marriage: not by means of empty words that have no blessing, but by fresh blossoms and living fruits from the fullness of her power. In the endless succession of new forms, creative time weaves the wreath of eternity, and the man who is touched by the joy of fruitfulness and health is blessed.16 Julian calls on Lucinde to “earn our place” and bear “immortal fruits,” entering into the “dance of humanity.” He extols: I want to plant myself in the earth, I want to sow and reap for the future and the present, I want to use all my powers as long as it is day, and then in the evening refresh myself in the arms of the mother who will forever be my bride.17 His concludes his declaration of romantic love, giving it the blessing of Rousseau: I lived on this earth, but I was not at home on it. Now the sanctity of marriage has given me citizenship in the state of nature.18 Of course the Idyll that Schlegel is depicting, an allegory for the human love, is not immune to personal conflict, but again, this strife is only due to “our common insatiability in giving love and being loved.” Julian declares: We live and love to destruction. And if it is love that first makes us true and complete human beings and is the essence of life then love also shouldn’t avoid conflict—​avoid it as little as life and mankind do. And so the peace of love will ensue as well only after a struggle of opposing forces.19

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Yet, this “struggle of opposing forces,” this romantic confusion, is only apparent, and will be overcome, as the struggle is allegorical, in the sense of a via negativa, for an ultimate Love in which we already participate. Julian asks: Do you remember how I  wrote you that no memory could profane you for me, that you were eternally pure like the Holy Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, and that you lacked nothing but a child to make you a Madonna?20 This quote clearly situates Lucinde in the ideological tapestry of Christianity, as Diotima and Socrates are placed in the service of the Christ. Julian desires to be born again, bursting forth from the chrysalis of mortality, to reveal his own immortal status. He writes of his resolution to fulfil his calling, to dedicate himself to creativity, and to the creation of immortal works: That is my virtue; so does it suit me to become like the gods. Yours is to be, like nature, a priestess of joy, gently revealing the mystery of love, and, surrounded by worthy sons and daughters, hallowing this beautiful life into a holy festival.21 Julian reminds Lucinde regarding her health in that she is creating a “new order of things,” a noumenous creation of nature as the allegory of eternal love. Life can itself be an allegory of the divine, for those who do not partake of the “infinity of barbarism,” but instead, embrace love which is the “holiest miracle of nature.”22 Underlying the Rousseauean theme, Julian writes regarding the upbringing of their children: But I’ve already thought very much about the child’s education:  that is, how we’re going to manage carefully to save it from any sort of “education.”23 In the Second Letter, Julian confesses to Lucinde that, in the midst of her illness, he had envisioned her death and the time that followed, and had contemplated suicide to join her. Again, indicating that Platonic metempsychosis (in the service of Christianity) was much in his thoughts, he reminds Lucinde of his suggestion that their next life would be more terrible, bolder, wilder, perhaps to compensate for the pettiness of this life. Yet, he succumbs, even before news of her recovery (note Hölderlin’s poem, “Her Recovery” to Susette Gontard24) to the ironic duty of life and to his calling and its demands. Amid the discord of the world, and his disdain for merely earthly things, his illness itself became a symbol for all of life, and for the “monstrous world of infinite power, of unending struggle and strife down to the furthest depths of existence.”25 Julian describes the negative theology of his sickness unto death:

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My sickness was transformed by this strange feeling into a world perfect and complete in itself. I felt that its mysterious life was fuller and deeper than the ordinary health of the dreaming sleepwalkers around me.26 Amid the depths of his imagination, her death “was nothing more than a gentle awakening from a light slumber.”27 In his waking dream, Julian flies into the future, telling of his own death, through old age, his life given meaning only by the love of Lucinde whom he addresses as “gracious Madonna”28: At last I realized that the end had come. My brow was no longer smooth and my hair had grown white. My life was finished but had not been completed. My most productive years were past and yet art and virtue still stood eternally unattainable before me. I  would have despaired if I hadn’t seen and worshipped both in you, most gracious Madonna! And seen you and your gentle godliness in myself.29 The Second Letter closes with a recapitulation of his love, and his contention that Divine Love is intimated in the love of the lover and the beloved, one that conquers tragedy. He closes with an evaluation of death in such a context: And I  know now that death can also be a sweet and beautiful thing. I realize how a creature that is free and in the flower of its life can secretly long for its own dissolution and freedom, how it can look on the idea of return as a morning sun of hope.30 He interprets this seemingly tragic situation comically, describing nature as a rogue and the omniscience of the “unknown Godhead.” Yet, simultaneously, Nature’s sensuality, eroticism, stimulates the search for the divine, “Nature itself wills the eternal cycle of eternally repeated experiments; and nature also wills that every individual should be perfect in himself, unique and new, a true image of supreme, indivisible individuality.”31 Each individual, perfect in itself, as with his influences, Jacob Boehme and Leibniz’s monadology, is a sign in the vast cosmic allegory of the divine, of the “hieroglyphics on flowers and stars,” and the “beautiful language of nature” that speaks to the “soul and everywhere the soul sees the loving spirit through the delicate veil.”32 The divine spirit moreover, as Day has only its allotted time, is inexorable. He writes: Always more beautifully does this magical circle encompass the soul. It can never escape, and what it forms or speaks sounds like a wonderful romance about the lovely mysteries of childhood’s world of gods—​a story accompanied by an enchanting music of the feelings and adorned with the most meaningful blossoms of lovely life.33

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Schlegel’s originary romantic perspective is, in the first instance, an elaboration of the indefinite finite events of aesthetic and existential awareness, of mortality, which are expressed in a multi-​genre poetics, in the overall form of a novel. In distinction from both the rigidity of rational mechanism, but also the emptiness and chaos of mortal existence, Schlegel, with the assurance of Kantian freedom, prior to concepts (and thus prior to science and morality) enacts his allegorical art of love and beauty—​even amid the pretence of founding a New Religion within the evanescence of poetic, creative elaboration—​art and life inhabiting the meta-​narrative of the spirit, of the soul—​of the pre-​destiny, infinity, the Word, moral (and political) freedom. The possibility for founding such a new state of affairs is grounded in the abyss of our freedom—​assured of either its superiority to Nature or its communion with Nature as the allegory of the divine—​reveals to us our susceptibility to the infinite, which is once again consistent both with Spinoza, Kant, and Fichte, each in their own respective ways. If we are free, and if the creativity of an aesthetic (mortal) Reason (as opposed to the mere rationality of rules, which adheres to the logistics of mechanics and not freedom) is revealed to us in the spiritual event of the Sublime, then it is possible to conceive of ourselves, as a sensus communis (and as individual persons), as free and creative beings, who are the artists not only of the world, but also of ourselves, our relationships with others, and of the enjoyment of friendship. Yet, if this is indeed the case, as it can be deduced as an elaboration of Kant’s notion of the subjective purposiveness or beauty of Nature, and of our susceptibility to reason in the sublime, then it is also possible to expand the domain of our creative endeavors to science and morality (which includes the political state as well.) In this way, the notion of poiesis can be extended to the creation of not only literary and plastic works of art, music, architecture, but also to the state, which in the case of the early German romantics, was exemplified in the republican state, a political state of affairs of free citizens, self-​governed under a developmental law and form of the sensus communis. Science could also be seen under the lens of art, as Nietzsche later reminded us in his “Self Criticism” of The Birth of Tragedy and in Naturphilosophie, especially in the hands of Schelling—​and also as a continuation of the Classical scientific efforts of Goethe, in, for instance, his poem, “The Metamorphosis of Plants.” Finally, if we are indeed the creative beings that our own subjective purposiveness declares to be necessary, then our conception of morality must also be subject to our freedom—​for actually existing morality as the historical, conventional, or traditional mores of the sensus communis may not, and usually never are, consistent with the true morality of reason, of the infinite susceptibility to thought of the free, reflective, and embodied being. Morality lives for the day, Heidegger wrote, it is “makeshift.”34 Like Bataille, who in his Story of the Eye,35 had scandalized French Catholic society, Schlegel held that sexual love was an event in which spiritual love is revealed, confirmed. For earthly beauty and physical love

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are allegories for the beauty of the divine and of the communion of all and each in the divine—​whether this occurs through metempsychosis or the rapture—​it is initially revealed, for Schlegel, in the love of the lover and beloved. We may perhaps wish to extend Schlegel’s criticism of conventional morality to his maintenance of the archetype of Adam and Eve—​not to mention his adherence to the Christo-​Platonic meta-​narrative of the Word. Such a position is underlined by Schlegel’s aversion to tragedy (of the mortal as mortal), which he shared with Kant himself who, in his third Critique, said that tragedy was only useful as a relief from boredom. Schlegel, as we have read, describes Julian’s severance from the “bacchantic frenzy”—​ a state of life that was an ephemeral part of his apprenticeship. With the revelation of the beloved, Lucinde, he has reached the maturity in which he can share and create with her, in beauty and love, of themselves and each other—​and the world, a new world. Hate must be confronted or resisted by love, tragedy by comedy, death by immortality—​even if such a possibility is grounded upon irony, one which dissipates “seriousness.”36 The tragic rejoinder is laid out by Juliane, who, in sketches for a continuation of Lucinde, affirms the eternal recurrence of the same, an affirmation that embraces the tragic fate of her life, the deaths of her children, a humanity whose fate is to effectuate its own self-​destruction, as the fate of human existence, and the destiny of the true human being in which freedom is rooted in our mortality and not in the infinite. She contends: The man who raises his hand against himself is free. Self-​destruction when the time has come; that’s the destiny of man! Look, that’s the story of the world and of life; you can paint it and mold it, adorn it and polish it, but it will always stay the same. That’s how it is, how it was, and how it will be. (I’ll gladly stay in my simple, little hut, though you build one palace of art on top of another.) After much preparation, one plants the seed in the earth; the little plant strains and labors to make a little room for itself, and finally it pushes itself up into the open air. Then the sun shines, the rain falls, and springtime blows over the earth. The little plant thrives in all its parts and grows ever lovelier; everything goes well and properly and slowly; and everyone who sees it, finds pleasure in it. Then the blossom comes. For a few moments the whole plant is transfigured, and then it withers. Now, what was the destiny of this flower; to bloom or to wither? I contend that people are partial to flowers that are still in bloom; they let themselves be carried away by the pleasurable aroma. But there’s more truth in the withered flowers. Flowers exist to bloom and then to wither. Fruits have to fall to the ground. Eyes exist to shine and weep. And the heart? Well, it must beat—​first calmly, then quickly (and more quickly), then slowly again, until it finally bleeds to death.37 This passage, reminiscent, though through a tragic lens, of Diotima’s discourse on Love in the Symposium, to which Schlegel alluded to earlier in

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the novel, and which he criticizes as one-​sided, articulates the death-​bound situation of her and all existence. Yet, Julius will not accept her condemnation of humanity but responds to our situation with laughter that he envisions in the context of irony, which expressing a paradox (“Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great”38), reveals that finitude is not only not the only reality, but strictly speaking, is not a reality at all. Finitude, the fragment, is on the contrary, an allegory for the spiritual progress of humanity in its yearning for the eternal, though, one that they, ironically, can never achieve (from the ironic perspective of the temporal), but yet always already possess, in the instantaneous wit of the divine. Such a result, in the classic sense, is comedy (as in Dante’s Divine Comedy)—​as, although one is carried along upon the noise of the mortal world, our true destiny in the divine harmony. Our mortal being reflects the divine in its fragmented mirror (à la Leibniz) an Idea assured by the meta-​ narrative of Platonism and Christianity, together with the “New Religion” or as the dispensation of Kantian freedom and romantic license. In this light, suffering is not only illusory, the “Maya” of the Hindus, but shows itself only due to the forgetfulness of the nothingness of the phenomenal world and the divinity of which Nature is an allegory. Yet, Juliane will have none of Julius’ old error of web-​spinning:  “Stay away from me with your fine metaphors and fairy tales. They are words and nothing but words.”39 Instead, it is freedom amid the terrible truth that concerns her, as her radical freedom has unmasked not only the barbarism of everyday life, but also the irony of the Sisyphian struggle of human existence in light of its alleged divinity. She declares, in variance to even the mores of today, the radical sovereignty of the individual over his or her body: “For a human being who is a human being, there is no death other than his own self-​induced death, his suicide.”40 Juliane has blown away Julius’ cobwebs with a storm of wit—​fragments are not mirrors, but shards, intimations of death. She denounces the world and its vanity, asserting her absolute freedom to kill herself. From the perspective of irony, which she has rejected, a decisive wit flashes like a thunderbolt. She need not live at all—​she is free in a sovereign manner, and her death by suicide, if it occurred, would be a sublime act of wit, her plunge into the abyss, a work of art, one which confirms her own freedom and truth.

Poetic fragments of philosophical and theological reflection Far from rejecting reason from a super-​rational or irrational perspective, as is usually the case in portrayals of romanticism, Schlegel is seeking, after the example of Kant, to broaden the notion of reason in such a way as to recognize the primacy of a free aesthetical reason that lies as the root of the

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theoretical and the practical, each of which may be altered for the sake of subjective purposiveness and freedom. Schlegel writes: What’s commonly called reason is only a subspecies of it: namely, the thin and watery sort. There’s also a thick, fiery kind that actually makes wit witty, and gives an elasticity and electricity to a solid style.41 The style which Schlegel is setting forth is one of a synthetic character, a symphilosophy or sympoetry,42 which builds a sacred relationship with an active and critical reader, a relation that is creative in and of itself, from the personal to the global. He writes: If in communicating a thought, one fluctuates between absolute comprehension and absolute incomprehension, then this process might already be termed a philosophical friendship.43 In this way, Schlegel, again exhibiting his Platonic archetypes, depicts Socratic irony of the “indissoluble antagonism” between the infinite and the finite, a severance that is the “freest of all licenses, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary.”44 This depiction echoes Kant’s statement in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason that reason exists in a perplexity in which it is compelled to ask questions that it can never answer. From our attempts to answer questions, we compile a compendium of errors, remembrances, and cautious guides for the future. Yet, despite, or perhaps in light of these errors, and with the gradual, although sometimes revolutionary acts, assurances of subjective purposiveness (Kant gives mathematics as an example of perfection), we wander in our irony, in our exploration and creativity, which in the end, reveals to us our freedom and, through love between the lover and the beloved, the intimacy of the divine and our participation in the repose of eternity. In this way, our radical mortal limitations paradoxically reveal to us our absolute freedom, and the transmutability of all terrestrial and temporal states of affairs. As an example, Schlegel writes of his own historical era, that of modernity, of its susceptibilities and specific contours of creativity and exploration, “The whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.”45 Such a possibility—​ one that is progressive in its search for its own perfection in the manner of the ancients—​has already been intimated in the transcendental poetics of Kant in the third Critique, which, looking through the eyes of Schlegel, came to the ironic conclusion that philosophy is a creative work of art and that all of its concepts are poetic indications of feeling, situation—​of mortality. Yet, this very creative “foundation” for our art, science, and morality, as freedom, authorizes us to create the sciences,

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moralities, the criterion for which should be the facilitation of human purposiveness, of our freedom, in every arena of life, in an ever-​expanding way. Creativity arises out of the “unity of opposites,” whether of love or strife or a configuration of the two, in a harmony of opposites, one that is inherent in nature and which indicates a pathway to its transcendence. Schlegel writes in Blutenstaub: The principle of contradiction is inevitably doomed, and the only remaining choice is either to assume an attitude of suffering or else ennoble necessity by acknowledging the possibility of free action.46 It is this free action that is the basis of Schlegel’s philosophy in its intimate operations; yet, it is a freedom that is based upon the comedic meta-​ narrative of Platonic beauty and Kantian subjective purposiveness, a story that, as in a Euripidean comedy, from the very beginning, declares ourselves to be deities. And, while Kant would mutter that such enthusiasm would—​ if it be regarded as knowledge—​ transgress his limits, Schlegel quickly responds:  “Kant introduced the concept of the negative into philosophy. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile trying now to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy as well?”47 It is this positive—​not positivistic—​ that will mark the trajectory of early German and British romanticism as poetico-​philosophical enactments of a poiesis of freedom and of the constructive creation of a literature (not to mention the great “systems” of philosophy in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, each of which responded to Kant’s call for a “System of Reason”). Romantic literature cultivated the groundwork and orchestrated an art of ideal freedom, one of a dream that, however, remains with one long after one awakes, and as culture, inaugurates the duty of a (republican) transfiguration of the world down to its very roots. It is the vocation that Kant invokes in the third Critique as the sublime duty of reason to transform the world in the image of the moral law, of freedom in all matters. This licentiousness, run amok in the world, however, is necessarily limited as we exist as a fragment amid fragments, traversing the circumscribed historical “spirit” of accumulation and annihilation of fragments. We are in “the middle,” existing, fated to die, but, nevertheless capable of a poetics that allows us to transcend the tragic domain of conflict, of Strife. It is, in this light, that Schlegel, although once in a while he shoots an arrow at Kant, inhabits the transcendental philosophical edifice of Kant. Reason acquires an expanded and creative significance, through which the positive can be expressed through poetics. It is the concept of irony that maintains his fidelity to Kant. Schlegel lays out his own schema of philosophy when he writes: “Next to the perfect representation of critical idealism (which always comes first) the following seem to be the most important desiderata of philosophy: a materialistic logic, a poetical poetics, a positive politics, a systematical ethics, and a practical history.”48 It is

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significant that Schlegel indicates a “critical idealism” (and not a subjective idealism as this terminology is not in the end helpful) and his contention that such “always comes first.” Schlegel is well aware than he has taken radical liberties with his freedom, but nevertheless defends Kant, who remained his mentor, though he did not see the need for a “system of reason,” given Kant’s seemingly ironical premises. Attuned with our treatment of Kant in the first chapter, and the clumsy impatience that marred the reception of the Critical Philosophy, Schlegel writes: The few attacks against Kantian philosophy which exist are the most important documents for a pathological history of common sense. This epidemic, which started in England, even threatened for a while to infect German philosophy.49 Indeed, he seems to claim that he is in fact one of the few true Kantians, thereby assuming the role of the arbiter of Kantianism: “According to the outmoded Socratic concept of disciples being those who have independently made the spirit of the great master their own spirit, have adapted themselves to it, and, as his spiritual sons, have been named after him, there are probably only a very few Kantians.”50 Indeed, the next fragment proceeds to attack Schelling, as a deviation from Kant, and further underscoring Schlegel’s absolute rejection of tragedy:  “Schelling’s philosophy—​ which might be termed criticized mysticism—​ concludes like Aeschylus’s Prometheus in earthquake and ruins.”51 Remarks of this nature will become quite important in the next chapter on Hölderlin. Schlegel, with his assurance of freedom, disagrees with the Biblical notion that there is nothing new under the sun—​yet again, ironically, as he writes that the romantic poetics of the new freedom is not only still becoming and should never be perfected, as with Batallie’s intimation of incompletion, but must achieve its own classicism in its incompletion, its own eternal becoming. Romantic poetry is a “progressive, universal poetry”52 that, contrary to building a system, will deconstruct the barriers and limits that currently exist in culture, education, and the state, building an art that never ends. Schlegel writes further, declaring the revolutionary significance of romanticism: It alone can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole circumambient world, an image of the age. And it can also—​more than any other form—​ hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-​interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors. It is capable of the highest and most variegated refinement, not only from within outwards, but also from without inwards; capable in that it organizes—​for everything that seeks a wholeness in its effects—​the parts along similar lines, so that it opens up a perspective upon an infinitely increasing classicism.53

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It would seem that, far from wanting to return to the Golden Age of the Classics, that he wishes that romanticism enacts (in its becoming) a repetition of the creative trajectory of the Greeks, and not merely an imitation of them—​as he says, there are other poets besides the Greeks. He put great faith in the novel in its capacity to multiply the “mirrors” by which the finite world is felt and comprehended by free, reflecting, and embodied beings. This speaks of the noumenal causality (creation) of Kant and of Fichte’s desire to change the world, yet contrary to Fichte’s moral/​political interpretation of this freedom, Schlegel seeks to spark cultural revolution that would create the indigenous conditions and for authentic political revolution (republican constitution, yet aristocracy and monarchy for guidance and cultural education).54 The republican revolution is spurred on by the new philosophy: “The creative philosophy that originates in freedom and belief in freedom, and shows how the human spirit impresses its law on all things and how the world is its work of art.”55 Schlegel speculates upon the possibilities of a permanent cultural revolution: Perhaps there would be a birth of a whole new era of the sciences and arts if symphilosophy and sympoetry became so universal and heartfelt that it would no longer be anything extraordinary for several complementary minds to create communal works of art.56 Schlegel specifies those threads, events which he sees as the weave of the new philosophy: Or perhaps several complementary events:  The French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s Meister are the greatest tendencies of the age. Whoever is offended by this juxtaposition, whoever cannot take any revolution seriously that isn’t noisy and materialistic, hasn’t yet achieved a lofty, broad perspective on the history of mankind.57 Schlegel baldly describes this revolution as the realization of the “Kingdom of God on Earth”—​calling it the “elastic point of progressive civilisation and the beginning of Modern history.”58 From his perspective, in line with his “progressive universal poetry,” there is a progressive evolution in history, and the “illusion of anarchy in history” erupts from the “collisions of heterogeneous spheres of nature, all meeting and concatenating in his experience.”59 It is in this way, that from the perspective of the sensus communis, the world itself becomes the topos of moral freedom. Schlegel writes, “It’s only prejudice and presumption that maintains there is only a single mediator between God and man. For the perfect Christian—​whom in this respect Spinoza probably resembles most—​everything would really have to be a mediator.”60 In this light, as with Boehme, creation itself, Nature, becomes the only legitimate scripture.

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Without challenging the meta-​narrative of Platonic-​Christian ideology, he seeks to instead deploy it as a ground for a revolutionary transformation of the world. He insists that “every good human being is always progressively becoming God”61 and that death, far from the annihilation of the self, spirit, or soul, leads to a blessed (easier) life.62 He writes: Only the external formative and creative power of man is changeable and subject to the seasons. Change is a word for the physical world only. The ego loses nothing and engulfs nothing; it lives together with all that belongs to it, its thoughts and feelings, in the lordly freedom of immortality. You can only lose something that you’ve put now in one place, then in another. In the ego, all things are created organically and everything has its proper place.63 In this way, amid the warring conflict of the phenomenal, mortal world, philosophy amid the new dispensation of freedom becomes a New Religion, in which the “I” and “Thou” undertake a “mutual search for omniscience”64 so as to awaken the reader to the divinity of existence, the “pure eternal being and becoming” of a divinity born of Love. He concludes, providing his attempted subjugation of paganism: The life of the Universal Spirit is an unbroken chain of inner revolutions; all individuals—​that is, all original and eternal ones—​live in him. He is a genuine polytheist and bears within himself all Olympus.65 This last statement implies the immortality of human souls, of individuals, as God himself surrounds himself with other Gods. We are not fragments of the totality as the totality is a unity that transcends, as with Plato’s Timaeus,66 the temporal realm. Fragmentation is the character of existence of temporal beings, yet, ones who are assured of a “lordly freedom of immortality.” For Hölderlin, such hyperbole is a flagrant example of nefas, hubris.

CHAPTER THREE

Holderlin: Poetics beyond reflection In this chapter, we will explore the revolutionary implications of Hölderlin’s essay “Urteil und Seyn,” in which he places into question and transgresses the ultimately subjective limits of reflection and the poetics of reflection with his distinction between Being and Judgment, or that between the sense of mortal existence and its tragic thought and the divisions and architectonics of consciousness. For Hölderlin, such a consciousness—​as it was with Fichte and the romantics—​is a denial of the true meaning of the sublime, which is the thought of mortality, an idea that emerges as a recognition of the finitude of existence in the midst of a Being that transcends and exceeds our comprehension. Rationality is merely a form of escapism for those without the courage to gaze into the Nothing. Oh, you wretches who feel all this, who, even as I, cannot allow yourselves to speak of man’s being here for a purpose, who, even as I, are so utterly in the clutch of the Nothing that governs us, so profoundly aware that we are born for nothing, that we love a nothing, believe in nothing, work ourselves to death for nothing only that little by little we may pass over into nothing—​how can I help it if your knees collapse when you think of it seriously? Many a time have I, too, sunk into these bottomless thoughts, and cried out: Why do you lay the axe to my root, pitiless spirit?—​and still I am here. HÖLDERLIN, FROM HYPERION 1

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The Dionysian spirit of poetry in the philosophy of Hölderlin is vital, not only with respect to the influence of the early Greek thinkers and tragic poets and dramatists, but also in his own enactment of the deadly word, the word that kills, in his own existence of revolution and war. The tragic retrieval as a philosophical strategy allows Hölderlin to raise the question of Being, and thus of Reality, in a manner that rejects the Kantian notion of reason. With the rejection of Kant’s rationalist solution to the question of the Sublime, it follows that the romantics, who never questioned Kantian freedom, are not oriented to truth, but to egoistic, subjective purposiveness. Absolute reality is indeed inaccessible to consciousness in its determinative and reflective comportments, yet, with his question of being, and of the tragic limitations of mortal existence, Hölderlin seeks, in his philosophy, to establish a different “ground” of freedom and the configuration of existence that is attuned to the unfolding of fate and destiny—​of revealed mortality. But, that is precisely the point of his poetic intellectual intuition that intimates a “feeling” (Gefühl), articulated by Jacobi, but, for Hölderlin, transfigured in a radically different sense, as the feeling of nothingness. The radical criticisms of Kant’s transcendental philosophy by the sceptics had done their work, and there would seem to be no answers forthcoming from Kant or Kantians—​unless we are to merely overlook or deny the problem. Yet, Hölderlin is no sceptic, and indeed, destroys scepticism. The destiny of the name “Hölderlin” remains undecided, still on its way—​the journey of “Hölderlin” has been a mirror of his own tragic—​and perhaps, comic—​age and life. For the journey of the name began with a mortal being. Two dead fathers by the age of nine, a profound and perhaps unreciprocated love expressed to his mother, half-​brother, and sister, an emotional temperament harnessed to a lack of self-​esteem, exacerbated by an enforced poverty by his mother, who seems to have held back his substantial inheritance out of spite. It is almost a cliché in German philosophy, of the family angered by the decision of the son to pursue a philosophical, literary, and poetic pathway instead of a career as a cleric, a protestant pastor. Yet, reading Hölderlin’s letters to his mother, he never (despite Foucault’s unsourced reference in his essay, “The Father’s ‘No’ ”2) demands to have his inheritance, though he mentions it and frequently asks for money, especially during his many hiatuses from his various employments as a private tutor. Being a private tutor, an educational child-​care servant for the wealthy, carried its own humiliation for Hölderlin, who was already a rather successful poet, author of Hyperion, translator of Sophocles, all of which were composed amid the erratic trajectory of his life, of his own relation to the “harmoniously opposed.” This engagement with life itself in turn inspired his writings, as did the situation of war that persisted from Hölderlin’s nineteenth year until ten years into his residence in the Tower. Hölderlin’s perspective, while deeply wedded to early Greek thought, mythology, and poetry, epic, lyric, and tragic, necessitated an existential involvement in the temporal world as such. Many significant names are

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connected to him, in one way or another on his journey: Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Niethammer, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Heinse, and many others with whom he corresponded through extensive letter writing. This was a period of history, as Foucault writes, of the return of time,3 in which our finitude becomes manifest in the shadow of the death of God—​of the tragic absolute. Hölderlin’s own “breakdown” was preceded, amid a situation of endless war and disease, by a series of events, his dismissal from the Gontard household, the failure of his journal Iduna (which was meant to secure his basic necessities, and perhaps, demonstrate to his mother that his life path was vindicated), Fichte’s dismissal in 1799, the deaths of Novalis, Maimon, Schiller, Kant—​and most importantly for him, the death of Susette Gontard, his Diotima from Hyperion. When he was at the Tower, it is reported by Eric Zimmer that Hölderlin continued to work on his poetry, extant as an array of innumerable fragments that existed as a portfolio of incomplete work, revisions. Inexplicably, this work was removed from Hölderlin’s possession by his half-​brother Karl Gok. In this way, contrary to the intentional construction of the fragment as a genre by Schlegel, the often fragmentary character of some of Hölderlin’s work is due to a great extent upon this callous act by his family, who, as we can see from the letters, only received expressions of love and concern from a son and older brother, who was extremely respectful to his mother, and also provided advice his sister and half-​brother. None of his family members visited Hölderlin while he was in the Tower, other than to take his writings. It is said that when he died, Hölderlin was ironically a rich man. His family instigated crass legal battles for his estate. While the treatment of Hölderlin by his family is incomprehensible, the treatment of his work has been, as I have alluded, a mirror of his life. Hölderlin became a belated poet of the homeland, his poetry and novel Hyperion were taught in schools, where Nietzsche read a version of Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles. Hölderlin would, as with Nietzsche, later be held up by the Nazis as a prophet of National Socialism, a blasphemy to which Heidegger responded, against Alfred Baumler, with his own version of Hölderlin and a poetics of Being,4 as examined by Frank Edler in his four-​part essay. The Marxian theorists of the Frankfurt school, such as Benjamin, Adorno, and Marcuse had also developed an interest in early German romanticism as a prelude to German Idealism, and as a contestation of the use and abuse of both Hölderlin and Nietzsche by the Nazis. The poststructuralists Paul de Man, Derrida, and Foucault had also written on Hölderlin, yet not as a philosopher, but as a poet. Yet, the explicit evidence that Hölderlin was more than a poet or even a philosophical poet, but was a philosopher in his own right, came only in 1961, with the discovery (written in the back of a book, and found in an aristocratic library) of Hölderlin’s short essay “Urteil und Seyn.” On the basis of this discovery, as well as Hölderlin’s contribution to the “Oldest Programme of German Idealism,” with Schelling and Hegel, a literature has developed that has begun to look at Hölderlin as a philosopher.

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In the postwar generation, there has been a lively and growing interest in German idealism, early German romanticism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, alongside Critical Theory (the offspring of the Frankfurt School), all of which strangely has a poet at its center. There is the work, as we have mentioned, of Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, and Friedrick Beiser, which is significant as a contemporary reconstruction of the context of Hölderlin’s work and which provides a general outline of his thought and his relationship with the other significant figures in German philosophy. The work of these scholars is important, yet, in specific regard to Hölderlin, there remains an inadequate explication of Hölderlin’s philosophy as philosophy, its own philosophy, and not merely as either a contribution to another philosophy, such as Schelling or Hegel or as just another variant of romanticism. We must respond to the suggestions by David Farrell Krell and Walter Benjamin, that there is something distinct about Hölderlin, something I would suggest, radically distances him from the early German romantics, although he was contemporaneous with them. The focus of Hölderlin upon the “Tragic Absolute,” to use Krell’s illuminating phrase, distinguishes him from the aversion to tragedy that we have found in Novalis and Schlegel. It is in this light that we should explore Hölderlin’s philosophy in more detail, and investigate his extant essays, especially “Judgment and Being,” and other relevant writings in the more appropriate context, I  will illustrate, of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the “Analytic of the Sublime.” Indeed, it is often said that Kant’s third Critique was highly influential upon the romantics, and Hölderlin, in particular. And, we are told that the romantics, Hölderlin, and the German Idealists adhered to intellectual intuition. But, in what specific senses are these attributable to Hölderlin? What is the relationship between Novalis, Schlegel, and Hölderlin? Benjamin elaborates the decisive relevance of the third Critique to Novalis and Schlegel, and in a manner that explains intellectual intuition as it pertained to these poetic philosophers, but consigns Hölderlin to an evasive note. We have moreover explored the direct impact of Kant’s critical philosophy upon Novalis and Schlegel, and we concur with Benjamin that early German romanticism, as it was practiced by the latter adherents, was a creature of Kantian reflection. We have also, in the previous two chapters, emphasized the impact of Fichte and the necessity of an objective ground in a Platonic-​Spinozistic Christianity. Yet, what is Hölderlin’s distinction with respect to the (other) early German romantics? Hölderlin never called himself a romantic and never apparently interacted with Novalis or Schlegel—​though he must have known about them, at the very least in light of Schiller’s dismissal of Hölderlin’s idea for a journal, Iduna, since such a project was already in place with the Schlegel brothers’ Athenaeum. Yet, we will see that Schiller’s judgment of Hölderlin’s project was perhaps faulty, since, in his eccentric originality, the latter was radically distinct from the romantics, who, while as “poeticists,” may seem like differing degrees of the same tendency, differed not with respect to

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their respective poetics per se, but instead, to fundamental philosophical differences, ones pertaining to tragedy and the legitimacy of reason. In light of their philosophical divergence, they also differed with respect to the status of poetry as philosophy or thought, grounded in and of itself, and not as an elaboration (for moral ends) of the Good. Hölderlin was seeking to do something quite different than the Romantics. In this light, in the following, we will explore Hölderlin’s essay “Judgment and Being” within the context of the event and resolution of the Kantian sublime (fundamental philosophy), and the repercussions of his perspective upon the Kantian Idea of Reason—​and everything else that comes with it, including the question of the status of romantic poetry as philosophy, in a world in which freedom acquires a different sense, that of tragic freedom. Such a transfiguration of thought and the notion of freedom itself would have incalculable impact upon the cultural life of mortals, a transfiguration that is still underway. Hölderlin’s essay “Judgment and Being” (1795) (aka, “Being Judgment Possibility”) is just four paragraphs long, and, having been written in the back cover of a book, was likely never intended for publication—​nor does its content recur in any of his other extant writings and letters, except perhaps for his statement, in a letter to Schiller in September of the same year. Hölderlin writes, obviously referring to Fichte, whose lectures he attended in Jena: I am attempting to work out for myself the idea of an infinite progress in philosophy by showing that the unremitting demand that must be made of any system, the union of subject and object in an absolute . . . I or whatever one wants to call it, though possible aesthetically in an act of intellectual intuition, is theoretically possible only through endless approximation.5 As we have seen in the last two chapters, Hölderlin is referring to Kantian and Fichtean irony, in which the system, grounded as it is upon reason, demands the unity of subject and object, and its demand, in this conflict, such a unity is revealed aesthetically as a susceptibility that is named in the act of reflection. Hölderlin, remaining within the strictures of Kantian critical philosophy, writes that such unity, the result of an infinite progress already undertaken, is not possible “theoretically” as truth, but will disclose itself only as an “endless approximation.” It is only through aesthetic reflection, depicted as an “intellectual intuition” (a reflective act) that the Absolute will be intimated in the Fichtean “system.” It may seem or have seemed to Schiller that Hölderlin was merely playing at Maimonian scepticism, underlining the failure of Fichte to answer Maimon’s question of reality, or truth. Yet, Hölderlin’s observation of a peculiar aspect of the new philosophy was neither meant to be merely critical, nor does his engagement with critical philosophy (and hence, romanticism) end merely with a negative scepticism.

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It is in “Judgment and Being” where he provides a rough sketch of not only a powerful criticism of Kant, Fichte, and tacitly the romantics, but also a displacement of the Copernican Revolution for what may be called a Brunoian Revolution, after the Italian poet and philosopher Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake in 1600 in Rome. We do not seek merely a shift in our perspective from the Earth to the Sun, but instead to remember and engage the myriad simultaneity of the openness of Being, where “the center is everywhere.”6 In his essay, Hölderlin lays out his criteria for Being, of the Absolute unity of ‘subject and object.” He writes: Where subject and object are absolutely, not only partly, united, namely so united that no division can be executed without damaging the essence of that which is to be separated, there and nowhere else one can speak of a being as such, as is the case with intellectual intuition.7 The discerning reader may immediately notice the important use made by Hölderlin of the notion of intellectual intuition in the context of Being, when in a letter of the same year, he had expressed sceptical doubts to Schiller of the relationship of aesthetical reflection to truth. Yet, that would be to assume that he is using the notion in the same sense and most urgently within the same philosophical context. Hölderlin has contended that, in the Kantian-​ Fichtean universe, the Absolute is only accessible as an aesthetic idea, in a subjective universe, which has its own objectivity in the sensus communis. At the same time, however, Being is not Identity as the expression “I am I,” as the “I” already always assumes a prerequisite self-​consciousness, a product “damaging the essence of that which is to be separated.”8 Judgment itself, in this context, is seen as the “primal separation,” or, severance, of Being, of the Absolute, and is the essence of consciousness, whether that reflective judgment in the third Critique, regulative ideas and principles in the first Critique and as “Postulates” in the second Critique. Judgment, a mysterious art that cannot be taught, is the modus operandi of Kant’s philosophy of the As If, “believing what we so keenly desire” (Social Contract).9 Kant—​ the “Konigsbergian Theologian” and the inventor of necessary illusions10—​reveals to us, in the third Critique, his criterion of subjective purposiveness without purpose, “grounded” upon the objectivity of the sensus communis, upon the assessment and education (enlightenment) of the community, with a form of the state that was capable of providing the conditions of possibility for such an enlightenment. Yet, for Hölderlin, judgment per se as the “original division,” and, in its specific operation as synthesis, cannot reveal the truth as it is, that of Being, which in Heidegger’s words, is the transcendens pure and simple.11 Judgment fabricates only self-​reflexive ideas, apprehending the world through the “tainted, uneven mirror”12 of reflection. Yet, at the same time, judgment

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demands that the world be “as it ought to be,” that the moral law (freedom) must be capable of fulfilment for the sake of subjective purposiveness, for the survival of the community. Transcendental philosophy is in this way the search for the precise conditions for the reconciliation of the ought with actuality—​even though, given the character of reason and its Ideas, such a reconciliation is in principle impossible. Disregarding the latter systemic impossibility, the student is thrown into the game of the “subject” and “object,” which enacts the false question of the relationship of antithetical constructions, the unity of which remains grounded upon a mere assertion. Hölderlin writes, criticizing Fichte: “I am I” is the most apposite example of this concept of the original division, as a theoretical division, since in the practical original division, I is opposed to the Not-​I and not to itself.13 Upon the territory of the practical domain of the I  and the Not-​I, a theoretical division is demanded through which “self-​ consciousness” is deemed necessary as the “ground” for the unity of experience as such, which is otherwise the field of possibility and reality, of the play and existential work of understanding and imagination, in their reciprocal synergy amid the sensuous reality of “observation and perception.” That which is being contested in this essay is the hubris of Kantian Reason in its alleged triumph over Nature. Prior to Kant there was only objective rationalists and sceptics—​Kant demands that nature be remade in our image. If we are to apply the lessons provided in Hölderlin’s essay to Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime,” we will obtain radically different perspectives upon the meaning of thought and, of its limits—​the point after all of Critical Philosophy. As we will recall from Chapter One, the susceptibility of the sensus communis to reason was revealed in the aesthetic judgment of the sublime, in an act of reflection in which the Idea of reason is poetically named and in the context of the transcendental method, established as a principle. Reason, apperception, the “I” divided in itself as self-​consciousness—​ demanded as the ground of the “unity of experience,” of the Absolute, as the Absolute—​these are the “Flowers of Evil”14 that grew out of Kant’s rationalist solution of the Sublime. In both its mathematical and dynamic senses, Kant claims that the Sublime is a symbol—​trace, of the triumph of reason over nature, of the ultimate intelligibility of reality, of the infinite, in and through reason, and its technical and logistical surrogates, science and religion. Hölderlin’s “Judgment and Being,” read in the context of the sublime, reveals the utter limitations of consciousness and self-​consciousness as the “I am I” seeks to separate itself from the All, from Nature, but also claims to know and master that from which it flees. The pathos of distance, the separation of subject and object is meant to establish the conditions for objectivity, but

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the severance merely reiterates and exposes the subjectivity and contingency of the perspective, but ironically, as a deficient mode of awareness. There are two apparent arguments against Kant’s rationalist solution of the Sublime. On the one hand, Hölderlin, and supporting Maimon, contends that acts of reflection, as products of judgment (the original division) will never enact a disclosure of Being—​or, the Absolute, as the original division of judgment enacted an irretrievable damage upon the original “essence.” On the other hand, and more specifically, reason is revealed as a susceptibility, a power, according to a procedure the criteria for which is a Christian meta-​narrative of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Kant’s sublime freedom is generated by a covert ideological decision, in which “freedom,” reason, as the root of the imaginative nexus of manifestation, creativity, is conceived as not only duty and respect for the Moral Law, but also as the power of self-​control and self-​legislation, all made possible by the relentless demands of self-​consciousness to which art is subject. Yet, Hölderlin’s concise essay enacts a contestation, indeed, an aufhebung (abolition, preservation, and transcendence) of Kant’s narrative, of his archetype of a triumphant reason. If we apply his parameters to Kant’s aesthetics, we can see imagination in play with the understanding, within the harmony of the beautiful, the logos of Heraclitus, as Hölderlin writes in his novel Hyperion. The reiteration of the Heraclitean logos displaces the intractable and scandalous problem of “subjectivism” through the recontextualization of the mortal being in the temporal world disclosed as the unity of opposites, as the flux. Yet, in the situation of existential crisis, of the threat in both of its mathematical and dynamic contexts—​ as the temporal existence of the mortal being and the community—​Kant insists that imagination breaks down, and in this event, reason is revealed as a susceptibility, a power, of subjective purposiveness, which is self-​violation out of necessity. But, what type of necessity is this? What is Kant contending in his description of the violence enacted by the imagination against itself, and what is the status of the utterance in relation to the notion of truth, the fundamental thematic, we will recall, of philosophy? Kant holds, we might infer, that if human existence is to transcend the limits of nature, it must be of such a kind as to have already transcended nature. The kind of thing human existence must be, in this light, is one of reason, a rational being. Since reason is by definition the power to conceive infinity, and, as we are possessed of reason, we ourselves have conceived infinity and have already transcended the limits of nature, of mortality. If we are to be eternal, we must be eternal in a manner that is demonstrated, and this demonstration, for Kant, took place in the “Analytic of the Sublime.” Yet, his deduction raises many questions in light of Hölderlin’s essay. First, does the alleged revelation of reason have any more status than that of any other reflective act or product of a reflective act? Second, is the Idea of infinity, revealed simultaneously with reason, anything more than

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a reflective, subjective notion? Third, is the Idea of infinity, as that which is revealed in reflection, the same as Being, in Hölderlin’s sense? Fourth, if the “Analytic of the Sublime” is meant to reveal our sublimity in the face of death—​and hence our eternity—​is such a status assured by a mere reflective act, one that remains oriented by the criterion of subjective purposiveness? Hölderlin’s essay is quite clear as to the answers to these questions. He would answer “yes” to the first and second questions, and “no” to the third and fourth questions. Indeed, in respect of the criterion of “subjective purposiveness” and Reason, and of its alleged triumph over Nature, Hölderlin has already stated that Being is not the same as Identity, or, the “I am I.” In this light, the “subjective purposiveness” of Nature cannot be a criterion, on Kant’s own strictures, for truth, or, in other words, for Being—​Absolute Reality. To this extent, Maimon is correct. Kant, of course, would respond that the thing in itself is unknowable, but that with our freedom, both moral and artistic, we may directly determine the Will as if we knew. Kant leaves us with an aporia that is resolved by a demand, by, a ghostly Derrida may interject, the Law, taken up by Schlegel and the early romantics, as we have seen, in the concept of irony. But, what is the meaning of this sense of the Law, of this demand, in relation to Being and Truth? This Law seems to demand that we believe that we are eternal, that our freedom and our will must be eternal, if the fulfilment of the Moral Law is to be achieved, if Nature is to be “moralized” with our triumph over her. Is this not a vicious circle? The romantics, following the articulation by Fichte of this practical command, wrote of the “romanticization” of Nature. Indeed, it is not only an ironic philosophy, but it is also an irony upon which there is to be action, drama, the construction of narratives, institutions, and states of the “As If.” Hölderlin throws a wrench into the works of this project. He refuses the “As If” for the sake of truth. In this way, he resembles Juliane from Schlegel’s Lucinde. We will recall that Kant described, transcendentally, the beautiful as the free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding, and the sublime as the conflict between the faculties of imagination and reason. Yet, as we looked closer, it was not a conflict at all since, prior to the event, the susceptibility of reason was not apparent as an Idea, but was revealed as that which could compensate for the breakdown of the imagination. We may compare this eventuality as a variant of Hölderlin’s statement in his poem “As on a Holiday” that with the threat grows the saving power also—​but with a radical difference. Hölderlin is not describing, recounting dutifully the triumph of Reason over Nature, but instead, the birth of a different configuration and orientation for thought. If the play of imagination and of the understanding, as the beautiful, is the logos (Heraclitus), the one and many, the unlimited and limited, of possibility and reality, then the sublime would be an event in which mortal logos, as the unity of imagination and understanding, broke down in the face of the overwhelming.

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The failure of imagination (and understanding) is, for Holderlin, an intimation of our existence. Indeed, reason was not in conflict with imagination, and it was not revealed as a susceptibility, through such a conflict, but was, as Kant himself describes, constructed from the self-​ suppression of spatial and temporal conditions in the revelation of a nothingness, of freedom, of the noumenal—​mere creatures of reflection with no claim to either knowledge or Absolute truth. By means of this construction (deduction) of freedom, we become, for Kant, authorized to deploy determinative judgments in theoretical and practical jurisdictions. To describe the sublime event, Kant may have better described it transcendentally as a conflict between imagination and understanding, one which, in the overwhelming event of the threat, forced a severance between the two faculties, thereby positing a pure understanding, which, in the first Critique, Kant uses synonymously with reason, as the faculty of principles. Such a severance would allow for the usual play of the faculties in the aesthetic experience of the beautiful, but would, in the sublime, decide not only an order of rank, but also give legitimacy to the claims of Reason in each of its jurisdictions. Nevertheless, from the perspective of Hölderlin’s essay, even with this latter stronger deduction of reason, all of these operations are taking place as acts of consciousness, and of a reflection whose criterion is subjective purposiveness and desire backed up by a command. For Hölderlin, even if we were to grant Kant his masquerade, his reason would, in its origin in the self-​suppression of imagination, still be negatively affiliated with temporality. Reason, just as with understanding in the first Critique (and, as a negative, suppressed element in the second Critique) has as its condition of possibility the imagination, and given the a priori status of reason and the concepts of the understanding, one that is transcendental, a priori, something that Kant does not mention in the third Critique. In the latter, there are two narratives for the emergence of reason. One, in the self-​suppression—​the self-​violence—​imagination in its divorcement from the condition of space and time, in its creation of reason. The other, that the imagination, in its attempt to comprehend the whole, breaks down—​at which point, there is the revelation of a reason that is Sublime in relation to Nature. In other words, the power of understanding had to sever itself, purify itself, from its play with imagination in beauty so as to comprehend the infinite. For Hölderlin, as it emerges with reflective judgment, and in the self-​ suppression of imagination, reason is tainted by temporality. Indeed, reason fails to comprehend Nature or even to establish its own existence as “pure reason.” The critique of pure reason, as we will recall, necessitated the accommodation of empirical, phenomenal reality in the context of knowledge as the horizon of possible experience. Yet, Kant seeks to keep reason pure by giving it the status of a no-​thingness—​as that which can have no direct contact with spatio-​temporal existence, but which, in the end, must (but cannot) govern this existence.

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In our reappraisal of the details of the origination of reason through the lens of Hölderlin’s essay, thought becomes sensual, mortal thought—​ tragic thought in which our freedom arises from our limitations, our tragic double bind, from mortality itself, not from some proposed escape from tragic existence as with the Platonism, Christianity, Christo-​ Spinozism of Kant, Fichte, and the early German romantics. Outside of the walls of the latter’s City of God, or with Schlegel’s “Kingdom of God on Earth,” Hölderlin apprehends and articulates the failure to grasp, to comprehend the Absolute, infinity, Being—​by either imagination or understanding—​and this failure reveals our mortal status as spanned among the Many, in the limited realm of individuation. As mortals, we are juxtaposed in the Law, the logos, to the Unlimited (Anaximander), the All, the logos being the articulation of the structure of Being, and our place within this dispensation. As we are contingent parts of a dynamic whole, existence will remain incomprehensible. Nevertheless, though mortal, we come to grasp a rough sketch of our situation, and its radical inevitability. Heraclitus said that few are capable of grasping the whole, with most remaining in their own private worlds. To grasp the whole is to grasp the truth of existence, the logos, the Law of Being, which forbids indifferently any apprehension of Being as such. Freedom is not an escape from reality, as proposed by Kant and his followers, but is the acquiescence of the mortal to the sensual reality of tragic existence in its love and strife. In this light, thought becomes a remembrance of the law, or logos of Being, an understanding of the situation, an understanding of Being (its Law), the law of mortality, but one, for Hölderlin that was to be expressed as poetry, as a poiesis of becoming, of the flux, of the tragic openness of temporal existence. Such an art, in its freedom, may impact, channel the flux in its ever real-​time configurations of existence, as a type of cultural praxis and cultural revolution, intellectual action. Such a cultural force was tragic poetry and drama in sixth century BCE Greece, in which the Law of Being was articulated, imitated, imbibed in an event in which all were participants, in the truest sense, actors, singers, participants, mortals, remembering the Law of Being through the contemplation of the fall of great houses, of great men and women. Such resistance to the state, as demonstrated by Antigone, for instance, is an affirmation of the Law of Being, of mortality and the sensuality, reality of sorrow, grief, love, and fidelity amid the conflictual terrain of existence. As we can agree with Schlegel that we exist in the fragment, we cannot agree with his wish to reconstitute the mirror—​there was never a mirror, there is no transcendence of tragedy—​the Law of Being is inexorable. Mortality is not the negative reflection of the divine, but is its own situation, as an opening amid temporal existence, to which, in its singularity, the event of Being will remain incomprehensible and inviolable. Indeed, this inviolability of Being is one possible account of the nefas of Empedocles, that he defamed the Law of Being with his proclamation of his immortality. His death would then have been his free acquiescence to the Law of Being as a self-​sacrifice for his hubris.

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Such is also the hubris of Kant and his ideological endorsement of Christianity, even as he admits, in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, that Islam or Paganism would also be compatible with the fulfilment of the Moral Law. Kant’s tactical distinction between the public and private intellectual is indicative of an era of philosophy under the intolerant and contemptuous distortions of ecclesiastical and political interference. Nevertheless, as we can clearly ascertain from the radicality of Hölderlin’s criticisms, Kant, far from making a declaration of independence from religious authority, simply appeased this power in his Christian doctrine of Reason, an ideology that asserts the immortality of individual souls and the ethical centrality of these souls. Hölderlin, in his philosophy of the tragic sublime, tears the ground out from under Kant and his followers, with his radical temporalization of thought and openness to tragic fate.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hölderlin and the tragic sublime

In this chapter, we will explore Hölderlin’s statement that Ancient Greek tragedy was an intellectual intuition of human existence, as the art work that, in its failure to resist the sublimity of Being, discloses the tragic character of our existence. Amid the tragic absolute, of the One and All, the truth of mortal existence is expressed not only as an indication of our fundamental predicament, as with Holderlin’s translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone, but also as a return of such remembrance. It is a remembrance of mortality and Anaximandrian Dike or necessity.

In light of our more precise and clear understanding of Hölderlin’s philosophy, we can turn to an articulation of the specificity of his tragic thought, one that denies to Kant his fantasy, his Noble Lie of Reason—​ and, to the romantics, their irony and wit. The texts that will orient our elaboration will be Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles’ tragic dramas Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Hyperion, quotations from various letters, his essays on the tonality of poetry, and his table of tones. The mortal thought of Hölderlin is Dionysian—​it annunciates, sings, poetizes the intimacy of the tragic situation, articulating the indefinite becoming and utter fragility of mortal existence, as the song of the community amid the rise and fall of its heroes and great civilizations. Tragedy is an expression of this “epochal discordance.”1 As we have witnessed in Hölderlin’s confrontation of Kant’s rationalist solution of the sublime, the former articulates a Law of Being that is an

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evocation of our mortality and of the ultimate incomprehensibility of Reality—​not as skepticism, in the manner of Maimon, but as the reiteration of the mortal status and articulation of the place of mortal beings. Hölderlin enacts an intimate poetic phenomenology of existence, in which the poet philosopher acts as the one who preserves, for the community, remembrance of that which “remains.” In other words, Hölderlin has laid out, in the terminology of Heidegger and Krell, though nearly a century and a half before Heidegger’s fragment Sein und Zeit, a fundamental ontology of human existence and a metontology2 of the truth of Being, as the respective specifications of the status of human existence as mortal, and the demarcation of the topos or place of mortal existence through poetic language. Hölderlin’s is a sensuous, mortal thought that serves to lay out the constellations of remembrance and intimate engagement in the moment. Such a topological metontology, in the work of Hölderlin, is the articulation of the mortal situation, the topos, of the tragic sublime. We have ascertained that the sublime, for Hölderlin, is necessarily tragic, which, in the breakdown of comprehension, of both understanding and imagination in the face of the horror of our predicament, gives rise to the feeling (Gefühl) of being shattered against the overwhelming, of the insufficiency of our susceptibilities—​as the truth of our situation, the truth of ourselves. “Reason” arises, as Nietzsche will suggest, as the redemptive Apollonian dream in the wake of the terror of existence—​it is a contestably necessary illusion. Reason as mind is, as first articulated by Anaxagoras as the Nous, the coordinating power, which guides the world “by the mere power of thought alone,”3 unmixed with the myriadity of Phusis, of Nature—​eternal—​just as with Kant, though in his own hypothetical, heuristic sophistry. In either case, and that which is completed in Plato’s academic objectivism, Nous is a notion of a ruling power that exceeds the Limit (Peras)—​it is the Unlimited of Anaximander. In this context, we can regard Nous as the One placed in a unilateral and effective relationship with the myriad fragments of Nature, as a distortion of the Heraclitean notion of Logos, in which the “unity of opposites,” the limited and unlimited is torn apart and reconfigured according to a novel sense of unity in which the limited is revealed as the unlimited in forgetfulness. Such a unity is located, ironically, beyond the intimacy of the physical world, of tragic existence, in the “One” beyond the world, the original enactment of the nihilism of the metaphysical era. In the wake of the shattering event of the Sublime, the mortal traverses the surfaces of cosmic limitation, mortality—​these surfaces are the topology of beings amid the disclosure of existence, of their relationships, relative powers and durabilities, of the attributes and ways of beings, of their metamorphoses in an all-​encompassing and dynamic Nature. The Logos, in its specific, limited sense as breath, voice, is the conversation of mortal existence, which is the historical residence of the community, and its members amid the stark and naked terror of Reality. Yet, the Logos in its sense of

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the whole, beyond private awareness, is the Law of Being that orchestrates Reality, according to insurmountable temporal relationships with indefinite variations. In other words, mortals exist amid the beautiful, upon the surface of the many, and such an existence is governed by the Law of Being, or, by Fate, as revealed in the overwhelming, in events of the sublime. Mortals as fated to the domain of limitation exist and participate in existence upon the surface of the many, witness and experience in their own selves, in their entropic bodies and relations with other bodies, the metamorphoses of Nature. Mortals exist primarily as affective beings and experience the “world” through feeling, through the Empedoclean spiral of Love and Strife, and experience other mortal beings as personalities, faces, types. To this extent, it is simple to see the abysmal basis of science and religion as historical modalities of the story of limitation, poets as those who remember, and philosophers, those who search for the truth. The error on the part of Philolaus, and subsequently of Plato, was the severance of Logos, of the unity of opposites, into a state of affairs of radical opposition. The One is no longer the All in any tangible sense but is severed from the modalities of existence, from the many, and set up as the mon-​archy of existence, beyond existence. For Plato, the One as the Good is beyond Being, as Nous, and the All. The One is defined as radically transcendent of temporality, of Nature, the domain of the mortal, but not as the unity of opposites, of the All—​but, with Anaxagoras, Philolaus and Plato, as a radical displacement of the All and its Law of Being with a One that reposes beyond Being and the All—​it is “nothingness.” The tragic openness of possibility and creativity, amid the All and its inexorably incomprehensible Law, is destroyed, in writing, by Plato. With his work, a tear emerges in the fabric of the tragic reckoning of existence and truth, one that remembered the Law of Being, of Fate, of the mortal status of all and each that exists as a being. The beautiful intimacy of the unity of opposites, of the each and all, is turned into the monstrous site in which the community no longer holds, in its own right, supremacy over those fleeting heroes who emerge from its womb, and with tragic poetry, inevitably return to the community, into the All. That which is at stake, in this case, is not merely the conflict of narrative possibilities, but a shift in the basic paradigm of existential self-​interpretation from that of the tragic, to that of the comedic, in the sense of a transcendence of the tragic double bind—​indeed, the implosion of Logos in its early Greek sense and the re-​writing of the spiritual possibility of mortal beings—​who, in Plato’s transfiguration are no longer mortal, but, in the context of the doctrine of recollection and its narrative of metempsychosis, are on the way to becoming divine—​immortal. As I have argued in my Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration,4 Plato and Pythagoras are radically at odds, in that, for Pythagoras, the journey was from each to All, enlightenment, and not with Plato, as a One (Good) beyond All and Being (Mind), a rapture of the each to the divine, beyond

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the body, temporality, and death. It should be recalled that Aeschylus was a follower of Pythagoras and the work of the latter fit, contrary to Nietzsche, seamlessly within the tragic age of the Greeks. The Law of Being has not been transgressed, but is displayed, ironically, as the eternal recurrence of the same, in which each becomes each other until each becomes All—​as the disclosure of the mortal domain articulated in the Law of Being. There is no “transcendence,” either to Being or beyond Being as such, but instead the mortal community enacts the desire to become attuned to the All via an ethos and bios, a way of life that took the form of a community with shared ownership and equality. It was the poets of this community, struck by the manifest divinity of Nature and its myriad powers, who named these as Gods, Goddesses, and spirits. Such a poiesis of existence, a logos of Being, the groundless ground of culture, discloses the truth (the reality) of the openness and its manifold contours, configurations, personalities, and communal and ecological dynamics of the general economy of existence, of the All. In the following pages, I  will unpack these ideas with two examples, from Oedipus Rex and Antigone, each of which disclose, respectively, an artistic orchestration of the dual facets of Hölderlin’s Dionysian, mortal thought we have been exploring:  of the fundamental ontology of mortal existence, on the one hand, and the metontology of mortal becoming and metamorphosis, on the other. Each of the perspectives is shown in these tragic dramas, upon a typology of poiesis orchestrated in the multicultural context of the indigenous polytheistic (pagan) cultural meta-​narratives of the Mediterranean world.

The philosophical significance of Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles appeared in 1802, although they had been completed a couple of years before. A  translation may not seem as important as his novel or published poems, for instance, except for the two considerations. On the one hand, Hölderlin had explicitly stated that early Greek tragedy was an intellectual intuition of existence, and on the other hand, he has dissolved the pretences of reason, in its characterization by both rationalists and by critical philosophy. Beiser has explored the debates of the pantheism controversy, incited by Jacobi in the 1780s and the question of the authority of reason.5 Yet, as we have seen, Hölderlin’s subversive reading of the sublime is not a mere capitulation to the empiricisms and theoretical scepticisms of Jacobi and Maimon, or a romanticism, but a radical displacement of the cultural and intellectual paradigm from the derivative modernist debates that had arisen in the wake of the work of Descartes, on the role of the subject and the authority of reason, toward

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a primal disclosure of Reality, in the sense of mortal existence, and of its relation with the All and its inaccessibility to Being, the unconcealed. Such is the tragic paradigm, and its intellectual and artistic implications, oriented to the insurmountable context of mortal existence. Philosophy ceased to be oriented by truth since the Apollonian falsification of Platonic Ideas, which, as ideas of the incomprehensible Nous of the divine are not accessible to mortals since aspects of eternity do not apply to our “essence” as temporal, spatial, and causal beings. In this way, a self-​interpretation of existence, of mortal existence, if it is oriented to the articulation of truth, cannot have recourse to ideas that transgress the horizons of possibility, which, for mortals, is that of radical temporality. In light of the default of reason, of the imposture of its own incompre­ hensible fantasy, Hölderlin would, as a philosopher, no longer be compelled to articulate philosophical truth in the manner of a rational treatise in the tradition that began in the scholastic context of late Aristotelian theological philosophy. In the wake of Hölderlin’s dissolution of the imposture of eternity, of immortality (since, it could be argued that every modern “philosopher” was in fact a theologian, excepting Hume, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche), philosophy becomes an intimate, poetic, and radically temporal thinking of existence that cultivates and maintains a remembrance of the mortal status of human existence, on the one hand, and articulates a topology/​typology of the contours, configurations, tendencies, and trajectories of existence, for creative action, on the other. Such thinking, moreover, need not be systematic, but its Law would be that of an Anaximanderian necessity, of our mortal status with respect to the Logos of Seyn, and not of a dogmatic and hegemonic reason, which, while claiming to be freedom itself, hoards freedom in its turret, in its windowless house. That which is disclosed in the poetic work, in this case, in the tragedies of Sophocles, is precisely an articulation of the Law of Being—​and it is in this way that tragedy is an intellectual intuition of existence. As was alluded some way ago, the meaning of this phrase cannot be easily translated or transposed between the works of the various advocates of an intellectual intuition. For Kant, there were definite reasons for there not to be an intellectual intuition—​precisely due to the fact that reason is an a-​temporal Idea, which, while admitting sensibility and the horizons of possible experience as transcendental elements of knowledge, itself is merely a faculty of principles that administers the use of the understanding and does not apply to the construct of experience in the theoretical sense. Yet, with the displacement of the Kantian paradigm and its limits—​and the modernist subjectivist turn as such—​the meaning of intellectual intuition, as a thinking sense, acquires a radically different elaboration as a poetic-​phenomenology of mortality. Mortal thought meditates upon the overwhelming necessity of the death of mortal beings as emergent and fleeting events of an incomprehensible cosmos. Such a situation is disclosed, as a compositional, artistic unity, in Sophocles.

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Oedipus Rex In the first play of a trilogy, Oedipus Rex articulates and displays the fundamental situation of the human being, one of insurmountable Fate, in the form of a tragic drama. Ostensibly, the narrative, which occurs as remembrances of fateful events, is that of Thebes, a city in crisis, subject to a plague beset by a monster, the Sphinx, who will not be cajoled without an answer to her question: “What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?” She does not disclose the reason for her attack upon the city, but awaits only the one who will give her the answer. Oedipus, a young traveller, happens onto the city and witnessing its trauma, answers the question of the Sphinx. His answer is: “Man.” With this answer, the Sphinx departs from the city. It is presumed by the citizens of Thebes that the traveller Oedipus, in light of the departure of the monster, and the apparent ending of the trauma, has given the right answer, and as a hero, one distinguished from the Many, is given the Queen of the city as his wife. The drama proper begins after these events, with Thebes once again in crisis. Oedipus undertakes the usual procedure of consulting the oracle of Apollo and is told that the city is under siege due to a curse of blood. The killer of the last king, Laius, remains in the city, and his presence is the provocation that has incited the wrath of the gods. As the drama unfolds, it is revealed that Oedipus is the killer himself and that he has, in an attempt to flee the prophetic certainty of the oracle of Apollo, of Fate itself, ironically, fulfilled his prophesy precisely and by necessity. That which is significant is the structure of the drama itself as the illustration of the temporality of human existence, as the emergence of the hero, of his individuation, from the Many, and his inevitable destruction or, in the case of Oedipus, his exile and departure into obscurity. Yet, in the manner of Parmenides’ poem in which he describes being swept away to a Goddess who disclosed to him the meaning of the Truth for herself, as One, the oracle of Apollo serves as a poetic device for the indication of that which is radically other, in essence, to mortal existence. While the drama reflects the journey and events of the great man as a temporal succession, for the god Apollo, there is no drama at all—​there is no Many for Apollo, but the necessity of Fate and the certainty of that which for him has already always occurred. In this way, the initial question of the Sphinx is an intervention from the god, who would have already known that Oedipus would come to that very specific situation of the question. The plague of Thebes, his original birthplace, was already due to his transgression and his answer to the question was wrong. The answer, again taking into account the perspective of the gods, of the One, is not “Man,” but “Oedipus” for the latter exists in a state of radical incomprehensibility, embedded in mortal thought, not of the One, but of the play and unity of opposites, the Many

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which is the conflict of Love and Strife. Hölderlin writes in his “Notes to the Oedipus,” The intelligibility of the whole principally depends on considering the scene where Oedipus interprets the Oracle too infinitely, and is tempted to the nefas.6 In this way, in light of Oedipus’ failure to recognize himself as the “incurable disease,” he in effect hides within the generalization of “Man,” when the Sphinx was already the judge, perhaps Apollo in drag. Due to Oedipus’ blindness, or perhaps his own unconscious denial, it will take the unfolding of the drama to disclose the truth of his specific situation, a disclosure that is facilitated by the continuous undertow of the remembrance and thinking of the Chorus, Tiresias, and other members of the community. Indeed, the journey is the Heraclitean shift from the merely private narcissism of most to the perspective of the whole. The apotheosis of the drama, the revelation of truth, is portrayed as shocking to the infra-​dramatic characters, a shock that is shared by the audience, who as mortals, are also subject to the time-​ condition and thus to the compositional structure of the narrative. Yet, it is not the shock of the rather seedy details of the affair that is the fundamental intent of the drama as a poetic philosophical work. That which the tragic drama discloses is the radical finitude of all mortals, high and low, and that the greatest of us all may be monstrous in the eyes of the gods, and would be for us, if the truth was revealed. In this way, Oedipus Rex is a philosophical work oriented to the articulation, through poetry, dialogue, and music, of the tragic truth of mortal existence, a fate that is shared by all of the performers, the audience and the author himself.

Antigone If Oedipus Rex illustrates the mortal status of human beings with respect to the gods, and to Fate itself, Antigone undertakes a specification of the basic character of this mortal existence as the spiralic unity of opposites, of the conflict between Love and Strife—​of the divergence, of the laws of mortals (restricted economy) and those of the divine (the general economy, and those sacred practices that serve as a remembrance of the divine, which is, in the context of the drama, a negative remembrance of ourselves as mortal). The tragic drama involves the children of Oedipus and Jocasta, Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone, and Ismene and the terrible events that occurred after their father’s departure from Thebes. In the wake of the suicide of Jocasta and the exile of Oedipus, her son and husband, it was decided that their sons Eteocles and Polynices would jointly share the throne, and would exercise power in alternating years.

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Yet, after the first year, Eteocles refused to hand power over to his brother, and, in response, Polynices gathered an alliance of six allied princes, and attacked Thebes to exercise his claim to the throne. In the ensuing strife, both brothers were killed, and Creon, Jocasta’s brother, assumed the throne. Creon, now as King, decided that Eteocles would be buried in an honorable manner, but Polynices would not be buried, but left outside the city gates for the animals and vultures to eat. Creon decided, in other words, that even though Eteocles refused to step down, it was Polynices who attacked the city with its enemies, and that he should be dishonored in the eyes of men and gods. Antigone, Creon’s niece and sister of Eteocles and Polynices, objected to the nefas of forbidding the burial of Polynices, as a violation of the sacred laws of the dead. In the night, she undertakes a ritual for her dead brother and sprinkled dirt on his body. After this breach of the law of the state, of the order of the King, Antigone was brought before the King, who demanded that she relent from her desire to bury her brother and fulfil the sacred laws. She refused and was sentenced to be “immured,” which is to be buried alive in an exitless tomb. Antigone is brought to the tomb and is placed behind the stone. Haemon, her lover, having received a message from her, came to her, but found that she had already hanged herself. In agony in the face of his dead lover, he stabbed himself, crying out, and as Creon demanded that the stone be removed, his own wife, having finished her fateful knitting, retired to her room, and slashed her own throat. Antigone, caught in the double bind of the laws of the state and the laws of the dead, between the artificial Apollonian order of the state, of the restricted economy of the profane, and the aorgic Dionysian ecstasy of the All, of the general economy of the sacred, decides to transgress the laws of the state for those of the dead, to appease the violent exteriority of the sacred as her brother’s body rotted outside the walls. Antigone, nevertheless, binds herself to both of the laws at once, and she is aware that her decision means certain death, a penalty that she accepts, even to the extent of carrying out her own execution. Antigone as a tragic drama illustrates the metontological contours, configurations, and conflicts of the organized topos of mortal existence, and with its intricate meditation upon the conflict between differing orders of law and of loyalty, discloses itself as a philosophical work upon the complexity of the law and the potentially lethal conflicts between the types of Law to which we are bound.

The Dionysian character of Hölderlin’s mortal thought As we have seen in the previous review of the tragic dramas of Sophocles, which Hölderlin injected into the zeitgeist of a Germany at war with his

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translations, the poetic works exhibit, respectively, the dominant features of Hölderlin’s poetic thought. We will recall, from our earlier explorations, that, while general features of Hölderlin’s thought have been outlined in the literature, a precise philosophical specification of his thought had not been undertaken, not only with respect to the precise details of the repercussions of his thought upon that of Kant, but also, with respect to the vast philosophical difference between Hölderlin and the early German romantics, in the figures of Novalis and Schlegel. We have seen that the vast difference between the latter and Hölderlin is indicated not only in the latter’s subversion of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” but also his rejection of Platonic beauty and objectivity in favor of the early Greek conception of Logos, of the unity of opposites, the All and each, harmony and discordance. In this light, by avoiding the various Spinozist and Platonic strategies for overcoming an apparent subjectivism in the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, Hölderlin has displaced the modernist problematic, which is, after all, a Christian problematic (as the secular itself is only a suspension and not a breach or displacement of Christendom), by the rearticulation of tragic, mortal thought, which has its own strict conceptions of necessity and universality, conceptions to which Hölderlin acquiesced and articulated in his work. At the same time, while we have a much clearer and detailed picture of  Hölderlin’s thought, the extant work, essays and fragments, allow us to explore further fine details of his mortal thought, given the preeminent role given to poiesis, a category including music, in his interpretation and translation of Greek tragic thought and poetics to German culture. Indeed, in the wake of Hölderlin’s repudiation of Kantian (Christian) Reason, there would need to be an articulation of the poetics that would displace Kant’s rationalist table of categories with respect to the construction and articulation of tragic thinking, mortal thought. Hölderlin, as it turns out, created such tables, of poetic tones, which, in light of his orientation to the truth of the mortal predicament would provide a rough sketch of the way we use language, of poetics, by means of which mortals must, as a calculable law, disseminate mortal thought. Such a Law ironically requires that mortals acquiesce to the incomprehensible amid the concrete existential becoming of our predicament, and our affirmation of our cosmic status as mortal, orchestrated amid our reproduction and transformation of the sensus communis. In this way, we have an intimate engagement with other mortals in the poetic articulation and exploration of existence, one that, as we must note, through Hölderlin’s triadic schema of the tones, of the epic, tragic, and lyric, gives rise to the notion of “dialectics” (the Heraclitian unity of opposites), and by whom Hegel and Schelling, the philosophers of historical transformation, were brought to the early Greek thinkers. That which is a stake is our own sense of truth as we live as mortals—​ not as triumphant soldiers of reason who conquer nature and overcome death, but as those who acquiesce to Fate. For mortals, the ultimate meaning of Fate and its “unity” must remain inaccessible amid the temporal flux of existence,

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abiding in the unconscious, an abyss upon which our fragile awareness sets as a makeshift. For Hölderlin, despite the discordance of epochs generated by the fatal illusions of immortality peddled in the politicization of religion, in the fragmentation of conflicting monotheisms, our situation has never changed. For Hölderlin, the gods have always been there, right before our eyes, though very few invoke them. His work was such an invocation of the gods as a poetic affirmation of fate, hymns amid a mortal thought that has honesty as one of its central virtues. Such a thought is eccentric in its ecstatic openness to the manifestations of tragic becoming and freedom. The tragedy—​the situation of mortals—​is that experience is spanned as temporality and each event is quickly engulfed in contingency, praise and blame, love and strife. We are not gods who see all in an instant, already anticipating in their awareness the devastations yet to come for reckless mortals. This abyss of contingency engulfs all works of art—​any act of agency, of creation or thought by a mortal.

The philosophical significance of the theory of tones Ostensibly, Hölderlin’s theory of poetic tones seems to be a work of literary poetics, and has been either neglected or treated as a curiosity, as a discourse that, through the usual sorting method, pertains, in an eccentric manner, to the academic slots of literature or of poetological studies. In other words, they are generally ignored. Yet, if we are to take seriously Hölderlin’s dissolution of the phantasm of Reason, as the negative product of an imagination sacrificed upon the altar of immortality, then we do not seek to systematize theoretical concepts or moral postulates, of the derivative domains of determinative judgment, nor must we misunderstand the significance of language and of its radical embeddedness amid the phenomenal world, as the Law of Being articulated in tragic poetry. Hölderlin articulates the ground and the specific mechane, elements, and procedures of philosophical craft, of his philosophical praxis as poetic art, in such poetico-​ philosophical essays as “The Ground of Empedocles” (1799), “The Declining Fatherland” (1799), “Feeling Speaks in a Poem” (1799), “On the Different Modes of Poetic Composition” (1799), “Lyric, in Appearance an Idealic Poem” (1800), “Does the Idealic Catastrophe” (1800), “Poetological Tables,” “Notes on the Oedipus” (1802–​1803), “Notes on the Antigone” (1802), and others, including many fragments.7 In the wake of his poetic and philosophical revolution, these essays must be treated as philosophical texts, in the context of a philosophy in emergence, and as philosophical meditations of not only the context for artistic praxis and expression, but also the thoughts that were associated with the creation of specific art works.

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Hölderlin’s poetic tones were an elaboration of a poetics grounded upon three modes or poetic types: Epic, Tragic, and Lyric, and their manifestation of tragic existence through the alternating tones of Heraclitus’ “unity of opposites.” Each of the modes, moreover, contain the other two modalities of poetics, to a lesser and/​or latent extent in its articulation and composition. Rainer Nägele provides an excellent description: What seems at first glance an esoteric, playful, or even obsessive preoccupation with calculable laws of poetry, filling whole sheets of paper with tables of permutations of tones and their sequences, is in fact an attempt to formulate not only a philosophy of composition, but a philosophy, log, and poetics of representation fundamental principles guide these poetics: (1) all poetic presentation (Darstellung) occurs in time and is, therefore sequential; this is the basis for a poetics of alternating tones and representations (Vorstellungen); (2) no presentation is a simple straightforward expression of a pre-​given condition or being; thus there is not only a sequence of tones, but every manifest tone is the “artistic character” (Kunstcharakter) of a “basic tone” (Grundton) that cannot appear as such, but only in its opposite character. The basis for the tragic constellation, for example, is an underlying “basic tone” of original unity and intellectual intuition that can only be presented in the sequential tearing apart of all unity, in the tragic, painful dissemination of what was One. Hölderlin’s vocabulary and its differentiation of a musical Grundton, and the figural artistic character of presentation foreshadows in a certain way Nietzsche’s early aesthetics of a Dionysian, musical foundation of being its Apollonian manifestation in defined forms and beauty.8 The notion of tones recalls the musical composition of the cosmos in the Pythagorean philosophy, which in its non-​Platonic interpretation upheld the Logos, the unity of opposites, and whose “doctrine of transmigration” could be heard as a symbol or allegory of tragic irony, in which each asymptotically becomes the All through an indefinite—​ and incomprehensible—​ process of enlightenment. Yet, for Hölderlin, as with Heraclitus and Sophocles, the praxis of poiesis, as philosophical expression, is, as with the literary works of Camus and Sartre, both a remembrance of that which is and must remain—​a remembrance of equality before mortality, and also guidance for the cultivation of the culture of freedom, equality, and community. Hölderlin describes his mortal thought as a radical phenomenology of existence, in contrast to “philosophy,” which treats, Hölderlin contends, only “one faculty of the soul.” He writes: The rule is one of the various successions in which idea and feeling and reflection develop, according to poetic logic. For just as philosophy always treats only one faculty of the soul, so that the representation of

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this one faculty makes a whole, and the mere connection between the parts of this faculty is called logic: so poetry treats the various faculties of the human being, so that the representations of these different faculties makes a whole, and the connection between the more independent parts of the different faculties can be called the rhythm, taken in a higher sense, of the calculable law.9 As we have explored earlier, in reference to the regulative illusions of Kantian philosophy and its romantic children, it would seem clear that, in light of Hölderlin’s mortal thought, that poiesis, as it considers the human being under multidimensional aspects, has a clear claim to being philosophy—​in the sense of its echoes across nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century philosophy. Poetics, as Hölderlin sketches, is oriented to the truth of the human being, and seeks to find the rhythm, the calculable law of such a multidimensional existence. Such a law is exhibited in his works of art, his poems, his novel Hyperion, his many essays, and his translations. If the desire of philosophy is Philosophia, of the love of truth, it would be evident, especially given Hölderlin’s unmasking of modernist Reason, that mortal thought, as makeshift as it may be, would in itself, as with the fragment of Schlegel, reflect, express, articulate, and signify the exposure of our mortal situation. As Hölderlin wrote, we are a sign without meaning. Hölderlin is seeking to provide models for Paideia in a transfiguration of poetics in German and European culture. The interrelationship between the types, of epic, tragic, and lyrical poetry consummates a unique type, a mixed type, of equal stature, and manifested in the works that remain as traces of remembrance of a world which is no more. Hölderlin does not wish to resurrect a dead civilization, contrary to many stereotypes of romanticism—​and even if we still wish to apply this name to him—​yet, Greece remains unique in its art, poetry, and philosophy, the character of which is also at stake in Hölderlin’s interpretation. The musical, Dionysian character of Hölderlin’s mortal thought is demonstrated, not only in light of his theory of tones, and of its purpose and methods, but also in his contestation of an attribute of sublimity to beings who are in fact mortal—​a sublimity that is a usurpation of the Law of Being, of tragic existence and is thus an act of hubris. In this way, Hölderlin’s act of philosophical intervention is to displace a pseudo-​philosophy, organized under the eyes of the censor, both political and ecclesiastical, but not in the genre of a treatise, but as a poetry of existence and remembrance, traces of the specious present, to the conjuration of the voices of dead Greek kings and queens, also fated to death, deaths shown, sung for all eyes, ears. As Kant’s rationalist solution of the sublime falls, our freedom, formerly grounded upon a game of words, is now—​and already always has been—​ grounded upon the primordial equality of mortals before death. Any claim by a mortal of his own divinity, or divine status, is nefas,

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hubris—​an insult of and lie to the community, each member of which knows death. In light of the sensuous and intimate topos of thinking that Hölderlin is exhibiting, it is music, as with Pythagoras, that becomes the manner in which we become attuned with the All, with that which is the case. Hölderlin, as did Nietzsche later, wrote many hymns as well as his many published and unpublished poems. But, to regard such poems as “merely” poems, to be sorted into its appropriate poetic slot, is to miss the point of his philosophy and his decision to enact it as poetry. We should never forget that Hölderlin prodded Schelling to write a novel, but that he did not. In light of this poetic commitment, we can turn again to his poetic works, examining their tonal composition, listening to the words, contemplating the ladder that was thrown down, the several essays, fragments, as Hölderlin gave his work over to time, that according to which we pay recompense to each other, to the other mortals of the community (Anaximander). Hölderlin is a poet philosopher not only in his praxis, deciding what remains, but also reminding us of our mortality, expressing himself in a language that annunciates the symphonic ethos of the Dionysian community. Again, nothing has changed, human beings have always been mortal, each of us are, and we should never forget this fate—​although it seems that we had forgotten for nearly two thousand years. European civilization is forever indebted to the Arabic scholars for preserving our heritage while we sought to flee in the face of our destiny as the land of the evening. Yet, it was only the second Renaissance of the nineteenth century that began to clear away the delusions of a lost millennium. The first Renaissance, as it was under the political domination of the ecclesiastic authorities, gave us a distorted and inadequate reception of the newly translated Greek works. The history of Modernity is the history of the death of God, and the liberation of thought and life from the delusions and falsifications of existence by politicians of the soul.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mortal thought: The poetics of Being and existence Mortal thought, as we have seen over the previous chapters, is a tragic poetics of Being and existence, one which seeks to remind those who pretend at “infinite thought” of its own hubris and its mortal character. In this chapter, I will lay out Hölderlin’s philosophy as exemplified in his poem, “Bread and Wine,” and juxtapose his mortal, poetic thought with the mathematical, infinite thought of Badiou, who has mistakenly declared the end of the “Age of the Poets,” which is after all, as the age of revolution, one that is still underway.

Hölderlin: Mortal thought as poetic ontology and metontology As we have revealed across the previous chapters, Hölderlin had initiated a radical breach in philosophy through the renaissance of early Greek thought in his writings, a translation that emerged in the context of post-​Kantian, post-​French Revolution “Germany,” a country that was remembered by poets for millennia, yet one that perhaps only existed in any systematic sense with Hegel’s laughable equation of the Prussian State with the “end of history.” It is perhaps from such an angle that we see the greater affinity of Hölderlin and Schelling, than with Hegel, who, although he maintained a bitter feud with Schlegel for the rest of his life, shared with the latter the ideal of the Platonic republic, as the Christian sittlichkeit, which emerges as the manifest, revealed culmination of History. Both Schelling and Hölderlin, if we are to call them early German romantics, would need to be called

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Tragic romantics, as each of the philosophies, by maintaining Heraclitus’ tragic notion of the logos (as distinct from a distorted Nous), articulates a notion of Being, of the Absolute, that must remain radically inaccessible to mortal comprehension. In his System of Transcendental Idealism, reflecting the influence of Spinoza, Schelling articulates a tragic philosophy (often called pessimistic) in which temporality, while tentatively placed within a systematic and dynamic philosophical composition, elaborates the fundamental character of mortals, though still as the pinnacle of the creativity of Nature, and the metontological character with respect to the modes by which we come to comprehension, together with our agency, skill, and creativity by which we resist death in our freedom. In his 1805 On the Essence of Human Freedom, which was the subject of a 1936 lecture course by Heidegger, Schelling equates human freedom with evil—​with a resistance against God by means of a cultivation of Nature, our twin, but a resistance that not only feels its own inevitable failure as a species, as “humanity,” but a failure that is already known to each mortal. Mortals and Nature have emerged from God, are the God in a state of self-​resistance, of radical freedom. Schelling held that art, mortal creativity, was the highest act, above religion and even philosophy, in the fleeting revelations, glimpses of truth that it retrospectively gives. We could suggest perhaps that Schelling embraces tragic fate through an intentional repetition of the tragic destinies of Oedipus and Antigone. It recalls Sartre: “Man is condemned to be free.”1 Hölderlin, on the other hand, in his philosophical poetics and in his individual works, never speaks of condemnation, or of the Platonic and Neo-​Platonic “judgment” that the body is the prison house of the soul. As Heidegger pointed out in his lecture course on Schelling’s On the Essence of Human Freedom, human freedom remains the vital question in all attempts of systematic philosophy. The irony of “systems” of philosophy beginning with Spinoza, as Heidegger contends that the latter had articulated the first “Modern” system of philosophy, is that theoretical systems negate freedom automatically, and by definition—​ unless, freedom is made the condition of possibility, or the ground, of the system. Schelling, unlike Spinoza, places existential freedom as the basis of his system, and places art at its pinnacle. Yet, with such a grounding without grounds (Abgrund), it becomes immediately evident that a system of philosophy is not needed at all—​so Hegel’s work was unnecessary after Schelling, though neither seem to have realized the implications of his thought. Hölderlin, however, who can be clearly traced as one of the primary philosophical agitators in the “development of German Idealism” is contesting Kant’s call for a system of reason. He has not only dispelled the illusion of reason with his poetics of the tragic sublime, but also described logic as mere connections in a partial, diminished consideration of the human being, from the perspective of one faculty alone. Hölderlin rejects such a reductionist philosophy and the need for a systematic structure to philosophy. Indeed, it could be argued that the notion of system was only introduced, if we understand the history of

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philosophy, tactically in the early Modern attempt to establish a modicum of independence for a subordinate and policed inquiry within a politically and culturally dominant Christian theological regime. In is in this light that Hölderlin, while perhaps exceeding Schelling and Hegel in philosophy, never planned to write a philosophical treatise, outlining a system of philosophy. Hölderlin instead writes of the “deepest intimacy” that is expressed in the tragic poem, which, as the Apollonian drama unfolds the fate of the hero: It is the deepest intimacy that expresses itself in a tragic dramatic poem. The tragic ode, too represents the intimate in the most positive differentiations, in real opposites, but these opposites are, after all, more present simply in the form and as the immediate language of feeling. The tragic poem conceals the intimacy in the representation even more, expresses a deeper intimacy, a more infinite divinity.2 And: Even in the tragic dramatic poem, therefore, the divine that expresses itself is that which the poet feels and experiences in his own world, even the tragic dramatic poem is a picture of that which is alive, which is and was present to him in his life; but as this image of intimacy everywhere denies, and must deny, its ultimate ground, it must everywhere approach the symbolic; the more infinite the intimacy is, the more inexpressible; the more near to the nefas, the more strictly and coldly the image must differentiate between man and his element as it is felt, in order to hold the feeling fast within its limits, the less the image is able to express the feeling immediately, it must deny it both according to the form and according to the subject-​matter, the subject matter must be bolder, more alien metaphor and example of it, the form must wear more the character of opposition and division.3 It is clear in the context of our exploration thus far that these passages are an elaboration of his 1795 essay “Urteil und Seyn,” which we investigated earlier, not only with respect to his radical criticism of a merely reflective judgment in respect of the intrinsic impossibility of a disclosure of Seyn, the Absolute, but also of the Law of Being, of the status of mortality and of the nefas of that one who does not hold fast to his limits, as a mortal. This latter injunction of necessity reveals to us our fleeting existence amid the tragic double bind, a situation that is disclosed intimately, through feeling (not through the presumption of rational concepts), but one that is limited, disseminated as poetic language in the symbolic realm, within the poetico-​ phenomenological praxis of mortal thought. The deepest intimacy tempts us to the nefas, but the concealment of Being necessitates deflected expression. We are reminded of Nietzsche’s use of the

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tropes of the Dionysian and Apollonian, which constitute the possibility for drama, as the symbolization of the musical intoxication of the chorus, of the feeling community, into the “dream-​image” of the fall of great houses, men and women, each of whom must acquiesce to the Law of Being, to equality before mortality. Before turning to Badiou’s attempt to displace the “Age of the Poets” with a repetition of Platonist “objectivism,” we will explore Hölderlin’s elegy “Bread and Wine” (1800), one of his most explicitly Dionysian poems, as an example of our rough sketch of his philosophy.

A reading of “Bread and Wine” (“Brod und Wein,” An Heinze)4 “Bread and Wine,” written in 1800, is dedicated to the anarchist writer Johann Wilhelm Heinze, author of Ardinghello, with whom he spent some time, along with Susette Gontard, in Kassel, in 1796. The poem is divided into nine sections, each of which has eighteen lines, except for section seven, which has sixteen lines. “Bread and Wine” begins with an intimate description of a town in the evening, at the close of day. The inhabitants, sated with the pleasures of the day, return home to rest after selling their wares in the marketplace. As Night falls, coaches rush away, with torches illuminating the road. The music of strings sound out across the evening, the poet wonders if it comes from a man lonely, or in love, in remembrance. The music is joined by the splashes of the fountain and the church bells, in “quivering half-​light” as the watchman calls out the hour. The poet, struck, tells us to look at the rising moon, the shadow of the Earth, and Night, the “fantastical” comes, full of stars, which the poet thinks are “little concerned for us.” Night is a “stranger to all that is human,” our response to her is astonishment, as she mournfully covers the mountains. In the second stanza, the poet speaks of the Night as marvellous, incomprehensible, and unknown even to the wise. Yet, she works upon our souls “ever hoping.” The poet, then, perhaps with a touch of sarcasm, states that this incomprehension was the will of “God, the Highest,” who the poet says “very much loves you,” concluding, as if making an argument, with “therefore, Dearer even than Night reasoning Day is to you.” The sarcasm would be an attack upon the Apollonian metaphysical catechism that allays all doubts and uncertainty under the light of the omniscience of Day. Yet, in an alternation of tone, the poet begins to speak of the enjoyment of the pleasures of the Night, of the shadows, of dreams, and states that we rightly honor her with hymns and garlands since she is sacred to the lost, mad and dead. Night herself remains, the poet continues, firm and free, but to us, mortals, who descend into the dark, she gives “Holy drunkenness” and “frenzied oblivion,” which

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Grant the on-​rushing word, sleepless as lovers are too, And a wine-​cup more full, a little more intense and more daring, Holy remembrance too, keeping us wakeful at night.5 In the poem thus far, the poet has situated his reader in a place, the community, as it exists, individuated amid the temporal flux, manifested as the alternation between Day and Night. Each state, that of Light and Darkness, has its own characteristics: that of the Day, work, Reason, and calculating; that of Night, rest, imagination, and dreaming. Night, the fantastical, proves to be incomprehensible for human beings, who, far from sublime, prefer the day and the comforting lie. Yet, there remain those who embrace the night, who gives to human beings the gifts of “holy drunkenness,” “frenzied oblivion,” and the “on-​rushing word,” so that “deep in the dark there shall be something that endures.” Wine keeps some “wakeful at night,” sleepless lovers, the intense and daring, and the poets, who enact holy remembrance. We have thus been given the articulation of a dynamic, temporal state of affairs, of a situation that is tied to and surrounds the mortals who inhabit the place, and an indication of a distinction within the mortals, with regard to their respective orientations by the characteristics of Day or Night. In other words, Hölderlin has, in the first two stanzas, reiterated his fundamental ontology of human existence as mortal, and laid the ground for the articulation of a metontology, poiesis of words and rhythm, a poetics of temporal existence, of our place in spiralic recurrence. In the third stanza, there is an acceleration of the rhythm of the previous tone, that of the Night, as the poet cannot conceal his heart, his courage, in the wake of a divine fire that incites us to break free, “day-​long, night-​ long,” “Off to see open spaces, Where we may seek what is ours, distant, remote though it be!” At noon and at midnight, a measure exists that is common to all, death, but each still has his own measure and freedom—​ “Each makes for the place and reaches the place that he can.” For the poet, it is the Isthmus, when in “Hallowed night,” he is “seized by its power”—​and in his freedom, he should not be “derided.” The poet will seek the mountains of Greece, Parnassus, Olympus, Cithaeron, the pines, grapes, and the rivers in the land of Cadmus, to the place the poet has come and to where “points the god who is to come.” The third stanza articulates a shift in location, through the Night inspired imagination, to the other, from which, as Hölderlin stated repeatedly in his essays, the most intimate may be seen most clearly. In this way, with his epochal transportation to the Greeks, Hölderlin is turning his eye poetically toward his own homeland, to Germany. In the fourth stanza, the poets speaks of the “Happy land of the Greeks,” of which he heard in his youth, of the mythology of the Greeks, but he asks where are the temples, vessels of nectar for the gods, songs, the oracles, the swift, the thunderer. The civilization, and the gods of the Night, have fallen

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into oblivion: “Delphi’s asleep, and where now is great fait to be heard?” Not able to stand the intensity of life on his own, one cried out, “Father Aether,” and “tongue after tongue took it up then.” The poet suggests that such wealth when shared with strangers turns to rapture, as “the word gathers new strength when asleep.” The poet remembers the entry of the Heavenly, of the Father, Clear Light, “shaking the foundations,” and from this “gloom,” their Day comes to “mankind.” In the fifth stanza, the poet elaborates upon his intimation of the entry of the Light, Heavenly, of the Day into human existence. Yet, only children perceive them at first, as they are too bright, and mortals, afraid, “name those who approach him with gifts.” The joyfulness of the gift giver enters into existence, first only as a tolerated idolatry, and then as Truth when the gods reveal themselves and their faces in person, “One and All long ago, once and for all, they were named.” Mankind becomes “accustomed to joy and to Day, every of his desires are satisfied. The poet is describing the process by which the originary dazzling magisterium tremendens of the Night, of the Heavenly is domesticated as the Gods of the Day, named once and for all. It is Germany that lives in the intensity of the Day, of the exhaustion of Greece in Plato, in the domesticated Gods, of religion that is no longer holy, sacred. It is in the context that Hölderlin will advocate a cultural revolution that seeks to read the Greeks backward, from the calm classicism of the Platonists, toward the Dionysian and eccentric unravelling of the “machines” of the Day. With regard to our situation, the poet counsels: Such is man; when the wealth is there, and no less than a god in Person tends him with gifts, blind he remains, unaware. First he must suffer; but now he names his most treasured possession, Now for it words like flowers leaping alive he must find.6 In the sixth stanza, the poet details his description of the formalization of the religion of the Day, in a remarkable similarity to Georges Bataille’s demarcation of the “Religion Within the Limits of Reason,” Part Two of Theory of Religion,7 in which praxis becomes regimented, in which production is the profane fabrication of commodities by means of commodities, by the order of reason. Nations rise up and compete with each other in the construction of artworks, of temples, a competition over the “presence” of the gods. Yet, again, the poet asks, “where are these great works?” Athens is withered, and Thebes, now do no weapons ring out In Olympia, nor now those chariots, all golden, in games there, And no longer are wreaths hung on Corinthian ships? Why are they silent too, the theatres, ancient and hallowed? Why not now does the dance celebrate, consecrate joy?8

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In his remembrance of that which has been, he not only contemplates the temporality of their absence, but also the striking difference between the other and his own temporal place. That other becomes the mirror in which we are reflected, in which we can ascertain historical flux and differentiation. In this light, “Bread and Wine” is a genealogy of the Holy, of the divine fire, which has become objectified in a religion of the Day, of reason, of calculation, and, in this way, is comparable to Hesiod’s “Five Ages of Man” and to Schelling’s and Hegel’s own philosophies of history. In the seventh stanza, the poet transports us back to the present, “But, my friend, we have come too late.” Yet, as we had ascertained earlier, for mortals, nothing has changed in the character of our fundamental ontology, our mortality. That which has changed, however, is not only our narrative, our own self-​ understanding, and our frail comprehension of human existence, but also, perhaps, our capacity to feel the sacred, which after all has no necessary relationship with religion. The poet states: Though the gods are living, Over our heads they live, up in a different world. Endlessly there they act, and such is their kind, wish to spare us, Little they seem to care whether we live or do not. For not always a frail, a delicate vessel can hold them, Only at times can our kind bear the full impact of the gods. Ever after our life is dream about them.9 The poet is suggesting that our preference for the reasoning of the Day, that desire for self-​content and satiation that culminates in our domestication of the sacred, of the violence of the exterior, of the magisterium tremendens of the Holy.10 The New Religion is that of the Day, our idolatry of the Light, enacted as the continual Apollonian suppression of Night, of the Dionysian dance of celebration and jubilation, of the festival of existence. It is such a suppression of the Dionysian that is the precise means by which we lost our capacity to apprehend the holy, the Law of Being. We have become weakened by our Apollonian dream, by our illusion of redemption, and with Kant, of our alleged triumph over nature and death. The poet invokes heroes whose “heart’s strength can match heavenly strength as before.” But, we wait for that time when “thundering,” the gods will return. In the meantime, the poet says that he would rather sleep than be alone and friendless, “as we are.” Amusingly, the poet asks, “Who wants poets at all in lean years?” The stanza ends with a comparison of poets to the wandering priests of the god Dionysus, “who in Holy Night roamed from one place to the next.” In the eighth stanza, the poet remembers the turning of the Father’s face from the mortals and the mourning then that commenced upon the earth. There is then reference to a Genius who came, proclaimed the end of the Day, and then “went away.” Yet, as “tokens” that they had once been here, the “heavenly choir” left a “few presents behind.” These gifts were left

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behind for the pleasure of the “humanly human” as for “spiritual joy great things had now grown too great,” and there is a “lack of the strong for Joy’s extremity.” The silent thanks that remain are bread and wine, the former, the fruit of the earth, touched by the sunlight, and the latter, issued from the “thundering god.” The poet concludes the stanza: Therefore in tasting them we think of the Heavenly who once were Here and shall come again, come when their advent is due; Therefore also the poets in serious hymns to the wine-​god, Never idly devised, sound that most ancient one’s praise.11 In the ninth, and last, stanza, the poet speaks of those traces of Dionysus, intimating the task of the poet as the collector of such traces, leads the stars in the sky upward and down without end, Always glad, like the living boughs of the evergreen pine tree Which he loves, and the wreath wound out of the ivy for choice, Since it lasts and conveys the trace of the gods now departed Down to the godless below, into the midst of their gloom.12 Yet, the poet scolds the present, chiding that We are the godless, heartless, foretold “in the songs of the ancients,” as the last age of man: “Look, we are it, ourselves; fruit of Hersperia it is!” The poet gives us our prognosis: Much, however, occurs, Nothing succeeds, because we are heartless, mere shadows until our Father Aether, made known, recognized, fathers us all.13 The poet then make reference to the Son of Highest, the Syrian, who bears a torch that makes the “wise men” smile, captives frozen in their own situation, who shall yet thaw in response to the light. Dreams more gentle and sleep in the arms of the Earth lull the Titan, Even the envious one, Cerberus, drinks and lies down.14 The mythology of Jesus prepares for the great thaw of the light, of the day of Reason, of the homogenous restricted economy toward the opening up, and, setting free of the sacred, heterogeneous, saturnalia. The thaw is the unraveling of the monotheistic order of things as the opening of an indefinite multiplicity of becoming, life. In the wake of Hölderlin’s tragic unmasking of reason and the false and unnecessary systematics of modernist philosophical systems, that which becomes preeminent is a poiesis of existence. In “Bread and Wine,” Hölderlin traces a genealogy of the sacred in its “transfer” from the intimacy of the Holy Night to the religion of the Day, which, as an objectification of the Holy into the Names and Faces of the

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Gods, which with familiarity in the Apollonian dream world, become a prison for our capacity for feeling (Gefühl), who weaken in their capacity to experience the Holy in its radical immediacy. Night, the subduer of Gods and men, and Light, works upon us in our dreams, “hoping”—​but, we are the godless, living alone and in gloom. We live, in the current era, beyond the gods and God—​ however, that is due to the objectivizing, dogmatizing trajectory of the historicity of the sacred. In such a climate, atheists, as Zîzêk may suggest, are ironically the greatest believers, just as the religious fundamentalists are the greatest atheists. This historicity outlines the transformation of a sacred feeling into a utilitarian religion of morality and cultural containment, removes us from proximity to the intimacy and immediacy of an intense and daring life, awakening to the radical mortality of existence, of tragic existence, one of uncertainty, risk, freedom, and our insurmountable pathway and destination of aging and death. Every beautiful flower will wilt and die, but, it remains beautiful in the moment, as we already know the “basic tone” of tragedy and decomposition. Hölderlin alludes to the “god to come,” the eventual return of the gods, Night, the subduer of Gods and Men, working upon our souls in hope—​ these types of prophetic tropes symbolize a mortal thought that invokes the Night, the goddess, who is sacred to the lost, mad, and dead. He describes the fruits of Hesperia as the godless, living in the gloom, alone and meaningless. Such a regime loses touch with the sacred as its treats the gods or God as a means to a terrestrial end, in the manner of St Paul, Machiavelli, and our own contemporary politicians, clerics, and intellectuals. Another such politician of the soul is Alain Badiou, and in the following section, I  will respond to his declaration of the end of the “Age of the Poets,” one beginning with Hölderlin, who, as with his colleagues, he regards as only a poet, never considering Hölderlin’s unprecedented philosophical achievement.

Fatal repetition: Badiou and the “Age of the Poets” Badiou, in his Manifesto for Philosophy,15 asserts that the “Age of the Poets”—​a time span begun with Hölderlin and completed with Celan—​ is no more. This “Age”—​“period”—​inaugurated by Hölderlin, was first articulated philosophically by Nietzsche—​ and has been reproduced by all those who still remember and work in the philosophies from Kant to Derrida. His solution is a pseudo-​mathematicization of philosophy16—​his target is the trajectory of philosophy from the “subjectivist” turn of Kant to the implosion of subjectivism in post-​structuralism (even Wittgenstein falls under his hammer as the new sophistry)—​and the philosophers along the way, from the romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger—​these

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“philosophers” give us the words of their texts, poetic memoirs of their own subjective experience, but not “Truth.” The paradigm for this turn from language and a problematic subjectivity to “truth” is the definition of philosophy in Badiou’s Plato. The disciplinary strategy is the establishment of a mathematical aristocracy as the gatekeeper of philosophy, as François Laruelle argues, in his Anti-​Badiou.17 Indeed, in light of the fact that Badiou criticizes analytic philosophy, in his “Philosophy and Desire”18 for privileging a scientific and mathematical language that is inaccessible to the majority of the people of the world, why on earth would he privilege “set theory” and the matheme in the way that he does? It seems to be a glaring contradiction. The purpose of this section is to place Badiou into question and to resist those who would wish Continental philosophy to acquiesce to the coronation of a rather derivative thinker who is merely an analytical philosopher in drag. Badiou seeks to repeat the expulsion of the poets from the polis. He wishes only to preserve the Idea, displacing the complexities of philosophical poetics—​of the entirety of language and language-​oriented philosophies, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, which adhere to the early Greek distinction between Being and Logos. Badiou, replacing Being with matheme, and Logos with event, gives us a Platonism of the multiple, in which poetics (the intimacy of the early Greek thinkers) is caricatured as a mere primitive groping toward the standpoint of mathematics. Badiou threatens a fatal repetition of the Platonic dismissals of the tragic philosophy of early “Greek” (Mediterranean) thinkers—​and seeks to repeat the downgrading of poetics with respect to not only the early Greeks but also with respect to European thought since Kant. The “Age of the Poets,” for Badiou, is completed in the question-​raising meeting of Celan and Heidegger—​the judgment by Badiou upon poetics (which is parasitic upon similar scenarios of Adorno and Lacue-​Labarthe) is retrospective and prospective, and entails a radically eliminationist strategy, just as Analytic philosophy in its initial phase and in its continuing operations. Poetry (poetics, linguistically oriented philosophies) is to be dismissed in the new age to which Badiou testifies. He fancies that he has simply bracketed that type of philosophy, put language out of play. The judgment is asserted in artful language as the last permissible artistic act—​the questioning is silenced and the judgment becomes merely a meme orchestrated in polite discourse. He has the last word in a conversation with a group of thinkers who are now all dead. Badiou’s assertion—​“intervention”—​is articulated as an unapologetic “system” (he hates Nietzsche, after all, though steals from him, and from Heidegger)—​that of the pure multiple—​matheme, poiesis, polis, and eros—​these are the “conditions” upon which any philosophy rests—​the best philosophy, for Badiou, is the one that organizes these four “moments” into a “system”—​but, vaguely, one open to multiple ‘events’. He limits the possibility of the ‘system’ by his deflationary definitions of the moments, though he does not give any architectonic for his “system.”

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Badiou applies his philosophy nevertheless as he, in a seemingly ad hoc manner, specifies various histories, situations, and persons according to the relationship of the four conditions to philosophy “itself”:  mathematical, poetic, political, and erotic. For Badiou, for example, May 1968 would have been an event pertaining to several if not all of the conditions. Philosophy is threatened when it is sutured to one condition among the others—​and any polis would be threatened in the same way. Badiou admirers the work of Althusser as he sought to transfer Marxian thought from “politics” to “science”—​(which in itself seems to forgo the Quaternary of the four conditions, as we do detect a scientistic bias in the thought of Badiou). Yet, with this example, it is clear that there can be a reconfiguration of the moments, conditions of thought, in relation to the context of significance, networked across temporal existence and specific situations. Significantly, Badiou states that “Anglo-​ Saxon” academic philosophy has persisted—​and perhaps still languishes—​in the “suture” of the positivistic or scientistic. He does not seem to know or care that his analysis may not have merely neutral relevance to an Anglo-​Saxon audience. Nevertheless, he is making, in his works, a primary decision about the status of poetry—​and of the meaning of philosophy. Does that not apply to his Anglo-​Saxons? An aspect of the problem is the apparently uncritical reception of the translations of Badiou into English by Anglophone readers who may lack the context that would indicate that his notion of the “Age of the Poets,” in its dismissive posture toward poetry (poetics, questions, and strategies of language, such as formal indication in radical phenomenology, post-​ structuralism, etc.), may not have any relevance to the situation of Anglophone life or its version of “continental philosophy,” a philosophical movement that has persisted until the last decades in the shadows of the “Anglo-​Saxon” world. Badiou will simply “shut us down”—​his philosophy, for us, is a de facto “Trojan horse” for analytic philosophy. Are philosophers to write essays on “Set Theory”? Why not make the fatal leap straight to Cube, ETL, Business Intelligence, and Big Data? Or, a return to Locke à la Quentin Meillassoux, Badiou’s disciple? Shall we allow his trope of the “Age of the Poets” to taint our studies of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida, and a host of others who have, to give an example, only recently gained a foothold in British universities in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Even if we accept Badiou—​for us, there would need be a transfer from “scientism” and “logicism” to something more akin to the existential and poetic/​linguistic questions raised by phenomenological, hermeneutical, and post-​structuralist perspectives in the Anglophone world. Otherwise, if we had to simply accept Badiou as a universal doctrine, we would be forced to simply capitulate once again to an analytic philosophy, which Hawking has recently declared dead. In this way, affirming and resisting Badiou, there is the need for a transfer—​not in this instance from politics to science, as with Althusser, but, a shift from the “suture” of “scientism” and “reactionary politics” to—​in some of Badiou’s words—​those of radical politics, poetry

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(expression, dwelling), and the Empedoclean play of love and strife (in distinction from merely love or strife). However, it could simply be argued that there is a fatal contradiction in Badiou between his own engagement with the imaginary of the age of the poets, and his own insistence that this age is over, as something the limit of which has been traversed. How are we to understand for instance such statements by Badiou as “We must create new symbolic forms for our collective actions.”19 Probably not in the context of global negation and final war, but in the context of local affirmation and endless conflicts. We must find a new sun, in other words, a new mental country. As Stevens says; “The sun is the country wherever he is.”20 Is Badiou enacting a performative contradiction in his simultaneous rejection and exploitation of poetry and thinkers associated with the so-​called age of the poets, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lyotard? Simultaneously, the name or notion is invoked as the use suggests, but within a meta-​criticism that has already always rejected them—​though having purloined their best ideas, but in a form that re-​invests them into Platonic “objectivism.” But, why must our “new mental country” be an old Platonistic and mathematical one? And, when we have barely been liberated from that cage? Indeed, the entire significance of the contemporary age is that of poetic liberation, artistic freedom. These are our strengths, and in them dwell our collective affirmations as a community. If it is indeed the case that we must create new symbolic forms, then it is clear that it will be poetry, language, and art, that will be the source of such collective temporal (and sacred) creation. Yet, Badiou’s notion of the matheme would be the announcement of the death of a poetic liberation that has only recently erupted as a cultural thread of artistic and political life. Badiou’s is a philosophy in retreat, it is, in the spirit of Nietzsche, a philosophy of exhaustion, of nihilism. It would seem then, that it is not simply for the Anglophones in their arrested development, but for the West itself and perhaps for the world, that there is a need for an intensification of poetic and artistic activity in light of the current transformation of the world order. It is not the time to retreat into the “Idea of Communism” and seek to build a new ivory tower, ruled by a mathematical aristocracy. It is instead a time of poetry, art, and the streets—​not the mere idea of “Communism,” but an actual community. The “Age of the Poets” has only just begun; no book burnings will be necessary.

The political implications of Hölderlin’s poetical thought Hölderlin, the political revolutionary, gives us a republicanism grounded upon early Greek thought, upon the ancient Greek city states, and neither

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upon Plato’s Polis nor upon Humean skepticism, which while being freed from Kant’s criticisms, remains blind to tragic fate. In the wake of Hölderlin’s repudiation of the Kantian Idea of Reason and thus of the meaning of freedom and law, his republicanism is tragic, one oriented to the Many, amid mortal thought:  there can be no divine right of kings since the notion of divinity, except as a reminder of our own mortality, is unthinkable, unknowable, and thus, is not a legitimate and meaningful ground for a democratic culture-​political order, one that which must negotiate the intricate complexities of the laws of organization, of the state, and the laws of the aorgic, of an overwhelming Nature that reminds us of our mortality, a reminder that includes the fleeting political actors in the state. The philosopher whispers to the ruler: “Remember thou art mortal.” Hölderlin’s politics is one of equality before mortality, the tragic as festival. Such a criticism overturns Kant’s defence of constitutional monarchy (in his own repudiation of Hume’s republican empiricist atheism), but in a manner that shatters the Kantian paradigm itself—​“modernism” itself—​and in this way, releases tragic thought as a revolutionary poetics liberated from Platonism and Christianity—​and Schlegel’s reflective and ironic emphasis upon beauty and love—​to a tragic paradigm in which the community, the Dionysian, composed of mortals in their equality before death, witness the rise and fall of higher men and participate in this rise and fall, in a temporal world of love and strife, beauty and the tragic sublime.

PART TWO

Hölderlin’s child: Nietzsche

CHAPTER SIX

Hyperion and The Birth of Tragedy In this chapter, Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion will be considered together with Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. The intimacy of Hölderlin’s committed regard for the Greek Independence movement, as with Lord Bryon, as well as his attempts to bring Greek poetics into Germany through his translations of Sophocles, will be brought into dialogue with Nietzsche’s engagements with academic classics and slightly later with Richard Wagner in the context of his own attempt to contribute to a rebirth of the tragic. Hyperion’s Song of Destiny Holy spirits, you walk up there in the light, on soft earth. Shining god-​like breezes touch upon you gently, as a woman’s fingers play music on holy strings. Like sleeping infants the gods breathe without any plan; the spirit flourishes continually in them, chastely kept, as in a small bud, and their holy eyes

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look out in still eternal clearness. A place to rest Is not given to us. Suffering humans decline and blindly fall from one hour to the next, like water thrown from cliff to cliff, year after year, down into the Unknown.1

Preface: Nietzsche, Hölderlin’s child Neither Nietzsche nor Hölderlin ever had a place to rest, at least until they went mad. Both were wanderers and writers, poets and authors—​and philosophers, neither of whom had any glimpse of their respective impacts upon Western culture. It is clear that Hölderlin, in his multi-​genre poiesis, can no longer be regarded “merely” as a poet, but must be encountered as a philosopher in his own right, who articulated his thought necessarily as literature, poetry, drama, novels just as many of the best philosophers in our three-​millennia tradition—​Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato, Bruno, Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, and countless others—​have done. One of those most influenced by Hölderlin’s philosophical revolution was Nietzsche, who, more than others influenced by Hölderlin, picked up the torn threads of his project, as exemplified in his work upon the early Greek philosophers and in his vital reconstruction of the emergence of tragic drama. Not only is Nietzsche attuned to the project of Hölderlin, however, he also seems to wish to continue or echo this work, not specifically in his “Schlegelian” fragments, in his aphoristic writings (all influenced by French writers and philosophers), but in his own poetry and in his magnum opus Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this chapter, we will explore the relationship of the father and son, of Hölderlin and Nietzsche, in the dissemination of the work of the former and its earth shattering metamorphoses in the hands of his progeny. Given its musical, Dionysian composition, Thus Spoke Zarathustra2 can be seen as a poetico-​philosophical work, orchestrated according to its own poetic calculus, calculable law, as in the case of Hölderlin’s poetological philosophy, as a poetics of rhythm traversing the Open of a world of fate and destiny. Such intimacy between his creative endeavor and that of Hölderlin, and the care given to his thought in its disarray and incompletion, establishes the claim of poetic and philosophical parentage for Nietzsche as Hölderlin’s child.

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Hölderlin’s Hyperion and the Dionysian Legacy Nietzsche’s near sanctification of Hölderlin is well known, and as we have witnessed in the previous chapters, his philosophical work was instrumental in awakening a non-​classicist sense of early tragic Greece that was to be seminal in the works of his contemporaries, such as Schelling and Hegel. Beyond the classic image of the repose and order of Greece, Hölderlin excavates the Dionysian chaos of early Greece, of the contestation between the gods and goddesses, of an order that arose in the wake of weakness and cowardice in the face of the strength of the sacred. For Hölderlin, the tragic situation has never changed, as an eternal recurrence of the same, yet the strength of the mortals, through history, alternates between weakness and strength in relation to their own openness to the divine and its chaotic immediacy and intimacy. In line with Spinoza’s notion that the divine will only show itself to the mortal in the manner attuned to the capacity of the latter—​and that such a capacity is characterized by an essential temporal alteration—​Hölderlin contends that it is our weakness that is the occasion for the seeming flight of the gods. But, they have not fled, they are still there, but we are incapable, due to our weakness, of a naked apprehension of the divine, requiring, as in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, an Apollonian redemptive artwork that shields or sublimates an intimacy with the exteriority of Dionysian truth. Our weakness, our “fatelessness,”3 is cast into relief through a comparison of ourselves and other historical or contemporary cultures, and is a historical condition, which is, ironically, due to our own previous successful domestication of the divine into a religion of Light, of Apollonian moral and political economic order. In other words, our organizational response to the primordial site of horror, in the tragic sublime, has been to name the powers clearly manifest, to objectify these, to harness these, to establish command and control over Nature, while ceaselessly working to build a narcissistic eternity. Our fear of God, linked to a trans-​generational, planetary praxis of security and order, is, in this way, the ironic aetiology of our weakness, of our cowardice in the face of Reality. As I alluded, such weakness is not an intrinsic, eternal quality of a substance, mortal being, but as all is amid flux, temporal metamorphosis; the weakness is historical and has changed before and will change again. The symptomology of our weakness finds its traces in the Olympian, in the intrinsic fabrication of gods of Light, of the Sky (organizational/​organic), and of their entropy as temporal, mortal works in the objectification of the sacred. Hölderlin writes: Such an object is a land grown barren, which in its own original lush fertility had too greatly intensified the effects of the sun and becomes dry for that reason. The fate of Phrygian Niobe; as it is everywhere the fate of innocent nature, which everywhere in its virtuosity passes over into the

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all-​too-​organic to just the degree to which man approaches the aorgic, in more heroic circumstances and times.4 For Hölderlin, and with the romantics, the current historical condition of Europe was unprecedented. With the revolution, divine fire had erupted amid a seemingly eternal situation of godless joylessness, of the fifth race prophesied by Hesiod. The event is the emancipation of nature, of aorgic chaos, and the gods of the earth, the Titans, led by Prometheus and Dionysus, who, through his wine, enacts a reconciliation between the gods, as even “Cerberus drinks, and lies down to sleep.”5 In other words, as weakness and strength are temporal, it is possible that there can be breaches in history, in which weakness becomes strength, and vice versa. Yet, Holderlin laments “but we come too late,”6 and would prefer sleep, to die, than having to wait. It could be suggested, in this light, that Hyperion, a titan, born of Earth, has come too late, and that it is Dionysus and fantastical Night, who remain for mortals. We have our memory, Mnemosyne, as well, remembrance that will allow the emergence of a strength, which ironically, is characterized by passivity, openness to uncertainty, risk, and the sacred violence of the abyss, of chaotic existence in its general economy. In his novel Hyperion, Hölderlin articulates a narrative that subverts, as did the tragedians, the dominant narratives of the hero: of his own establishment as a hero and his dissemination in marriage.7 Such were the tropes of heroic myth, from our oldest extant text, Gilgamesh, together with the vast mythology of the Sumerians and the Babylonians, as it was transfigured through history, until, in the late second millennium, it became the mythos of the Mycenaeans, having populated the tropes with their own names, and then, in the first millennium, by the Greeks themselves. It was tragedy that established something new under the sun through its own exaltation of the destruction of the “great houses,” of the disclosure and symbolization of the Law of Being, or Fate (Moira). Indeed, the tragic work of art itself acts to overthrow power in the contemporary world and is to be seen as a revolutionary art form, and for Hölderlin, was to be the ground of a cultural revolutionary praxis, seeking to awaken the Dionysian. Hölderlin writes, in respect of tragedy, of a drama in which the divine is death: Hence, as the “Notes to the Oedipus” have already indicated, the form of the dialogue, and the chorus in contrast to it; hence, the dangerous structure of the scenes, which, in the more Greek manner, necessarily conclude factually in the sense that the word becomes factual more mediately, overwhelming the more physical body; according to our own age or way of thinking, it becomes factual more immediately, overwhelming the more spiritual body. The Greek tragic word is deadly factual, because the body it overwhelms really kills.8

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The “real murder through words”9 is that, for Hölderlin, which typifies the Greek art of words that overwhelms the body in a “palpable” way. In the midst of the era just after the French Revolution, and amid the European wars that had engulfed Germany, Hölderlin, with his novel translations, is exhibiting tragedy as a revolutionary form of art. He writes that Antigone is in a state of revolt against the profanity of the national state:10 The nature of the action in the Antigone is that in a revolt, where, insofar as it is a national matter, everything depends on the fact that everyone, being overwhelmed by the infinite reversal, and thoroughly moved, apprehends himself in the infinite form in which he is moved. For national reversal is the reversal of every mode of understanding and form.11 In light of the overtly political, and dangerous, character of tragedy, one would have expected Hölderlin to seek such a national reversal through poetry. Yet, he confesses, that is not the role of the poet, but instead, it is the role of the poet to represent his age in miniature and not to alter the “national modes of understanding” of a history that, although it subordinates the arts to “national form,”12 the latter is in turn subordinated to Fate. Yet, such a revolutionary role may still be thrust upon the poet in eras of national reversal in which the poet, remembering the radical possibilities of existence, guides the change that is always favored in a world of ceaseless flux. Hyperion, as we have alluded, is not a classical heroic epic. As the protagonist of the same name recounts his thoughts, feelings, and the events of his life to his friend Bellarmin and to his lover Diotima, that which is manifested, even in triumph, is failure. The struggle for the freedom of Greece from the Turks fails to turn Hyperion into a hero, despite Adamas’ counsel and Alabanda’s friendship, training, and comradery. His only victory is spoilt by his soldiers who, in the absence of martial valor, loot the defeated, displaying dishonor to the gods. Such failure climaxes with his lover, who, unable to live without Hyperion, dies before he returns. In this dire way, Hyperion is neither established as a hero, nor is his noble line celebrated, and disseminated with the fertility of his love for Diotima. Far from being a call for a return to ancient Greece, such a possibility is occluded by its impossibility, one that is due to not only the calculable law of fate, but also the weakness of contemporary mankind. Hyperion, in this light, may seem to be a tragedy, but despite the tragic elements, it is in truth an epistolary melodrama of failure; we remain in the gloom and darkness of the shadows, the godless, and the wretched—​of the Nothing. Though she dies, Diotima’s death is not tragic, but pathetic, occurring at a distance. It does not reveal the infinite and her courage in the face of her meagre portion, but only her weakness, simply a modern death, without meaning. Hyperion does not even bother to return to see her dead body, nor does he take his own life out of overwhelming grief, as did Haemon, the lover of Antigone.

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Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music (1872) As we will readily notice, there are clear differences, in terms of specifics, between Hölderlin and Nietzsche’s interpretations of tragedy. Yet, in a deeper sense, there abides an attunement in their views, perspectives, that will later to be taken over by Heidegger, in his own way. In his Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche explores and traces the emergence of tragedy as a mixed type, as the creative artwork of the “marriage” of two naturo-​cultural artistic principles, or gods, the Apollonian of Homeric epic with the Dionysian of “oriental” culture through the sixth-​century cultural diffusion, or as Walter Burkert named the phenomenon, the “orientalizing revolution” of Greek cultural and political life.13 Nietzsche traces further the death of tragedy with Socrates and Euripides, with the suppression of the Chorus, of musical intoxication and uncertainty under the weight of the ironic knowledge of the “theoretical man.”14 Such is the merely Apollonian, which, with the severance from its half-​brother Dionysus, eventually becomes the mind as opposed to the body. Since tragic poiesis originally began with only the Chorus and later developed tragic drama with the thematization of the tragic hero, the suppression of the former by logic and dialogue clearly signifies the death of tragedy. In Euripides’ New Attic Comedy, the main elements of tragedy disappear. It is no longer the unfolding of the utter destruction of the great, of inexorable fate, uncertainty, danger, mortal conflict amid an ultimate double bind. It begins instead with an explanation of the coming narrative and of the lessons that are to be learned, the moral of the story. Nietzsche suggested that this feature alone was a crime against the aesthetics of suspense. The new form no longer concerns the destruction of the great due to their own status as mortals, and to their own hubris, nor does the chorus, the repository of the remembrance of the community, play its counter-​punctual role as whisperers, commentators, and agents of disagreement or guidance. The New Attic Comedy, moreover, ends with a reconciliation of the conflict, of political agreements between the gods, a successful negotiation that saves the city. Such an art-​form, with its progressive dialectics and resolution of conflict is indeed a comedy in the classical sense, as it resolves into a happy ending, sometimes even with a deus ex machina. Yet, even as comedy, it remains, for Hölderlin, what would be of the “national,” of that which serves the state and order of things—​and does not seek the dangerous pathway of revolt (that of which comedy is indeed capable) or even the illustration of the terrible truth of mortality. Tragedy concerns the destruction of the great as a reminder to all of the radical and insurmountable mortality of each. Antigone, for instance, tells the story of a sister and daughter in revolt, and who in the predicament of her being buried alive, hangs herself, an act that leads to the suicides of her lover and her mother. In the Orestia by

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Aeschylus, we are witness to the murder of Agamemnon by his unfaithful wife, Clytemnestra (in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphygenia), and the subsequent murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes in revenge for his father. Euripides, except perhaps for Bacchantes, shies away from such intensity and overwhelming devastation, yet it could be argued that the violence of the latter was anti-​Dionysian propaganda, displaying the dangerous, terroristic character of the devotees of Dionysus who tear King Pentheus’s body into pieces. Yet, such a death is not tragic as Pentheus just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. His death is, like Diotima’s in Hyperion, without meaning—​revealing nothing but weakness or, in the case of Pentheus, bad luck—​certainty not the calculable law of Fate and Law of Being. At the same time, as with the poetics of Hölderlin, The Birth of Tragedy is not merely a book on poetry or aesthetics. Indeed, as with Hölderlin, tragic drama and poetry are a mixed form of articulation and expression that orchestrate a poetic philosophy (phenomenology) of tragic existence, of a temporal world of multi-​dimensional beings. As a philosophy in its own right, moreover, tragedy, as has been suggested earlier, maintains an orientation to truth in a manner that cannot be said of a philosophy that focuses upon one faculty alone, that of Mind (Nous), a practice that, ironically, resembles sophistry in comparison to tragedy. Nietzsche and Hölderlin, in this light, agree not only upon the aetiology of the death of tragedy, but also, upon the possibility of its rebirth. Yet, they also agree as to the historical or “national”15 conditions of weakness, which may prevent such a rebirth. Nietzsche writes of the physiological exhaustion of post-​ tragic, classical Greece, a claim that coheres well with that of Hölderlin’s concerning the “all-​too-​organic”16 character of the Olympian religion of the Day. Tragic poetry was created to destroy this religion of ossification, in its more heroic era, with the final collapse of the intimacy of the divine in the weakness of the Apollonian state, of Plato’s polis, which had expelled the poets from its Ideal polis (unless it was a merely national poetics, serving the interests of the state and power). For Hölderlin, the dissolution of the sacred, our frailty to be the vessels to contain such power, began much earlier than in Nietzsche’s diagnosis. For the latter, tragedy was a “metaphysical miracle,”17 the marriage of opposites, one that gave rise to tragedy as the preeminent work of mortal art. Yet, while Nietzsche fully acknowledges the religious character of tragedy, Hölderlin, with his much earlier recognition of the objectification of the divine, of the transition from the Titanic (Earth and Darkness) to that of the Olympians (Sky and Light), provides a more satisfying account of the birth of tragedy. Hölderlin is in agreement with Nietzsche that tragedy was birthed from the Chorus and Music, yet, with his more extensive genealogy of the implications of reversals, of the Titans to the Olympians, for instance, of Nature and Art, set forth a purpose for tragedy, a spiritual project, which sought to deconstruct the religion of art and Light in the midst of a retrieval

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of the “eccentric land of the dead,”18 of the sacred spirits of the mortal community. In this way, tragedy was no metaphysical miracle, arising by mere chance, but was an event fated in itself as the matching of the strength of the divine with a creativity of strength, one, contrary to Nietzsche’s prevailing notion of a radical aristocracy of creators, was, in both early Greece and in Germany of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a political and cultural movement of a republican character, one of equality of mortals before death. The destruction of the houses of the great is an illustration of the mortality of all, our radical equality as mortals. Plato, an enemy of tragedy and democracy, advocated an aristocracy of the Mind, as determined in the context of his own philosophical paradigm. Given Nietzsche’s radical criticisms of Plato, his persistent orientation to the Dionysian (the community of mortals), and with his work on the Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, it seems incongruent that he would not, with Empedocles, a political revolutionary, advocate a republic of equality, grounded upon early Greek tragic thought and the extant history of the early Greek republics, communities of strength. Indeed, his early philosophy of the Dionysian and the Apollonian was an “echo of a scream,” from Hölderlin, through the failed 1848 revolution in which Richard Wagner and Mikhail Bakunin stood together at the barricades, fighting for a republican order. It is highly significant that this Dionysian paradigm, as propagated in Nietzsche’s book (which did not in itself openly advocate aristocracy) has had a massive impact on politics, and in most cases, in the context of a republican or radical democratic or left-​wing movements or revolutions, such as Germany, during and after World War I; in the cultural praxis and preoccupations of the Frankfurt School; in Bataille’s surrealism; Heidegger in his subversions of Baumler and Rosenburg in their blatant misappropriations of Nietzsche (and Hölderlin for that matter); not to mention the New Left. Yet, Nietzsche, after his flirtation with worldly affairs in his failed collaborative friendship with Wagner, explicitly rejected politics for art (unless it be grand politics), though he would, in all of his works, continue to criticize Christianity, socialism, feminism, and democracy as movements of ressentiment and of weakness. Yet, as we have seen in the case of Hölderlin’s republicanism as equality before mortality, tragedy, in its exaltation in the destruction of the great, is not ressentiment, but a matching of strength, facing death without evasion (as with the master/​slave dialectic of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit) a poetic reminder that each is mortal, and that this insurmountable fact is our truth and our only notion of universality. In light of Hölderlin’s philosophical revolution, elements that may have been unknown to Nietzsche, the latter’s characterizations of early Greece, tragedy, and the entire leitmotif of the slave revolt of the masses begin to look incomplete, superficial, and seemingly unaware of the spiritual bondage that the Greeks had already inherited as a completed mytho-​poetic paradigm from several other cultures, ones that only became truly their own when the

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tragic poets began to exhibit the destruction of the great men and women, great houses, together with the continuation of a living mythology, with the novel acts of the gods, and the intensity of the conflict between which the mortals suffer without knowledge or understanding. The fifth and sixth centuries were eras of revolutions, which, as with the French Revolution, lead to counter-​revolution, wars, disease, depletion, and collapse. Socrates and Plato come quite late, but ironically became the inheritors of a wealth they merely silenced, though such a wealth would not remain silent, and given the endemic mortality of our situation, such wealth, as with philosophy, will persistently rise as long as we are still here.

Epilogue: Nietzsche and Hölderlin—​on Epochal Thought Hölderlin and Nietzsche each celebrated and explored the Greeks of the tragic age, and each, one perhaps more than the other, unlocked their true “essence” in the Dionysian. For them, the tragic age was a high point in the “development” of world culture, and its mere existence has allowed us to contemplate the trajectories and perhaps even the laws of history—​or, of the concealment of beings in the withdrawal of Being. Of course, this notion of a temporal disclosure of that which is already always, and our freedom in such a context, is the essence of tragedy, but it is also the teaching offered by Spinoza in his own reflections upon modes and the attributes of disclosure, of temporal existence over and against the eternal substance. It is such contemplations that allow for the articulation of philosophies of history. Hölderlin and Nietzsche—​ both disciples of Heraclitus—​ would immediately call into question Spinoza’s substance, and thus would allow a dynamic account of the revelation of mortal thought, of our historical “orders of encounter”19 and the pattern that such disclosures show. It is on this basis, in such contemplations, that Hölderlin and Nietzsche devised the account of history that went radically against the grain. As opposed to the classism of those such as Winkelmann, they proposed that the peak of Greek culture was not late Hellenism and Plato, but was instead, the early Greeks, the philosopher poets of the tragic age. With the arrogant destruction of tragedy by Socrates and Euripides, Western culture enters a period of decline, one interrupted intermittently by attempts to retrieve the greatness, or even to surpass it. It is this trajectory of history that Heidegger would adopt in his epochal topology of the rise of metaphysics in Platonic philosophy, and the epoch of metaphysics in the “history of Being,” which he claims to have ended with Nietzsche “the last of the metaphysicians.” Whether or not Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche is “valid” is not of concern here—​ only that they shared with Hölderlin an isomorphic philosophy of history, and the hope that the epoch of decline, of Platonism, Christianity, Islam,

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and Modernist Humanism, will be displaced by the nascent growth of a new tragic culture, of strength in the face of mortality and the Night. For Hölderlin and Nietzsche, as the epochal perspective underlines, whether one travels with the former or the latter in the specific contours of the death of Greece, of its ossification into mere academic formalism, the culture of the “theoretical man,” a mirror of the trajectory of contemporary Germany and Europe—​a tendency each sought to combat in his own way. In the first European Renaissance, it was Platonism, Neo-​Platonism, that become the lexicon and modus operandi of the intellectual Revolution, while the specifically sensuous aesthetics of Greek arts, sculpture, and mythological narratives served as the inspiration for the cultural revolution in the work of such artistic figures as Botticelli and the myriad others, depicted in Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists. Yet, it is instantly clear that such streams of the first renaissance were incompatible, anachronous—​ and counter-​productive to an era of rebirth. Platonism, or the philosophy of Greek decline, of its spiritual death, is juxtaposed to mythology and art, which arose centuries earlier, if not, in some cases, a millennium or more. Nevertheless, the Platonic Idea oriented itself rather well into the theological-​political order, offering a conception of the meaning not only of Beauty, but also of Art itself, as an intimation of the divine—​and in this case, the God of Christendom. The Greek motifs in art often met with violent reaction in the context of an incipient Reformation, for instance, in Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence, where even Botticelli placed his work upon the fire. Such was the trajectory of a history of denaturalization, and un-​worlding, from a Platonic displacement of the Dionysian attunement of existence with Nature to a Cartesian subjectivization of Plato’s “Divided Line”20 into the res cogitans and the res extensa: the logos of Being becomes, with the overthrow of Aristotelian scholasticism, the mind and the body, the self-​reflexive logic of the matheme. Already Spinoza threw Descartes into further doubt, a conflict that Leibniz sought to heal, leading only to a further formalization and rationalization of thought. The process becomes a farce with Kant’s regulative ideas and his aesthetic ideas, which, for the sake of a narcissistic purposiveness, are, together with its morality, deemed necessary. Not the romantics, but Hölderlin and Schelling began the post-​ Kantian philosophical challenges to the authority of reason, with the former’s indication of Seyn and the latter’s exploration of the unconscious. In what we have entitled the second European Renaissance, one that has become a world-​shaking transformation, philosophical and artistic praxis was grounded upon the exemplar and perspective of early Greek thought, of its philosophers, tragedians, lyric poets, and of its scientists, who had already elaborated the heliocentric order. In effect, Hölderlin is not only displacing Descartes—​and the entire trajectory of a sterile rationalism—​but also clearly indicates Plato as the end point that signalled the death of an epoch. Hölderlin shifts to the fringes of an early topos of traces, he brings some of these into his own language, and speaks of these times, of that

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which remains. Beauty is not an intimation of the divine, from a barren world to a sphere of perfection, but is the unity in diversity, the unity of the each and All, of the Many, as the Heraclitean logos, as a dynamic oscillation of opposites in which we, as mortals, emerge, become, and die. In such a context, it is phusis that is the place of manifestation of the phenomenal world, of the becoming that arises on the basis of the play of the opposites. Mortal existence occurs within this context and only within this context. Nietzsche would not express any disagreement with the argument thus far, but would add that the trajectory toward annihilation of the Greeks occurred due to the suppression of the Dionysian, an erasure that inaugurated a breach with the intimacy with Nature, with the All, toward the displacement of the All, an estrangement from Nature. Such was the Platonic transformation of the All into a One that, far from being the Cosmos itself, in its play of Love and Strife, in its eternal recurrence, becomes a Form that transcends the phenomenal world and is that which has the most real being. The cosmos becomes, in the Timaeus, a mere copy, the work of a demigod, and thus is unnecessary, contingent. With the rationalization of the world, whether driven by theoretical, practical, or aesthetic concerns—​from a subjective perspective, purposiveness—​we have nearly completed Plato’s project, with the hydra of monotheism, of a dysfunctional polytheism, dividing peoples while the suitors of Capital despoil our household. From his perspective, Nietzsche diagnoses Christianity as a form of nihilism, as the denial of the Earth, and the rejection of the intimacy of life. Hölderlin sets the precedent for this perspective in his Hyperion, which meditates upon the epochal suppression of the Dionysian spirit of tragedy. In such a situation of active nihilism, of the vast destruction of planetary lifeworlds, underscored by unquestioning, decadent, and powerless academies, of sterile thought regimes, Hölderlin and Nietzsche advocated a Dionysian strategy of deconstruction and play: one of the articulation of the motifs of Dionysus, of the awakening with wine, of the intensity and daring of mortality, notions disseminated through the introduction of the Dionysian choric forms, tragic drama, and poetry; in the context of Europe, a shift from the decadent, Platonist philosophy, to a dynamic philosophy of radical openness. Both Hölderlin and Nietzsche sought to conjure tragic thought back into the public consciousness as a revolutionary act.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tragic poetry and the thread of Ariadne In this chapter, I will explore the respective conception of poetry and examples of the tragic poetics of Hölderlin and Nietzsche. For the former, we will read his poems, “The Poet’s Vocation,”1 “Nature and Art, or Saturn and Jupiter,”2 “Germania,” and “The Archipelago.”3 For the latter, I will explore Dionysos Dythrambs,4 a collection of Nietzsche’s poems published in 1888. I seek to disclose not only the philosophical meaning of their respective poetics, but also their orientations within the tragic poetic constellation.

The selected poems of Hölderlin take us on a journey, from a mediation upon the role of the poet, who is assigned to serve the Highest, to concrete examples of poetic praxis in poetic hymns of substantial length, providing meditations upon the trajectory of Dionysian, tragic poetry from India to the West, to Germany. Dionysos Dythrambs by Nietzsche was chosen for his sustained contemplation upon the role of the poet and the myriad concrete examples of poetics in their various explorations culminating with the relationship between Dionysus and Ariadne, and the significance of the latter in the labyrinthine thought and poetics of Nietzsche.

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Four poems by Hölderlin “The Poet’s Vocation” In “The Poet’s Vocation,” Hölderlin, as he did in “Bread and Wine,” casts into relief a stark juxtaposition between the origins of poiesis, the poet, assigned to the Highest, sings songs of the triumph of the God of Joy, of Bacchus, heard by the “banks of the Ganges in Indus,” and the unnamed angel of our own day, of our own Modern existence. The temporal disjunction is underlined by the originary awakening of the drowsy people with wine, to the night and unexpected gods, the Genius that came over the people, in astonishment, as lightning to our own “all too knowing eyes,” our Promethean rebellion, in which one can count and name every star in the sky with his telescope but we do not see the Highest (and for that reason, he will cast the cover of night over our “all-​knowing-​eyes”). Hölderlin questions the angel of Modernity, as to its failure to awaken the people, in our own time, to give us the Law and Life. Yet, in the specific context of Hölderlin’s intimate, historical world, it is not the gods and their deeds that have been absent, but there is instead an utter lack of poets, in their original assignment, as servants of the Highest. Hölderlin looks around and sees only poets who sell their wares, “exploiting the Spirit,” mocking the gods for pennies, and cheapening all things divine. Such a poet of vanity, Hölderlin threatens, will, upon being reminded (by Hölderlin himself) of his noble origins, will cry out, and on hearing him, the Master himself will come and burn him to death with his “lethal missiles.” In the context of Hölderlin’s mortal thought, which we explored in Part One, this poem once again reiterates our mortality and lays out a topology of contrast with respect to differing mortal responses to the situation of insurmountable finitude. The enlightenment of the ancients consisted in the radical awakening to Joy, in the affirmation of inexorable Fate, as symbolized in the invocation of the god Bacchus. Tragedy itself consists in the dramatic events of one, who perhaps has “an eye too many,” who seeks to deny Fate, to transcend it. Yet, the outcome is always the same, destruction and death, as it must be, in the context of our remembrance of our fundamental equality before death. The poet must echo the honest and philosophical practice of orienting our knowledge to truth, and call us to acquiesce to the Law of Being, understanding that Being, in and of itself, will always be necessarily beyond our comprehension—​and despite our pretensions otherwise, as various exercises in error, of errancy. Such is our predicament, as echoed by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Yet, errancy also opens up the possibility of “losing one’s way,” in a state of forgetfulness of the Law, and thus, of the possibility of nefas. It is, in this manner, Hölderlin’s project to supplant the poets and philosophers who cheapen all that is sacred for mere pennies, and to awaken us to our own intense mortality through

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Dionysian songs of remembrance. In this light, all hierarchies based upon narcissistic self-​deification, mere barbarism, or the tracing of one’s temporal power to any notion of the divine, is a nefas, an act of hubris, and will be met inevitably and justly with destruction. All the great houses will fall into oblivion; there is no manifest destiny.

“Nature and Art, or Saturn and Jupiter”5 In this ode, a meditation upon nature (aorgic) and art (organic or organizational), Hölderlin enacts a contestation between Saturn and Jupiter. As we outlined in the last chapter where we explored Hyperion and The Birth of Tragedy, there was revealed a divergence between the respective accounts of the gods and of their significance, and the subsequent death of the ancient world—​though one in which tragedy shared the significance of a cultural revolution and apex. Hölderlin begins the ode by addressing Jupiter as the one who governs, hands out “our lots,” and “well-​contented, rest on the fame of immortal kinship.” He then shifts the tone by reminding Jupiter of his father Saturn, who the former had overthrown and made to languish with the other “wild ones” in the abyss. Hölderlin declares: Quite guiltless he, the god of the Golden Age: Once effortless and greater than you, although He uttered no commandment, and no Mortal on Earth ever named his presence. Hölderlin then tells the God, “So down with you! Or cease to withhold your thanks!” He tells the God to defer to the older god, and let the poets sing his praise. Hölderlin further tells the god that everything he has, his authority itself, comes from Saturn—​ that all powers developed during his epoch of peace. But, Saturn sleeps “in his cradle” and those things that Jupiter has shaped grow dim. Hölderlin closes with an exhortation to Jupiter, the Kronian, a wise master, a son of Time, who “gives laws to us and uncovers that which lies hidden in holy Twilight.”

“Germania” The gods have fled, vanished, and Hölderlin may not invoke them, for there is power in the invocation of a name, and “scarcely permitted it is to awaken the dead.” He alludes, however, to the new visitations of the ancients, who “jostle” us. Hölderlin enters into a prophetic tone, speaking of Aether and the manifestation of divine aspects that traverse toward Germania, the quietest daughter of God, who, in “deep ingenuousness,” can no longer remain silent and who, in her faith equal to that of the gods, beckoned them

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to search for her. The unbreakable speaks to her for the rest of the poem: he recounts the drowsiness of the people, lost in the forest and the poppies, drunken, but confesses that he left her a “mouth” as a “token of friendship,” with which she began to speak, lonely, and the rivers too dispatched words, a persistent motif in Hölderlin’s poetics, and Germania dwelt within the Earth, the mother of all, the concealed. The unbreakable then counsels the daughter, O drink the morning breezes Until you are opened up And name what you see before you; No longer now the unspoken May remain a mystery Though long it has been veiled; For shame behove us mortals And most of the time to speak thus Of the gods is indeed wise. However, this is not such a time—​now is the awakening of Germania to her destiny: But where more superabundant than purest well-​springs The gold has become and the anger in Heaven earnest, For once between Day and Night must A truth be made manifest. Now threefold circumscribe it, Yet, unuttered just as you found it, Innocent virgin, let it remain. Germania, the daughter of Holy Earth is permitted to speak the name of her mother once. With her invocation, the divine responds to the calling of its name, and is reawakened amid intimations of that which is yet to come, a joy-​giving in the distance. The poem closes with an image of Aether and virginal Earth, the never needy, abiding in the center of time. Their daughter, Germania, is counseled, to proffer, defenceless, advice to kings and peoples. “Germania,” in this way, speaks of the distant and recent past of Germany, of the gods and goddesses of Klopstock, and the rebellion of faith by Luther, and the future, one that lies in the distance. As with India, Greece, and Italy, Germany, in Hölderlin’s prophetic vision, is the previously quietest daughter who is now encouraged by the heavenly to name all things that lie before her. Yet, wary of the power of language to dissociate itself from reality, she is permitted to invoke the name of her mother only once. With the invocation, the truth is made manifest, unconcealed, shown, yet, a truth that must remain un-​uttered, innocent, “just as you found it,” there as it is. Germany is to be a country of poets and sages, undefended, providing counsel to

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leaders and peoples. Its destiny is the dissemination the tragic truth of the Law of Being, of the temporality of existence, and the freedom and equality of human beings. Such a reading radically contests the significance of this poem given by the Nazis, and may speak to the Germany of our own time, in the consideration of its destiny as a nation.

“The Archipelago” In this Elegy, Hölderlin addresses the god of the Sea, who, it will be significant, is not called Poseidon. He speaks to the Sea that surrounds the Archipelago, the topography of the Greek islands and Peninsula, of his daughters, the rivers, as the ecological lifeworld of a god, an old god, the Father. Ostensibly, this remains an address throughout, but this prayer becomes the context for a narration of the ancient wars between the Greeks and the Persians, who, after being attacked with the intensity of an eruption of Etna, won these wars with the mutual aid of the Sea god, only to come home to an exhausted land and an estranged, older people, unappreciative. After a time, with encouragement, they rebuild, honor the divine in their appreciation. Yet, this narrative, once again, becomes an occasion for a meditation upon the old world and the new. “Where is Athens now?” he asks once again. It is not that the sea god is no more, it is that we no longer commune with the sea as with a living being, who may be the source of words.6 Amid the putrifying decadence of life-​denying monotheisms, the total mobilization of planetary resources, existence and peoples becoming standing reserves, the profane economy, of inequality and narcissicism, orchestrates an order of things oriented to subjective purposiveness, hedonism, and growth. Yet, still the god of the Sea joins together with the rest of the waters, the sun, moon, the entire planetary ecology, inciting earthquakes with its rising. This is the place of mortality, an economics, a household that has, as we have witnessed, changed in respect to how people have responded to death, in the context of discordant epochs. Our de-​sacralized earth, in the context of Hölderlin’s deconstruction of reason, reveals modern “science” as merely the logistics for the technological extraction of resources from a planet that, for the latter, which is not merely alive, but is, for Hölderlin, a goddess, and the habitat of the gods themselves, of the necessary and inexplicable powers that exist so as to make life possible, the sea, rivers, earth, sun, moon and the stars. Ever hopeful—​amid his inexorably insurmountable situation, Hölderlin writes the choric hymns that he already hears upon the mountains at night. He meditates upon change, upon the god of the Sea, of the difference between the ancient and modern, of situations that were essentially, from the perspective of the Law of Being, of mortality, the same, but have been articulated differently. We no longer speak of the gods in the ways we once did although they exist as they always have done. There need not be faith in gods that one can see

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all around us. It is a question of our way of seeing the world.7 Hölderlin sees the world as an interconnected life, just as Nietzsche did. Hölderlin speaks of the relative durability of powers in the cosmos as gods, which affect our dreams (Schelling’s unconscious) and our existence. The moon, for instance, stabilizes the rotation of the planet Earth and thus provides the conditions for the establishment of life. Hölderlin states that the gods to come must be addressed, expressed, but yet, they nevertheless have always been there, silent. That which is being indicated by Hölderlin is the process of history as the displacement or overwriting of one epoch by another, or the transformation of one epoch or era to another as such an overwriting or concealment of that which no longer orients itself amid the restricted economy of the novel epoch. Yet, with Maimon, there is the question of reality. Not any narrative can become a hegemonic principle, and one that is out of tune with reality will, as all institutional narratives, eventually fall into oblivion, annihilation. In this way, the Christian epoch, in its fragmentation from the beginning, and with competitive monotheisms, is a failure, and due to its falsification of human existence, is out of tune with reality, with mortality, and will fall into oblivion. For Hölderlin, the false religion is already falling; yet, in the crisis that which is the saving power also grows—​there is a new overwriting, a new becoming that as a becoming of incompletion, one that affirms mortality and fate, remains strictly attuned to a fragmented reality of flux. Poetry, poiesis, is that which, in our feeling for the situation in which we finds ourselves, we remember the intimacy of the mortal and sacred ecology of our existence and of the interrelation of all that is, of a poetics of a polytheistic pantheism, a pagan poiesis of intimacy, of ubiquitous meaning.

Dionysos Dythrambs, by Friedrich Nietzsche Dionysos Dithyrambs8 is not merely a selection of poems, but a precise composition, of parts in relation to a constructed whole. The work abides alternating tones and thematics, between that of a poetics of intimacy, of his own solitude and status as a poet, and that of Zarathustra, his double and mirror, who came to him at Sils-​Maria. In the first poem, Nietzsche defends his existence as a poet. He was born one year after Hölderlin died, but, by the time Nietzsche had found his own poetic voice, and later began to take it seriously and to consider poiesis as philosophically significant, the wasteland of the desert continued to grow. Nietzsche mentions that “They scoffed” at what they saw as pretty, decorated words: Words and false rainbows Between false heavens Crawling and creeping—​ Only fool! Only poet!9

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Nietzsche responds to their scoff, in agreement, declaring that such ornamental poetry merely becomes a pillar of God, which may be read as a criticism of Schlegel’s romantic poetics, his Platonic lie, and his later arch conservatism, which as I have shown in Chapter Two, was not at all a surprise. Nietzsche declares “hostility” to all such herd virtues, and likens the poet instead to the panther and the eagle, who declare war upon the Day, upon the lambs, the last men. The lambs are those who consent to the farce of the order of things. Or, like the eagle, that long, Long stares into the abyss, Into its abyss . . . —​Oh, how it circles around in ever deeper depths! . . . Then suddenly, straightening its flight into a Screaming plunge, it thrusts upon the lambs!10 . . . Thus The poet’s longings are strong as An eagle, strong as a panther, Your longings abide under a thousand masks, You fool! You poet! . . .11 You look at men, As God does a sheep—​, Rending God in man, As you rend the sheep in men And you laugh rending—​12 That, that is your bliss, A panther’s and an eagle’s bliss, A poet and a fool’s bliss!13 Nietzsche, the poetic voice, confesses at the end, comparing himself to the moon going down in a crimson sky, that he had given up Day-​searching, sick of the truth of the Light—​that he had given up his truths and delusions, and allowed himself to sink into the shadows. As with the ontology of breakdown in the tragic sublime, Nietzsche becomes what he is, a poet. So I myself once sank From my truth and delusion, From my Day-​searching Tired of day, sick of light, I sank down, deeper into the shadows, Burned and thirsty from every truth

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—​Do you still remember, remember, hot heart, How you once thirsted there? I was banished from all Truth! Only fool! Only poet! 14 The Sun, the Day scorches the seeker, this Apollonian restricted economy of profane utility, production, growth, a household taken over by, as Hölderlin said, a “nest of vipers.” Those who had scoffed at his words he calls the “virtuous,” those who lie out of utility—​and not, like the poet, who “lies” so as to disclose the fatal truth, a different truth that destroys all truths and all virtues. One can witness immediately, in a pause, the affinity of Nietzsche with Hölderlin. Yet, one can also meditate upon the historical transformation between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, throughout Europe and the British Isles, with respect to the status of poetry. Poetry, in the eighteenth century, was the highest of the arts and the urgent concern of so many significant intellectuals. Yet, within half a century, poetry was dethroned from its peak in the hierarchy of culture. Theoretical Philosophy, divorced from its connections with ethics or aesthetics (something that was considered impossible, monstrous, a nightmare for all previous philosophy) became a mere uncritical function of technological development and served as a logistics for science, and, in the end, was declared dead. It was ironically found to be unnecessary by scientists themselves, who yet continue to posture as if they were philosophers themselves. There can be little place for poetry in such a truth regime of logistics, a poiesis that has its own calculable law and does not lend itself to mathematical and logical (Modernist) versification. It was amid such a proliferating and dire wasteland that Nietzsche discovered that he was a poet. In “The desert grows, woe to whom the desert shelters,”15 Nietzsche alternates the tone in a radical juxtaposition between his “identity” as a European and his finding himself at an African celebration. Through playful blasphemy, comedic, and overtly sensual and sexual references, Nietzsche attacks the sterility and joyless nihilism of the wasteland in the face of an affirmative culture. After only a short time, Nietzsche already begins to doubt if he was ever a European. I lie here, similar, all too similar To an exotic southern fruit, Surrounded by small flying beetles, dancing and playing with me like foolish and wicked

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wishes and ideas—​ surrounded by you, silent and suspicious Girl-​cats, Dudu and Suleika. —​Besphinxst, I put a lot of feeling in one word (Forgive me God, for this sinful speech! . . .)16 The poem continues with a farce in which one of the dancers, with much sexual innuendo, loses one of her legs. Nietzsche anticipates the moral outrage of his subject matter, and sets up a juxtaposition between the ethos of the “beautiful air,” of celebration and the “bellows of virtue”: Ha! Rise up! Blow, blow again, Bellows of virtue! Ha! Roar alone, roar with morality, As a moral lion roaring, Before the daughters of the desert! —​Your virtuous lament, dearest girls, Is like all European zeal, European hot-​hunger! And there I stand, already a European, I cannot do otherwise, God help me! Amen!17 The juxtaposition of a joyful affirmation of existence and the moral outrage of the virtuous is resolved by a poetic ontology of mortality: The desert grows, woe to whom the desert shelters! He crunches stone upon stone, the desert chokes and twists, Glowing brown, he looks at monstrous death With rumination—​his life is his chewing . . . Do not forget—​Man, who quenched his lust: You—​are stone, desert, and death18 In the wake of this intimation of “monstrous death,” Nietzsche gives us a “Last Will” in which the poet speaks of his own death, and juxtaposes it to a “friend” in his “dark youth,” who had already died, but who had shot adoration and lightning at him. While it is not clear whom Nietzsche is addressing, that this friend “conquers dying,” would perhaps indicate that he is intimating the Dionysian and revolutionary character of Jesus,

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the mortal, who, Nietzsche says, commands him to destroy, and in dying, destroys and conquers (Mark 13). Nietzsche writes, further suggesting his dead interlocutor: The boldest amongst the warriors Cheerful and grave under victors, Upon his fate—​a fate stands, Hard, circumspect, anticipating—​: Trembling in the face of triumph Jubilant that he conquers dying—​:19 In light of the context of the last poems that attacks the cowardice of the virtuous, it would seem that the fate that stands upon the fate of his friend is the death of God. The mortality of the conqueror is underscored by his “trembling,” perhaps an intimation of Gethsemane, one who conquers dying, but not death itself. All will be destroyed, the Temple, every stone will be destroyed. The Dionysian destruction of the household, the militant Jesus of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew—​this theme of poetic destruction of a hypocritical and dishonest virtue is augmented in the next poem, “Between Birds of Prey.” In this poem, Nietzsche invokes Zarathustra, asking if he still loves the abyss, if he is a pine tree, who waits for the first lightning in his solitude. Nietzsche writes, Alone! Who dares to Be a guest here? To be your guest? . . . Perhaps a bird of prey That ensnares itself happily With steadfast suffering Maliciously in the hair, With mad screaming laughter, A bird of prey laughter20 The bird of prey scorns Zarathustra, and bores into him, giving rise to a twosome, an event that echoes Nietzsche’s own description of the coming of Zarathustra to him. Now—​ Alone with you, Twosome in our own knowledge, Betwixt a hundred False games,

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Betwixt a hundred memories Unsure, On each tired wound On each cold frost, We choke on our own noose, Self Thinker! Self Hangman!21 With Zarathustra, fused with the bird of prey, an eagle, one comfortable around abysses, it is his own knowledge that is his destruction. Why do you tie yourself With the noose of your wisdom? What seduces you into the Paradise of the old snake? Why are you one who crawls Into yourself—​into yourself?22 Zarathustra is described as sick, a corpse, seeking the hardest fate, desiring the heaviest load, a deformed spirit, waiting, crouching, young and proud, a hermit without God. Now—​ crammed between two nothings, a question mark, a tired riddle—​ a riddle for birds of prey . . . —​They would already “dissolve” you they already crave your “dissolution,” they flutter round you, your riddles, round you, hanged one! Oh, Zarathustra! . . . Self-​knower! . . . Self-​hangman!23 This poem echoes the themes that have been developed in the composition thus far, and also reiterates thematics from Zarathustra, recalling his own illness, under the gravity of the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same. As with his “Attempt at Self-​Criticism” in the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, in which he wrote that he wished he had articulated the latter work as a song, a poiesis, Dionysos Dithyrambs conjures the world of Zarathustra, and providing a different perspective, and additional detail upon the original work. In the next poem, “The Fire Sign” the poetic voice speaks of Zarathustra’s “holy fire,” ignited under a dark sky, a beacon for lost sailors, of whom

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Nietzsche includes himself, lost in the endless sea, oriented only by the fire sign on the “little island” arising from the sea. This flame with a white grey belly —​in cold distance licks your greed, bends it neck towards always purer heights—​ a snake strikes from impatience: this sign, I placed there before me.24 The poetic voice temporality speaks from himself, expressing the resonation of Zarathustra with his own existence, and his own sense of tragic existence and mortality, his own soul being that of a flame. Through a series of questions, Zarathustra’s pathway away from men and animals is recounted, his six solitudes, but as the sea was not lonely enough for him, so the little island “allowed him to climb” and he became a flame upon the mountain, as his seventh solitude in which he “cast his fishing rod over his head.” Nietzsche closes the poem: Lost sailors! Fragments of old stars! You, seas to the future! Unfinished heavens! toward all the lonely I cast my rod: I gave an answer to the impatience of the flame, And caught myself, the fisher upon high mountains, My seventh, last solitude!—​25 Nietzsche continues his preceding thoughts with a lyrical poem, with the couplet, “Day of my life! The sun sinks.” The poetic voice, perhaps even that of Zarathustra, addresses his Day, in light of the setting of the sun. The scorching sun, disappears, “the great cool,” hope comes with the Night, a theme that he shares with Novalis, Schlegel, and Hölderlin. Does not the night Squint at me with a seducer’s glance? . . . Be brave, my strong heart! Ask not: why?—​26 The poetic voice, over the next lines, intimates that he is becoming oriented to the Night, he notes his noontide nap at midday, he recounts the tears of the Day, falling into the sea, and its own uncertain bliss. A sudden shift to “Laughter, golden, come!” The voice asks Laughter if she is the “foretaste of death” and questions his own seeming rashness, in which, despite the tears of the Day, and the pressures of multiple fates, happiness still comes to him. There is only games and waves all around, but the voice speaks of his boat being idle, that which was difficult has sunken into the blue sea,

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he has drunken “hope and longing,” and “smooth lies the soul and the sea.” Nietzsche concludes the poem, echoing the last poem: Seventh Solitude! Never closer to myself have I felt such sweet safety, never warmer, the sun’s rays. —​Does the ice still glow from my peak? Silvery, light, fish swim now upon my night27 Yet, the pleasure in the Seventh Solitude is quickly displaced by the agony of “The Lament of Ariadne,” in which the poetic voice is hunted by the Unknown God. The poem is radical in its sustained attack upon the hang-​ man God, one that merely tortures, but does not kill. The poetic voice intertwines attacks upon this silent God, unleashes questions to him as to his silence and his torment, and in a crescendo, bleeds out complete defiance in blasphemous and fearless calls for even more torture, a provocative echo of Zarathustra’s fateful affirmation of the eternal recurrence of the same. Significantly, and as a demonstration of the displacement of European nihilism with “beautiful air,” the poem ends with a shift to the god Dionysus: Lightning—​Dionysos is seen in his Emerald Beauty Dionysos: Be wise, Ariadne! . . . You have small ears, you have my ears. Fill them with a clever word!—​ Must one hate oneself first, before one can love oneself? I am your Labyrinth28 “Glory and Eternity” and “The Poverty of the Rich,” the last two poems of the composition continue the meditation upon Zarathustra, first as that one who curses the “coin” of the temporal world, glory, the delusionary desire to be remembered in the construct of history and in the eyes of the many. Zarathustra lurks in the mountains, lying long in wait, away from the vanity of the world, but curses the world with his strikes of lightning, one of Glory and gold, a world of shopkeepers, and “Tin Kling Klang glory,” in which each has his or her price. Nietzsche provokes: —​Will you buy them? They are all for sale. Offer them a lot! Rattle with a full purse! —​you strengthen them, you strengthen their virtue . . .29

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The poetic voice, in its defiance, states that in the face of such virtue, he would prefer to be guilty. He writes: Before all virtuousness I want to be guilty, called guilty with every great guilt! Before all glory-​trickery, my ambition is to become like a worm—​ under such lust, I become the lowest30 Yet, in the silence and darkness of the night, he spies a star far away, a sign, the “highest star of being,” an eternal work of art of “clumsy beauty,” a “shield of necessity,” who knows what he loves and hates and has given herself to him. Nietzsche closes the poem: Shield of necessity! Highest star of humanity! —​that does not reach its desire, —​that does not flee the impossible, eternal Yes of Being eternally I am your yes, because I love you, oh Eternity!—​31 This reprise of the “Seven Seals (or, the Yes and Amen Song)” is another expression of the affirmation of mortality, and a recognition of an eternity that he will never be. In the final poem, “The Poverty of the Rich,” Nietzsche returns to previous themes, to the first poem, in his unfulfilled desire for the cold dew and his desire for darkness, shadow of clouds, milky wisdom, to his castigation of the impatient truth of the day, and wishes that his wisdom come like a ripe fruit of African Celebration, as the transfiguration of Zarathustra in his awakening to the Law of Being, to the dryness of his world due to his own sterility, his own hoarding of wealth to Ariadne’s reply to Dionysus. It is this reply that is the climax to the composition. The torture with which Zarathustra is burdened is due to his own excessive search and accumulation of knowledge; his dreams of oases are merely symptoms of his own dryness, and aridity which has come despite his wish to the contrary. The poem speaks of events prior to his speech to the sun after ten years in his cave, of one who is over-​rich to the point that everything around him becomes a torment of the sun. But, Zarathustra is told, and in terms of the poetic format, by Ariadne: Ten years gone—​, And no drops reach you?

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No moist wind? No dew of love? But, who will love you, you, overrich? Your luck makes everything dry, makes love poor—​ a rainless land!32 And, closing: You must become poorer, Wise, unwise one! You want to be loved. One loves only the afflicted one only gives love to the hungry: give yourself away first, oh Zarathustra! —​I am your truth33 The goddess responds to Dionysus’ question and temptation that she is his truth, and answers his question:  no, one must not hate oneself, but to love oneself, one must become poor to oneself, unknown to oneself, incomprehensible. The rich are poor and create conditions of poverty by hoarding their wealth; one must not hate oneself as a seeker, but must give away that which one has so as to explore oneself ever more deeply. The speech to the sun in Thus Spoke Zarathustra occurs just after her counsel: Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest! For ten years hast thou climbed hither unto my cave: thou wouldst have wearied of thy light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine eagle, and my serpent. But we awaited thee every morning, took from thee thine overflow and blessed thee for it. Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it. I would fain bestow and distribute, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.34 As with Hölderlin, Nietzsche has traveled beyond the delusions and falsifications of post-​Platonic monotheism, has faced the necessity of the Law of Being, of the tragedy of mortal existence, as an event that sickened him, and from which he had to convalesce. Both seek, moreover, an affirmation of existence, in defiance to the narcissistic purposiveness of the restricted economy. Yet, while Hölderlin invokes the gods of the old, of their immurement, awakening, silence, and those that still, uninvoked, inhabit the intimacy of the lifeworld and the community, of the lover and the beloved, Nietzsche addresses Life, Soul, and Eternity, as goddesses, beyond God and the gods.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Empedocles and the Death of Zarathustra In this chapter, I will explore two more texts of Hölderlin and Nietzsche, The Death of Empedocles by the former, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra by the latter. I will place emphasis upon the respective destinies of the two protagonists: Empedocles, who dies due to his hubris amid the double bind of the law; and Zarathustra, who dies in innocence (only to open up his eyes again, with the next ironic recurrence). Zarathustra signifies Nietzsche’s departure from the Greeks and from gods to a novel constellation of Fate.

Hölderlin and the Death of Empedocles Hölderlin never finished his planned five-​act tragic drama, The Death of Empedocles, leaving behind three versions, with nearly three intact acts. In the following, we will explore the play from the perspective of its central protagonist, Empedocles, his death, and its meaning. Empedocles was a student of Pythagoras, who, through his doctrine of transmigration, articulated an enlightenment in the sense of becoming the All, which in his Pantheistic and Polytheistic topography was a manner by which mortals, creatures of body, may become attuned with the All, being the All after indefinite reincarnations. The irony of course is that the All is a process and is always changing, and the journey of the soul is open ended and unending—​not to mention the fact that each is, but will not be. It is ultimately tragic.

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Empedocles, it is said, declared himself to be a god. In the second version of the play, Hermocrates contends, in Act 1: Precisely this made him too mighty; he grew too familiar with the Gods. Thus to the crowd his word resounds As though from Olympus They thank him For having robbed the sky of The flame of life, Betraying it to mortals.1 Empedocles, we will recall, articulated his philosophy of Love and Strife, the four elements, and the vortex as an intimate poetics of becoming, of existence. He was also, as a historical agent, involved in a successful revolution against tyranny in Sicily. That Empedocles stated that he was a god, and due to his hubris against the gods, the Law of Being, was punished with death, a plunge into the crater of Aetna, which he seems to have chosen, is, as with all of his extant writings, derived from other sources. Yet, as suggested, becoming attuned to the divine All was the task of the Pythagorean bios and ethos, but it was not to become gods, who are celebrated first and foremost in his Golden Verses. If Empedocles did commit the nefas of which he is accused—​indeed, which he allegedly published in his own poetry—​then his case seems fairly straightforward in the context of the epoch. Nevertheless, Hölderlin did not complete the play, having abandoned it before 1800. It was with this abandonment that he finished his translations of Sophocles, both published in 1802. In its abandoned form, and in notes, it is clear that Empedocles as a “mourning play” was intended to undergo significant augmentations, including the development of the chorus. Indeed, in its incompletion, The Death of Empedocles is not a tragedy in the sense of Oedipus as Empedocles is neither blind to his nefas, nor does he seek to flee his fate, going willingly to his death. Moreover, beyond the hubris itself, there is no countervailing law that places Empedocles in a double bind of divided loyalties. The tortured fate of Antigone is missing, her transgression of the polis and the laws for the sake of another, deeper law—​that of her love for her brother. In the case of Empedocles, there would be, in the context of his political activity, alluded to by Hölderlin in the enthusiasm of the crowds who would make the former their King, a conflict between his status as a philosopher, as the devotee of the goddess Necessity, and his duty of a leader of the people, or, of the truth of the general economy (aorgic) vis-​ à-​ vis the restricted economy (organizational) of the state. Indeed, is Empedocles driven to hubris, the seduction of nefas, due to the seduction of glory, Nietzsche’s old coin, in the face of the crowds? Or, is he killed as Caesar was killed—​at the acme of victory, declaring himself a

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god, threatening the republican order of freedom and equality of mortals before death. Or, is there another way to read this story? Was his death the self-​sacrifice to the gods by one who was grateful for the victory of his people—​though a people who uncritically obey the state and blindly follow leaders, especially those who can magically heal the sick and raise the dead to life? Or, is it the case of walking away when one’s victory is assured, as Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. We can turn to Holderlin’s own essay on the mourning-​play to begin to comprehend the death of Empedocles. He writes in “The Basic Ground” (“The Ground of Empedocles”): In this independent relation, and in that supreme intensity which constitutes the fundamental tone of his character, he lives with the elements, whereas the world around him lives in supreme opposition to them; his contemporaries live in that free-​spirited refusal to think about or to acknowledge in any way that which lives; that is one side of the matter, while the other side is that their approach to the encroachments of nature remains under the supreme dominion of sheer serviceability.2 And: Thus he played the role of a religious reformer and a man politically engaged; in all the activities he devoted to those areas he displayed his typical proud and enthusiastic commitment; to all appearances, expressed already in his exchanging the positions of object and subject, he solved for himself all that was destined.3 In the light of Hölderlin’s perspective, we can ascertain the conflict in which Empedocles is embedded, in that conflict that has a strict resemblance to Antigone. The profanity of the state, of art, the organizational, the polis sees nature as “sheer serviceability,” as Heidegger’s “standing reserve.”4 Empedocles, in this way, despite the political victory, comprehends that such political change means nothing as there is still a supreme conflict between nature and art, between the laws of the gods and those of the state. Empedocles declares his allegiance to the laws of the gods, and in his nefas, his overt declaration of himself to be a god, does not break a law of art, of the state, but of the aorgic, of the gods. He thus sacrifices himself to the goddesses of the earth, refusing to serve the state, the organizational, art, and its fear of the unknown, of its narcissistic utilitarianism, its subjective purposiveness of a political regime that lies according to an agreed convention. As with the Antigone, Empedocles commits suicide, dies at the right time, as a sacrifice for nature over and against the Laws (Nomos) of the all-​too-​organic state, the restricted economy of the homogenous order of the profane regime of production, organization, and defence against the unknown, of the encroachments of Nature.

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In this way, Empedocles sacrifices himself to Nature as did the mother of Odysseus to the god of the Sea, who had punished her son for his failure to honor the gods in the wake of his victory at Troy. She sacrificed herself to set her son free from Circe, who held Odysseus in a state of forgetfulness of his destiny, of his homecoming.

Zarathustra: From tragedy to innocence With the Late tragedy of Euripides, the New Attic Comedy, the Dionysian power of life is conscientiously ignored, suppressed. Euripides, a friend of Socrates, takes a different tact with respect to the “tragic.” He no longer wishes to celebrate the self-​annihilating and self-​creating power of life. He not only eliminates the chorus, the exclusive topos of tragedy prior to the dramatic revolution, but also subjects Dionysus to humiliation and ridicule, as for instance, in The Bacchantes, in his caricature of the frenzy of the bacchantes, in which they tear apart Pentheus-​Dionysus. The latter is revalued as evil, excess, a disruptive power that must be eliminated from the polis. The tension of the bow, the rage of the power of life, is erased, quarantined from the productive divisions and production of the polis. Euripides seeks moreover to let the audience off the hook, to take away the uncertainty, suspense of the drama, seducing the audience to forget the terrible truth of existence. He orchestrates the situation and structure of the drama in order to disseminate his own moral agenda, his deus ex machina. The struggle for the birth of a new idol, a polis of Good, is waged at the cost of sacrifice of the power of life, the murder of the Dionysian. Yet, in the wake of the Euripidean suppression of the Dionysian power of life, it is Nietzsche, in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, who describes the three metamorphoses of the spirit by which his protagonist, Zarathustra, comes to affirm the innocence of Life, giving birth to novelty under the sun, to the Child. In Nietzsche’s later philosophy, he traces the emergence of the life-​ denying character of Christianity, of Augustine’s judgment of “guilt” upon the temporal world, to tragedy itself, and specifically to the successive curtailments of the chorus, of the Dionysian, in tragic drama. In his later philosophy, Nietzsche shifts his interpretation of the mortal situation to amor fati, love of fate, of an existence that is innocent in its becoming. In this light, from the perspective of the later Nietzsche, tragedy itself, in its lawful subjection of the protagonists to an interpretation of fate in which he or she is captive to an ultimate double bind, as for instance the divided loyalties of Agamemnon or Antigone, already abides the seeds of a life-​denying nihilism, not only as to the alleged necessity of these contradictory duties, but also, with respect to the questionable resolution of the conflict by means of sacrifice. That which is initially described as the “metaphysical miracle” of tragedy, becomes the laceration of the community

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in the distinction between the actor and the chorus—​drama itself begins the suppression of the Dionysian of the chorus. In the narrative, Zarathustra undergoes a metamorphic existence through which he discovers the innocence of life—​and the radical freedom of mortal beings. The narrative articulates his transformations, beginning with his retreat into solitude, to his cave upon the mountain, and an intimation of the metamorphoses indicating the pathway for the rest of the work—​what we could describe as the life-​cycle of the Overman. The latter must undergo the radical metamorphoses and events by means of which he is finally able to accept the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same as the highest formula for affirmation. For Zarathustra, the Child, the goal of the final metamorphosis, affirms the play of Life without sacrifice, as a gift. It is with Thus Spoke Zarathustra that Nietzsche liberates the Dionysian from its sublimation in the national community, of art in the service of the Moral Law, and allows music to become the tempo and melody of a free, very free spirit. The Overman is the one who overcomes himself, creates himself as an affirmation of life, irrespective of alleged necessities. The goal that is set by the Overman is the love of fate, an affirmation of a situation without purpose, a situation that is given purpose, meaning, in the act of creation itself. The Overman, through his three metamorphoses, is to become the child, the creator. Creation establishes purpose, meaning, in a creative event that affirms fate. The Child is not the Janus-​faced god of tragedy or comedy, neither any longer the Camel, who can bear much, nor the Lion, who laughs as he destroys. The Child transcends any dramatic or “religious representation” of the sacred in the polis amid the singularity of his own creation. He neither suppresses the Dionysian outright as Apollo, nor does he seek to destroy that which is, but instead affirms life in innocence, irrespective of the law or mores of the mortal community. There is no need for the camel or the lion any longer as the innocence of the child provides the strength for the affirmation of life.

Revaluation of all values: The lifeworld of the Overman The Overman must create the place for the emergence of the Child, a work that will conjure into existence the event of creative affirmation. Yet, such creation will necessitate the destruction of the Old Law Tablets, including those of tragedy. It is the Lion who destroys that which stands in the way of the Child, as the inquisitor of existence, condemning life. With the playful intimacy of the Child, there will awaken an innocence of becoming. Yet, this innocence will only arise once the Lion destroys the enduring mask of anarchy—​of the Good, Just, and the True—​the decadent valuations of the

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virtuous. As the event of destruction is simultaneously one of creation, the task of the Overman, in its metamorphosis as the Lion, is the revolutionary cultural praxis of a revaluation of values. Yet, as this is to be an event of self-​overcoming, that which is to be created in the moment of destruction is at once a metamorphosis, to that of the Child. The transfiguration of the Overman, through the three metamorphoses of the spirit, can be fruitfully read in tandem with the three typologies of history in Nietzsche’s early work, the Untimely Meditations—​yet, with the Child, the notion of a radical innocence of becoming a fourth mode of history—​or temporality—​is intimated, the unhistorical. The antiquarian is the Camel, that one who bears the burdens of the past since these are the past, the bygone, in a repetition of durable values, enduring images, idylls of the world no longer. Critical history is the Lion who seeks to unravel the anonymous strategies of power, uncovering the radix, the root of cultural repetition amid a subversive engagement with the disciplinary and totalitarian burden of received narratives. Monumental history, the inspiration of the Lion, looks to that which is great, commemorating a higher past, and reminds those to come that excellence in achievement is possible in human existence. These perspectives upon history, in light of the juxtaposition to the metamorphoses of the Spirit, exist intertwined with the other modalities of historical perspective, enmeshed together, although each remains indicated by the relative power in each of the three possible modes. Nevertheless, none of the perspectives upon history can account for the Child, as the creator. The Child, in this light, transcends each of these perspectives—​the Child is the transfigured fourth, the one who creates new values in an event of affirmation. This unhistorical event situates these three perspectives upon that which is upon the ground of creativity, one that will find its root in the unhistorical, the Child. The Child also destroys innocently, not from the reactive motive of an “against,” but accidentally in a “for.” The Child exists in freedom and innocence, and while he is given his topos by the Lion, he must never know the “against” of the Lion—​the Child acts intuitively in her preservation, destruction, creation, but does so in an untimely, unhistorical, way. Zarathustra intimates the innocence of the Child in his awakening to new truths and values that come to him throughout the play of fate. He himself does not consciously create these truths and values—​they seem to come to him as gifts, artefacts of his own engagement in a lifeworld in becoming, found and erected as tables of overcoming. The Child who exists in the Open, a state of ceaseless discovery, does not know the conditions for his or her own awakening into the state of innocence. For the Child, the past is not a concept of absence, but is his received world. The Child appropriates existence in the event of awakening amid the Open. As Franz Brentano5 expresses, the primordial associations of the past, present, and future allow for the ceaseless bleeding into the present and future of that which has been—​but is.

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Nietzsche, through his artistic engagement in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, enacts a strategy by which the philosophy of the future will come to pass. He has declared the death of God—​and thus of Sin—​and has thus inaugurated a cultural revolution, one that is still underway. Zarathustra undergoes the metamorphoses in his own allotted temporal existence, which will allow him to overcome nihilism through the affirmation of the eternal recurrence of the same—​which is another way of saying that life is singular, and occurs only once. It is in this sense that Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence has its own irony and wit, one that builds a pathway that immediately explodes into nothingness. Zarathustra, in his metamorphoses, exemplifies the pathway by which one overcomes the attribution of guilt to that which is temporal, and affirms Dionysian fate in innocence. The triumph of Zarathustra is retrospective—​his task is to prepare the ground, build the dwelling for the Child. He is to prepare a topos for the Child, for the found innocence of becoming. Only Zarathustra, amid his unhistorical gaze upon this random facticity of existence, can innocently cry out, “Thus I willed it.” The transfiguration will be a vision of the meaning of existence from the innocent perspective of the Child. After his address to the Sun, which we considered in the previous chapter, Zarathustra descends into the world with a message, a gift, for those with ears to hear. He is compelled to express the possibility of that which is farthest, just as the Sun overflows in the morning to give light and warmth to the Earth. And, as with the Sun, he would be nothing without those for whom he shines. He needs to communicate, he needs to engage the world with his call for an affirmation of the Earth that not only gives the future meaning, but also to all that which has been. At this moment, he is a camel who seeks to give his wisdom away to the crowd, to carry their burden. Yet, Zarathustra awakens to his first truth after a long sleep—​he understands that his clichéd mimicry of a camel, a Preacher for mobs, corpses, and flies, does not and cannot serve the chaos in his heart and his great longing for affirmation and creation. He instead seeks companions, whom he takes great pains to attract in his Speeches. He, as a Lion, viciously attacks the pedestals of nihilism—​complacent virtue and authority, doctrines of sleep, death, or the otherworldly. Zarathustra attacks the state as a destroyer of peoples, calling it the coldest of all cold monsters, an Idol, and the less of it the better. He also attacks the flies in the marketplace, and counsels his companions to flee into their solitude. Yet, with his intervention, as the exiles from The Birds of Aristophanes discover Cloud Cuckoo Land, he merely repeats the all-​too-​human simulacrum of power and façade. Zarathustra, the teacher and sage, realizes that he is afflicted by the shackles of discipleship. He revolts against his new truth in his repeated desire and actions to remove himself from those for whom he shines. While he is alone, he confronts the greatest weight of existence, shattered by the event, but yet convalesces with his new affirmation. Nevertheless, he seeks company for one last time in his cave with the higher men. But, he repeatedly

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needs to remove himself from the cave, from his engagement, to get some “good air.” Zarathustra wishes simply to speak to the stars. It is his exit from the cave, and his dwelling with his animals with a bronze mask, that lights up the event of his return to the Earth, in innocence, his affirmation of himself, and his amor fati. Zarathustra would have not been capable of the creation of new values as long as he is of this timely circumstance—​in the cave with the Higher Men who have made a festival of his philosophy. He lays the ground for an affirmation that will not only shatter hegemonic truths, worlds, wounds, but also complete the new law tablets. Amid the ironical wit of the eternal recurrence, we are called to embrace the singularity of existence in its innocence and positive meaninglessness. He partakes of his festival of death, as intimated in “The Sign,” closing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which he goes under, though as the one who, in the fulfilment of his own metamorphoses, gives birth to the Child. The Child must affirm the constellation of its own found world. Such an ultimate gesture and gift is enacted by the Lion—​it is the nearest the Lion will ever come to true creation—​it remains remote from the scenes of pregnancy and birth, he lies low behind a mask. However, it is the radical freedom of the Lion, which creates the topos, the dwelling for an infant creator. Zarathustra must again descend, go under. He must still become a Child, a creator amid an innocence of becoming.

The Overwoman and Zarathustra’s child Zarathustra confronts his last temptation when he hears the cry of distress of the higher men. He is tempted to pity by them—​the philosophers, kings, poets, mystics, magicians, and priests, those who are remembered as the official history of that which we are. Zarathustra laments that none of these Lions became a Child—​he is seduced to pity. He is tempted with the idea that if none of these will have individually achieved the innocence of the Child, then perhaps bringing each of these together inside his cave, the labyrinth of his wisdom, will bring about a situation in which free creation could emerge. Yet, again Zarathustra is tempted to become the camel and the shepherd for a flock—​he is the great artist bringing these variants together into volatile mixtures. The coterie of higher men wish that he join in the Ass Festival, and like them, become pious again. Yet, his pity flies in the face of the truth of their freedom as mortals and their shame—​even a freedom to be foolish, ignorant, or wilfully blind. Only a fool, only a poet. The Soothsayer, another agonal drive, tempts Zarathustra to become merely a Higher Man—​to be the very ass that will bear the latest festive bandwagon of the Mob, even a Mob of Higher Men. Zarathustra does not seek to become a Higher Man, nor does he seek to exercise the hegemony of authority and power of a monarch, or a Superman

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over the Higher Men et al. Zarathustra beckons these Higher Men to come out of the Cave into the Open of Midnight amid these Stars—​to witness Eternity—​to become Infants, Children, to play. Yet, the prerequisite for an Infant, a Child, is, after all, the Mother, Woman. Nietzsche suggests in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil: “Suppose truth be Woman, what then?”6 Zarathustra, as he tells us in his poiesis and song, never finds, or has not yet found a Woman with whom he wishes to have Children. Yet, he loves Eternity, a cosmic woman or women (Life, Soul, Earth, etc.) of great power. He longs for his Children, but laments his inability to find the Woman with whom he could create a creator. Woman is an enigma, a riddle—​she is also Loyalty, Truth, Life . . . She is Creation—​the Source of the Milk of the Stars of the Sky. But, it seems for Zarathustra, Woman is also an Island of Delos from which he seeks to fly. Zarathustra, while setting forth the possibility of an innocence of becoming, contains in himself the traces of the preceding metamorphoses, with their slavish and wrathful moods. He laments his self-​ destruction and desire for escape, which has kept him from Truth, from Woman, from Life. Zarathustra is spent—​ sterile, a mere voice in the wilderness—​he merely articulates a great longing for the Land of his Children, of the philosophers of the future, who have ears to hear. It is a cry of longing to the future. Yet, in the moment of vision in the Open of the Midnight amid the Stars, Zarathustra forgets his great longing, his last temptation, and seeks to become what he is, to stand amid the singularity of eternity. He is not concerned with physiological reproduction, but with the event of his own transfiguration amid his world. Aristotle’s woman as a pot of dirt for the depositing of the Seed is merely a pathway to exhaustion, of a procreation that merely defers creation to the future, to the next generation. Such a postponement will not facilitate his goal of becoming the Child. As a creator, he must cultivate this womb of being in himself—​Zarathustra, like Dionysus and Apollo, must learn and interpret these signs and crafts of Woman—​ Truth—​of this utter enigma of Fertility and Creation—​of the Goddesses—​as indications of this event of transfiguration that is betrayed in the creative phenomenology of his own mortal existence. Zarathustra laments that Woman, this power of creation, has only been betrayed as Birds, Cats, and Cows. Yet, this is not some repetition of Schopenhauer’s misogyny, but, on the contrary, a genealogy of mythological types. For instance, Isis and Maat, depicted as birds, were Ancient Egyptian Goddesses of Life, Justice, and Thought—​Woman as Harmony. Moon, their Sister, is the great practitioner of Balance for Life on the Earth; the Sphinx is Woman as Riddle—​she is a Cat, the Questioner in Oedipus Rex, and the Lion; Hathor and Nut—​the Cows—​are Woman as sustenance, Givers of All that which is; The Birds—​Isis, the mother of Horus and Maat, the goddess of philosophy, who is also named Minerva and Athena. Zarathustra says woman has been her best as a Cow, the Giver of All, that which is as She

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intimates the Child. Her breasts give the milk for the stars in the sky, for the mouths of the Children. Yet, these are not all the women, as Zarathustra will create relations with others, such as Eternity, Life, and Earth.7 Zarathustra is not a midwife as was Socrates. The latter wished to allow the traveler to overcome the sickness of Life—​death being the antidote. We will recall Socrates’ request that his disciples sacrifice a cock to the god Asclepius, the son of Apollo, the healer. One must choose death in the face of the Law (Nomos), which is the repository of the Divine in mortal Life. Life itself is of little or no value. It is merely a detour, an insurrection against nothingness, an indefinite deferral—​a revolt that has failed. For Socrates, the insurrection has failed in that Life itself has been exposed as untruth. Jesus, Mohammed, Siddhartha concur with Socrates on the ultimate value of Life. Yet, Zarathustra resists these Teachers. Zarathustra instead attempts the most difficult in his affirmation of Life—​ and calls the bluff of the great Sages, the Higher Men, by laughing at their scenarios of escape and denial. Zarathustra will live it all again—​eternally to recur as the Same, but he also seeks to rewrite the end of the story. His affirmation, though tainted by his own genealogy, involves a final act—​an event of affirmation that retrieves—​discovers and invents a new meaning for the haphazard and chance operations of his own earthly—​mortal—​life. He has left the cave and stands amid those whom he called into the Open—​yet, he stands alone amid Eternity. He has castigated the Higher Men and their bad air, and his face has turned to bronze. The time of pity for the Higher Man has ended. Zarathustra is not concerned with happiness, with the long life of the Last Man—​he is neither, therefore, concerned with suffering. The final act of Zarathustra is a being lifted up and shown by eternity the abyss that surges underneath. The goddess Life infiltrates the soul of Zarathustra, inscribing the primal incantations for his own birth, of his metamorphosis. Zarathustra dreaded what he had glimpsed in his vision and the riddle, as he choked with nausea upon the snake thrust down his throat, the trauma from which he convalesced in his solitude. He had not been swept up into a readymade meaning of life, as Truth is not to serve, to be servile, but must be discovered, excavated. The search for Dionysian truth is an arduous process, a struggle to release that which is masked into the Open. The moment of affirmation is announced when he declares that he cares only for his work, his creation, as he stands in the Open, with the arrival of his friends. Zarathustra declares: Well then! The lion came, my children are near, Zarathustra has ripened, my hour has come: this is my morning, my day is breaking: rise now, rise, thou great noon!8 In his dream at Noon, the world becomes perfect. Eternity throws the lightning that will incite his great affirmation. Nietzsche exalts the dice throw of Chance. It is the Child who can affirm Chance, Fate, the intricate

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enigma of Life, beyond God and gods—​even in the face of the death that we all share. The Child is born through the birth traumas of a Revaluation of All Values. Amid the metamorphoses of the Camel into the Lion, and the Lion into the Child, there is a struggle of self-​overcoming. The Camel is cast aside as the ring bearer of tradition, of the Old Law Tablets. The Lion, amid the revaluation, destroys, but is not aware of his inadvertent creations—​as a Lion, he will never be aware. It is the Child who is born into the topos, which is the last gift of the Lion. The Child picks up the blind creations of the Lion and meets these as found objects, beings of wonder, in innocence. The Child affirms new values in innocence, finally free of the “against” of the Lion. Zarathustra is inseminated by Eternity, by the Overwoman, a goddess. In an alchemical sense, Zarathustra, through his affirmation, gives birth to himself. Eternity rends this dread curtain, inaugurates this marriage of light and darkness. Zarathustra mates with Eternity. She shoots lightning out from a dark cloud—​flying off this edge of that precipice, off the cliff of that mountain. Zarathustra receives this lightning—​he is inseminated by it as a tree on the mountainside. Eternity—​Overwoman—​gives the Semen for the new creation. She flashes her nocturnal light, beckoning his pregnancy and childbirth. She disseminates her truth into him, and, with chaos in his heart, he gives birth to the Child—​Zarathustra gives birth to himself. That which Nietzsche has accomplished with Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the cultural articulation of an alternative meta-​narrative that radically contests previous narratives that he, as a physician of culture, has diagnosed as symptomatic of nihilism. That latter is the denial of Life, who is, as we have seen, a goddess in his magnum opus. It is in this way that we can understand the genealogies of Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals as commentaries upon Zarathustra, as was his poetry articulated in Dionysos Dythrambs. With his witty conjecture, “Supposing truth be woman,” followed by a question, “What then?” Nietzsche situates his motif of the Dionysian, of the terrible truth of existence and its affirmation, in woman as a constellation of goddesses, beyond God and the gods. Nietzsche, as with Schlegel, seeks to inaugurate a permanent cultural revolution, but, in distinction from the latter’s “progressive universal poesy,” he seeks a revaluation of cultural values that remains attuned to the Earth.

PART THREE

Hölderlin and contemporary philosophy

CHAPTER NINE

Hölderlin and the Frankfurt School In this chapter, I will explore Hölderlin’s influence upon the Frankfurt School, with a critical focus upon the figures of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who, while worth reading in respect to aspects of Hölderlin, demonstrate significant errors in their respective interpretations. I will begin with Benjamin’s interpretation of Hölderlin in a brief reference to “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” followed by his early essay “Two Poems of Hölderlin” for not only their seeming self-​contradiction, but also in light of a profound misunderstanding of Hölderlin’s philosophy. I will next turn to Adorno’s “Parataxis:  on Hölderlin’s Late Poetry” in which he, following closely Benjamin’s flawed interpretation of Hölderlin, enacts a criticism of Heidegger’s elucidation of Hölderlin, which repeats the same mistakes.

The Frankfurt School has long been associated with the Institute for Social Research in the Goethe Institute in Frankfurt. It originated in the early twentieth century and was composed of the many and not always consistent voices of the left-​wing, anti-​positivist intellectuals Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, and others. After Adolf Hitler ascended to power, some of its members removed themselves to New York and worked at the New School for Social Research, which also later included Hannah Arendt and her student Reiner Schürmann on its faculty. Being disaffected with the scientistic character of communist ideology of the time, the Frankfurt School sought to retrieve the philosophical

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background to Marx, especially in Hegel, an endeavor that became clearly necessary with the publication of Marx’s early writings in 1932. One of the sources for the development of German Idealism was of course Hölderlin and, given his monumental significance for German culture and the war over his “soul” in light of his appropriations by Nazis such as Alfred Baümler and Alfred Rosenberg, interpretation of his work became vital—​an overtly political act. Yet, as I will show, the interpretations of Hölderlin by Benjamin and Adorno are flawed, a fate due primarily to their consideration of Hölderlin as “merely” a poet, a mistake shared by Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Badiou. Nevertheless, in both Benjamin and Adorno, we find brilliant formulations of aspects of Hölderlin’s work—​yet, it is their failure to treat or even to conceive of Hölderlin as a philosopher in his own right that is the root of their misinterpretations and consequent distortion of his significance. As suggested at the beginning of this study, to take Hölderlin seriously as a philosopher, one must set forth an appropriate philosophical contextualization of his work, which, I  have contended, is Kant’s third Critique. Again, many refer to the significance of the Critique of Judgment for Hölderlin, but none of the philosophers listed above, nor any of those working on this topic in the contemporary era, has provided a detailed interpretation of Hölderlin’s thought in a sustained engagement with Kant. It may be suggested that Benjamin and Adorno could be forgiven for having written their works before the discovery of “Urteil und Seyn.” Yet, there are significant indications of Hölderlin’s philosophy of mortality in other extant texts, such as his letters, essays, poems, and even in his Hyperion. Heidegger, contrary to the protestations of Adorno, though he commits the similar error of regarding Hölderlin as a poet—​while assigning himself the role of the “thinker”—​ enacts a remarkably similar philosophical trajectory as Hölderlin and, despite his work preceding its discovery in 1961, much of his Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry accord with the text of Hölderlin’s “Urteil und Seyn.” Indeed, the failure to locate the significance of Hölderlin’s mortal thought within the context of Kant’s rationalist solution to the problem of the sublime leads to an obfuscation of his thought and the casual and usual identification of Hölderlin with the early German romantics, a claim we have found to be unsustainable. Indeed, Hölderlin and Schlegel, while inadvertently remaining in accord that philosophy must be expressed as a form of poetics, diverge radically with regard to their philosophical orientations. In this context, we will turn to Benjamin’s work on Hölderlin and the romantics in order to divine its central flaw.

Walter Benjamin’s Beautiful Error: “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin” In his brilliant essay “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Benjamin writes in a note toward the end on the craft of poetry:

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Although in these words Hölderlin directly parallels certain tendencies in Schlegel and Novalis, what is otherwise asserted of these authors in this study does not hold for him. What was certainly, on the one hand, a powerful tendency in the development of the Romantic philosophy of art, but, on the other hand, little developed or clarified—​and therefore, where it was explicitly postulated, only a remote outpost of their thinking—​ was Hölderlin’s domain. This expanse he governed and kept watch over, whereas for Friedrich Schlegel and also for Novalis, who saw into it more clearly, it remained a promised land. Apart, then, from this central idea of the sobriety of art, there is little to found a direct comparison of these philosophies of art, just as between their respective progenitors there was no personal relationship.1 Benjamin, in this passage, clearly distinguishes Hölderlin from Schlegel and Novalis—​to the point moreover that one may wonder if the former is in fact a “romantic” at all, grounded as the movement was upon Christianity and Platonism. As we have seen in the preceding pages, Hölderlin’s mortal thought found its orientation and grounding in early Greek tragic thought, specifically in Heraclitus, Empedocles, Pindar, and Sophocles. Indeed, it was Hölderlin’s orientation to tragic thought, as expressed in the philosophical poetry of Heraclitus and Empedocles and in the tragic dramas of Sophocles, that required him to assign the praxis of poetic craft as the means by which a mortal articulates his own “eccentric” interpretation of mortal existence. In this way, Benjamin’s assertion that there is “little to found a direct comparison of these philosophies of art,” becomes mute as that which founds a comparison is precisely their respective orientations to the Greeks and to Christianity. In his essay “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin,” written in the same period as “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Benjamin reveals at one and the same time, the profundity of his interpretation of Hölderlin, in its specific enactment as the articulation of poetic content, of the poetized (Gedichtete), but also his “blindness” to the philosophical horizons operative in the work of Hölderlin. As we have revealed in Part One, Hölderlin, in his radical deconstruction of the poetics of reflection, and its inherent falsification of mortal existence in the hands of Kant and the early German romantics, enacts a “revolution within the revolution,” displacing the modernist secularization of Christianity for an acquiescence to the tragic horizons of existential possibility—​and impossibility. Such an acquiescence to the limits of mortal existence is an invocation of the Law of Being, of the All, in which each perspective participates in its equality in the face of mortality. With the Heraclitean notion of logos, of the unity of opposites in the mortal realm as Love and Strife, the notion of the One becomes radically inaccessible to mortals, being enunciated to a mortal, after all, by a goddess. Yet, it was the same goddess who counselled Parmenides to also explore mortal knowing, thought, in which the Nothing appears to

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infiltrate the continuum of Being, thereby revealing the flux or temporality of existence, just as silence between notes allow for the creation of a melody. This scenario recalls the diremption in the tragic between the instantaneous intuition of the One by the gods and the dispersion of the mortal amid the many, the spatio-​temporal context. The poetized, for Hölderlin, is the manifestation of the Law of Being, as we have discovered in the preceding chapters, both in terms of the radically temporal character of mortal existence, but also the openness that is then to be explored on the basis of such a self-​interpretation as mortal. Benjamin, however, has a differing view, which is highly questionable: In this light the poetized will come to light as the precondition of the poem, as its inner form, as artistic task. The law according to which all apparent elements of sensation and ideas come to light as the embodiments of essential, in principle infinite functions is called the Law of Identity. This term describes the synthetic unity of functions. It may be recognized in each particular configuration it takes as an a priori of the poem.2 While we can readily accept the notion of the “poetized,” as the Law of poetics, of the mythos that unites in itself form and content, we cannot accept that this is a Law of Identity, if we are, that is, to apply such a notion to Hölderlin. Indeed, such a Law of Identity seems quite out of place here, given Benjamin’s description of Hölderlin’s method as mythopoetic. We will recall Hölderlin, who writes in “Urteil und Seyn”: But this Being must not be equated [verwechselt] with Identity. When I say: I am I, the Subject (Ego) and the Object (Ego) are not so united that absolutely no sundering can be undertaken, without destroying the essence of the thing that is to be sundered; on the contrary the Ego is only possible through this sundering of Ego from Ego. How can I  say “I” without self-​consciousness? But how is self-​consciousness possible? Precisely because I oppose myself to myself; I sunder myself from myself, but in spite of this sundering I  recognize myself as the same in the opposites. But how far as the same? I can raise this question and I must; for in another respect [Rüksicht] it [i.e. the Ego] is opposed to itself. So identity is not a uniting of Subject and Object that takes place absolutely, and so Identity is not equal to absolute Being.3 It is clear from this quotation that Benjamin’s interpretation of Hölderlin is mistaken, as is his transparent use of Kantian philosophy to describe Hölderlin’s poetic method. Of course, one could respond that the text I am citing was never known to Benjamin, who committed suicide nearly twenty years before its discovery. Yet, as we have seen, Hölderlin’s departure from Kantian reason (Vernunft) is readily detectable in other extant texts. Nevertheless, “Urteil und Seyn” remains Hölderlin’s most concise statement

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on Kantian and post-​ Kantian philosophy, which, from the perspective Hölderlin’s mythological paganism, is merely another variant of hubris against the Law of Being. We will readily recall—​and this should have been very clear to Benjamin, that Identity is the methodology of the Day, of the organizational sphere of the restricted economy, standing against the general economy of Being—​of the Rousseauean Night. In this light, our criticism of Benjamin’s inaccurate “reading” of Hölderlin is urgent given his commanding influence upon the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory as a whole. An example of such an impact comes immediately through a consideration of Adorno’s interpretation of Hölderlin in his essay “Parataxis.”

Theordore Adorno and the Destruction of Being It is immediately clear from reading Adorno’s essay on Hölderlin that his interpretation is grounded upon Benjamin’s reading. Not only does Adorno repeat the significance of the “poetized” (Gedichtete) for Hölderlin, but also attributes the use of this term to Heidegger. Yet, his generosity to the latter is suited for his own purposes, and is only temporary as he immediately asks the question of the meaning of the poetized. With this question, Adorno attacks Heidegger, claiming that he thrust Being upon Hölderlin “for authoritarian purposes.” Again, Adorno is, as Derrida does incessantly, intimating Heidegger’s “politics,” which we presume that we know all too clearly. Yet, as we can ascertain from “Urteil und Seyn,” Heidegger did not thrust Being upon Hölderlin, but most likely retrieved the question of Being through his own readings in early German romanticism and Hölderlin’s mortal thought. Moreover, it has been made very clear that Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin was an act of defiance against the Nazi regime and one of its most prominent intellectuals, Baümler. In this respect, Heidegger, as described by Frank Edler in his four essays on Heidegger’s radical disputation with Baümler,4 enacted a poetic subversion in his public communications while Recktor of the University of Freiberg, and was punished for his defiant posture. Heidegger’s recalcitrance, including a refusal to come to Berlin on Hitler’s request in 1935, was met with unambiguous consequences. Heidegger was placed under surveillance until the end of the war and denied membership to the Berlin Academy of Sciences, being refused as the result of a negative portrayal of him by Baümler as a “schizophrenic” with “Jewish Ideas.” To this extent, we can perhaps understand Arendt’s work to rehabilitate Heidegger after the war as she believed that Heidegger was working against the Nazis, as he remained to “stand in the storm.” To this extent, Adorno’s reliance upon Benjamin’s inaccurate interpretation of Hölderlin yields the result that he appears to understand neither Hölderlin nor Heidegger.

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Adorno often criticizes Heidegger for his so-​called jargon of authenticity, the title of a short pamphlet he wrote against Heidegger in the late 1960s. Yet, his own method betrays its own impenetrable and unexplicated Hegelian terminology, such as “determinate negation,” “dialectic,” not to mention his own Marxian political commitments. In other words, it turns out that Heidegger’s work on Hölderlin exhibits a philosophical accuracy with respect to the text of Hölderlin, but, as with any original thinker, discloses its own purposes and ideas. It is Adorno and Benjamin’s commitment to the Law of Identity, of Reason (apperception) that reveals their failure to understand Hölderlin’s philosophy, his mortal thought. Nevertheless, as with Benjamin’s notion of the “poetized,” Adorno makes another beautiful contribution to the exploration of Hölderlin’s poetics with his discussion of parataxis. In his reading, parataxis, appearing in the late works of Hölderlin, is a technique that is purposefully disruptive, deconstructive of “unity.” In this case, and in line with the trajectory of his interpretation, Adorno attributes to Hölderlin a strategy of de-​mythologization through temporal disjunctions and juxtapositions in which he refers to myth, so as to unseat myth. He writes:  “Hölderlin expects a state of freedom to be attained only in and through the synthetic principle, through its self-​reflection.”5 It is significant that these lines follow a reference to Benjamin’s invocation of the Law of Identity, which, in Hegelian fashion, he characterizes as an identity of the nonidentical, and it is in this context that he claims that Hölderlin seeks to attain freedom through the “synthetic principle, through its self-​reflection.”6 Adorno asserts, in this light, that the dialectical structure in the work of Hölderlin is incompatible with Heidegger’s commentaries, is neither a merely formal poetic principle nor and adaptation to philosophical doctrine. It is a structure of both form and content.7 Once again, Adorno is merely summarizing Benjamin’s article and repeating its mistakes, not only with respect to the entire “doctrine of reflection,” which Hölderlin radically opposed, but also with regard to the origin of freedom in the synthetic, in reflection. Adorno has shown himself, in this way, to be not only uncritical, but also anachronistic in his superimposition of his ever present Hegelian dialectic onto Hölderlin. To adequately discuss the meaning of thought for Hölderlin, we must instead bring into view the “unity of opposites” of early Greek thought, and thus, of the question of the relation of logos and Being. Such reflective ideas, merely parroted by Adorno, are clearly rejected in “Urteil und Seyn,” which, irrespective of any “dialectical” structure evident in much of Hölderlin’s poetic works, articulates not only the Law of Being, a poetic, fundamental ontology of mortality, but also a temporal metontology

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of existence, which makes manifest the Open, a topos that is disclosed with the shattering of our comprehension against the overwhelming. Nevertheless, and just as with Benjamin’s notion of the poetized, even if Adorno’s ground is inaccurate, and seems to have been taken over uncritically from the former, the performative concept of parataxis, also observed by Nietzsche, may be deployed as a knife, a deconstructive device that cuts against any claim to “unity.” In Hölderlin’s case, Adorno is making the assertion, contrary to one of Benjamin’s primary claims as to the meaning of “the poetized” as the mythic, that Hölderlin deconstructs myth and being, severs the narrative for the sake of the present, one neither forward, nor backward. Such a reading is also untenable, if, that is, we are seeking to understand Hölderlin’s mortal thought. Indeed, Hölderlin is not seeking the present through parataxis, the juxtaposition of epochs and places and names. On the contrary, he only comes to a temporal awareness of existence through such juxtaposition, one that discloses that which has been, together with a vision of that which is to be. As he is radically embedded in temporality, amid the sensus communis, the Dionysian community, the poet is that one who is assigned to “establish what remains,” and is endowed with vision, insight into radical possibility. Indeed, two of Hölderlin’s persistent themes are, on the one hand, remembrance, and prophesy, or prophetic insight. Adorno has strayed from the topic as parataxis, in the context of the ossifying and particularizing restricted economy, is meant to deconstruct the constructed uni-​vocity or identity of the “present,” or, of the eternal standing now (nunc stans), which is merely a falsification of existence that is a chaotic flux. Such a deconstruction has for its target any totalizing hegemony that presumes to be the One—​in the spatio-​temporal domain, as Benjamin contends, there are the Many and their relations, or their configuration, which is an aesthetic construction of compositional unity, one that is not of Identity, but of existence amid the Law of Being. Such clarity with respect to Hölderlin and his philosophy has been revealed through the contextualization of his “Urteil und Seyn,” a task that radically transforms the “narrative” surrounding Hölderlin and the poetic meaning and groundless ground of philosophy itself.

CHAPTER TEN

Heidegger and the question of Being In this chapter, I will explore affinities between Hölderlin’s philosophical innovation in Urteil und Seyn and Heidegger’s rearticulation of the question of Being in relation to the Kantian treatment of the Sublime. We will explore the impact of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche upon Heidegger’s early philosophy with respect to the radical criticism of the principle of reason and its breach in the event of the tragic sublime, a breach that allows for the disclosure of temporal existence.

Heidegger on Kant Heidegger left us much work directly on the philosophy of Kant, including Being and Time, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and “Kant’s Thesis about Being” among other references. Emerging from the phenomenological movement, which was itself a departure from neo-​Kantianism and directly opposed to logical positivism, Heidegger from the outset articulated the question of Being in a manner that mirrors, as a repetition, the question of Being that Hölderlin asked Fichte over one hundred years earlier. Heidegger, though he did not have access to Hölderlin’s “Urteil und Seyn,” was however aware of his intimate involvement with Schelling and Hegel, and was well-​read in Hölderlin’s extant work. We will consider the relationship of Hölderlin and Heidegger in more detail in the next chapter through an exploration of Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlinian poetics in his “Letter on Humanism.” In the first instance, however, we will explore the pathway by which Heidegger came to Hölderlin in light of his engagement

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with Neo-​Kantianism, logical positivism, and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl itself. Heidegger’s engagement with Kant was a central aspect of his 1920s radical phenomenology, of the fragments of his “Being and Time” project, from which he turned with, in the 1930s, an intensification of work upon Hölderlin and Nietzsche, engagements that were radically mired in political strife with Nazi philosophers who had appropriated the work of these latter “national” authors. Heidegger contested the Nazi interpretations of Hölderlin and Nietzsche, even using his own interpretations as criticisms of the Nazi regime itself, as in his Contributions to Philosophy (1937). Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant abides primarily in the first Critique. His concern, as it would become with his rejection of Husserl, was the temporality of thought itself, not the consciousness of time or of temporality as duration.1 In Kant and the Metaphysics, Heidegger directs our focus to the revisions between the first and second editions of Kant’s first Critique with respect to the status and role of the Transcendental Power of Imagination. When consulting the two editions,2 it is clear that significant alterations have occurred with respect to the status of the imagination, which, in the first edition (A94-​95), is situated not only as an a priori faculty in its own right, but also as, following Aristotle’s De Anima, that which mediates between the faculties of sensibility and understanding. Heidegger unfolds the significance of the Kantian imagination as that faculty which generates the temporal and spatial manifold, but also as that power which generates conceptuality itself. Heidegger places intense focus upon the Transcendental Judgment or the Schematism, an unrevised section in the B Edition, which contradicts Kant’s novel characterization of the imagination as merely the title of an act of the understanding, and, in its figurative and productive roles, as subordinate to understanding. With his excavation of the original significance of imagination in Kant, Heidegger reveals not only that transcendental imagination is temporality itself, but also that reason, as he ends his Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, is the transcendental imagination itself. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger, in light of his interpretation of Kant, articulates his own version of “transcendental philosophy,” tacitly admitting that Being and Time operates within the latter horizons, a stark admission he later makes in an explanation of the significance of the turn (Kehre). In his own version of transcendental philosophy, Heidegger maintains the Kantian distinction between the theoretical and practical, yet providing temporal interpretations of these domains, and demonstrating their interrelation and their relative status. It is vital that one recalls that this work of Heidegger was intended to be situated within the larger plan of Being and Time itself. In this light, the practical and theoretical distinction—​ a chasm in the philosophy of Kant, which, as we have seen, is mediated by judgement—​ becomes that of the distinction between the Zuhanden (practical) and Vorhanden (theoretical), the latter arising from the former only in the context of breach, absence or lack—​and in creative inspiration.

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These domains are operative within Care (Sorge), a name that indicates the being of Dasein, or existence. Again, Heidegger’s primary focus is upon the question of Being, a question that is intrinsic to the existence of a being for whom being is an issue and is articulated by the questioner amid anxiety as the mood, or feeling, which reveals our temporality as being toward death. Heidegger deploys the intentionally provocative formulation of Nothingness, of standing in the face of the abyss, as the type of understanding that is our ultimate possibility, which is death, as we are “shattered” against overwhelming temporality. In this context, one serves the truth, that of philosophy, by standing in the face of the Nothing without evasion. It is evident that Heidegger’s novel version of transcendental philosophy is a Kantian version of his own phenomenological analytic of Dasein. Yet, in such an interpretation, Kant is transfigured beyond recognition as his central purpose, that of defending the “authority” of Reason from skepticism and Humean empiricism, is displaced by a sensuous “reason,” which is aware of its status as a mortal thought, finite and contingent. In this way, in parallel with Kant’s project of a self-​critique of reason, Heidegger articulates his analytic of existence as a self-​interpretation of human existence, a being that is to be analyzed, phenomenologically, as a prerequisite endeavor for the fulfilment of the question of Being. In other words, in order to undertake the question of Being, one must understand the be-​ing of the questioner. Yet, as we have witnessed, the being who asks the question is radically temporal, limited, and fated to death. In other words, the status of human existence as mortal is disclosed, precisely in its articulation of the question of Being. Such a transcendental philosophy, which is enacted as a radical temporalization of thought and existence, has radical implications for Kant’s thought as a whole, including a retrieval of an existential notion of freedom and the prioritization of the artwork over the discipline of aesthetics. For Heidegger, the latter is a corruption by the German rationalist Alexander Baumgarten of the original significance of the Greek aisthetikos, which is concerned with perception and sensation within the context of the spatio-​temporal domain—​or, with the radical sensuality of mortal thought. As early as History of the Concept of Time, his lecture course of 1925 at the University of Marburg, Heidegger declared that Husserl’s path to the things themselves is not possible on its own criteria as Husserl’s phenomenology remains fatally embedded within the “mythology of consciousness.” In other words, Husserl, with his critical “displacement” of the fatally subjectivistic Neo-​Kantianism with his own appropriation of Cartesian doubt, remains ensnared within the solipsistic metaphysics of Modern philosophy. Heidegger transcends the subjectivistic paradigm with the apotheosis of the Being and Time fragment—​one that must be read along with the many lecture courses of the period, which not only fulfil the original plan for Being and Time, but in some cases exceed it, as with Heidegger’s lecture courses on Gottfried Leibniz, who was not mentioned in the original table of contents.3 Heidegger’s own transcendence of the subjectivistic paradigm is intimately

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related to his readings of Kierkegaard in light of Nietzsche. Heidegger exits the subjective, Kantian labyrinth through its destruction. One manner in which we can comprehend Heidegger’s 1920s radical temporalization of thought is through an exploration of the impacts of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche upon Being and Time, especially in the context of Heidegger’s deconstruction, and rejection, of Husserl’s phenomenology.

Kierkegaard and the Concept of Anxiety One work that is central to the Being and Time project is Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety,4 which is abundantly evident—​to the extent that Theodore Kiesel, in his brilliant excavation, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time,5 calls the published version of Sein und Zeit, the “Kierkegaardian” draft. In his seminal, and perhaps most recognizably philosophical work, Kierkegaard begins, in the Introduction, with a radical differentiation, upheld by Heidegger, between the scientific and mathematical domain of knowledge and that of the personal existence of the individual human being. The latter is a domain that is inaccessible to reason and must therefore be disclosed on its own terms and in a language or language system that is appropriate for this radically historical or temporal account of individual human existence. For Kierkegaard, the historicity of human existence is specifically characterized by Sin, and the anxiety that occurs in the face of Sin. Now, such a suggestion may lead us to immediately regard Kierkegaard as a Christian or, at the very least, a religious philosopher—​and this may be the case (although Kierkegaard was a fierce critic of established religion, which he labelled “Christendom”). However, if we merely remain here, at the surface level of labels and gossip, we will miss that which is vitally interesting in Kierkegaard—​and from a philosophical perspective. That which characterizes this mortal domain of personal existence is, for Kierkegaard, temporality, historicity, a domain to which we have alluded, and which was clearly drawn in our previous explorations of Kantian and early romantic poetics, has a susceptibility toward myriad interpretations and expressions. However, instead of time as the form of experience in Kant, or the tragic existence of Hölderlin, or God marching on horseback as Napoleon in Hegel, Kierkegaard locates the origin and the essence of personal, human existence, in the narrative poetics of the Fall of Adam and Eve. Kierkegaard seeks a language matrix that can express and guide the historicity of existence, one that is not scientific, logical, mathematical, or indeed, political as with the French Revolution, for instance. For Kierkegaard, that which is personal is the facticity of his existence as a Christian—​thus, this mode of expression is authentic for his own personal existence. But, his claims go much farther and deeper than this—​for from this perspective, he asserts that Sin, and thus the Fall, is the event through which

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human existence came to be. In this way, the temporality of human existence is the story of Sin and of its repetition throughout extant historicality. This synchronization of lived human existence and the biblical story of the Fall takes place in the field Kierkegaard designates as “dogmatics.” In this field, he has found a candidate for that other language system and one that can claim to be based upon some variation of historicity, in this case, that of the Adamic dispensation of human existence through Sin and the Fall. In this way, the dogmatics of Kierkegaard resemble the existentiales of Heidegger and are meant to fulfil the same purpose of the indication and expression of existence. Yet, there is evidently a radical distinction between Heidegger and Kierkegaard with respect to their respective responses to anxiety, and their interpretation of its significance. This distinction is due to the influence of Nietzsche upon Being and Time. Kierkegaard’s resolution of anxiety consists in an acquiescence to God through faith, an affirmation of the absurd.

Nietzsche: Mortal existence and the death of god The philosophy of Nietzsche is the culmination of a turbulent century of philosophy, of that which I  have described as the Second European Renaissance, with its appropriation of early Greek thinking. The immediate philosophical context for the emergence of Nietzsche’s philosophy is that of Schopenhauer, toward whom Nietzsche began to articulate a critical attitude as early as The Birth of Tragedy and in his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator” (1874), published in his work, Untimely Mediations. Kierkegaard was also aware of Schopenhauer, but while there were strong affinities in respect of the critique of the principle of sufficient reason and of its radical limits, the former resisted the atheistic and non-​Christian elements of his thought. Nietzsche’s criticisms of Schopenhauer can be delineated according to two major lines of engagement. On the one hand, Nietzsche lays out, across many of his works, a criticism of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Will. In a radicalization of Feuerbach’s insights, Nietzsche regards the notion of the Will as a fiction—​indeed, as a type of artwork. This aesthetic approach to the basic conceptuality of philosophy (a concept is a “worn out metaphor”),6 underscores and radicalizes Schopenhauer’s own departure from a systematic philosophy based upon the unity of reason (as in Hegel). In light of his radical suggestion that “reason” itself is a fiction (and that the very project of a philosophical “system” displays a “lack of integrity”), Nietzsche, as with Hölderlin, surpasses the radicality of Schopenhauer’s point of departure through his own dismissal of the integrity of the principle of sufficient reason underlying “science.” It will be recalled that each of the major philosophers of the nineteenth century, even

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as many were attempting to disclose a field of truth transcending “reason” and thus “science,” still left the principle of “reason” intact. Nietzsche’s own philosophical development takes a step further away from the tradition of idealism through his aesthetic interpretation of “science” (and “religion”) in The Birth of Tragedy. The second major line of criticism of Schopenhauer is Nietzsche’s affirmative repudiation of the former’s ethics of the denial of the Will. With his “aesthetic” or “poetic” turn, Nietzsche has set himself free from a substantive metaphysics of the Will—​the substantive character of which may be regarded as the major reason that necessitated its denial. With the rejection of the notion of the Will as not only a “fiction,” but also, as radically incoherent, Nietzsche sets forth a phenomenologically rooted philosophy in which language is deployed—​as it will be in Heidegger’s own phenomenology of formal indication in the 1920s—​ to indicate the predominant features and trajectories of existence. This linguistic philosophy—​ a forerunner to Wittgenstein—​ acted to retrieve the poetic and aesthetic character of “knowledge” through the wholesale translation (“transfiguration”) of philosophical conceptuality into the intimate mythos and poetics of Nietzsche’s own work as a poet-​philosopher. The central mythological transfiguration enacted by Nietzsche is his radical—​though often fundamentally misunderstood—​assertion regarding the “death of God” in his master poetic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the current context, the death of God is a reiteration of the illusion of reason—​ for the term “God” in the philosophical tradition is most predominantly regarded as a principle of unity (and not as a religious notion). In this way, the death of God is an echo of Nietzsche’s rejection of a philosophical system. The question that arises, in this light, concerns the philosophical implications of such a radical sensualization of “reason,” thought—​indeed, even of its transfiguration into a mere “fiction” (as the body is the great reason, as expressed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra). With the linchpin of “unity” dissolved, there can be no system of reason, as called for by Kant, who had postulated the existence of God as the practical grounding of the “unity” of reason. It is upon the basis of this dissolution that Nietzsche sets forth his indication of the will-​to-​power as a poetic and philosophical description of the chaotic phenomena of the world and of history—​it is not a metaphysical statement in the sense of “substance,” but an intimation of an unfathomable power that orchestrates our “experience” of the world. With the dissolution of the fundamental infrastructure of philosophical “systematicity” in the Idea of God, there is a dissolution of the illusion of rational “unity.” Nietzsche—​in light of his prerequisite philosophical and poetic insights—​ rejects not only the thing-​in-​itself (as was done in a qualified way by Kant and Fichte), but also the empirical “ego,” conceived as a substantive unity and identity (recall Schelling’s unconscious, which is itself a foreshadowing of Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacan).

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Heidegger: Kierkegaard after Nietzsche Near the beginning of his History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger speaks of being shattered by an unnamed philosopher—​though we ascertain that he is speaking of Nietzsche and his declaration of the death of God. It was this crucial intervention that transformed a phenomenologist of religion to one of existence. Husserl underlines this transformation in his observation that Heidegger had left the Catholic lifeworld. With the death of God, the overwriting, covering up, falsification of mortal existence by a fundamental theology and a theological dogmatics is unmasked, exposed as a work of mortal contingency. “God” was an artwork, a proper name of a poetics, which in its pretence to truth (over and against the mythos of the Ancients), transgressed it limits and entered into the scorching Daylight of philosophy, to which it succumbed, and ironically was displaced by scientific reason. With the death of God, Kierkegaard’s contention that anxiety reveals the character of human existence as sin is dissolved. For Nietzsche, the world transfigured as innocence becomes the character of human existence. Heidegger, for his part, parodies Kierkegaard by speaking of our guilt, but a guilt that, in the nonevasive engagement with the Nothing amid anxiety, reveals the radical temporality of human existence and its abysmal freedom. Instead of a leap of faith from the torments of anxiety into the absurdity of God, Heidegger, dwelling still in the domain of Care, of concern and anxiety, stands before the Nothing, is shattered in the Nothing, finding temporary resolution in the mortal freedom to imagine possible futures for personal and public existence. Such a situation is tragic, an existence of uncertainty and bewilderment in the face of an incomprehensible predicament.

Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Kantian Sublime Heidegger’s references to the Critique of Judgment are few, though they reveal that he was quite intimate with the text. One reference is in a Note to the fifth edition of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,7 in which he suggests that the third Critique had served to complete the Kantian Critical Philosophy according to its own criteria, and is in accordance with the suppression of the imagination as it took place in the second edition of the first Critique. Another reference occurs with Heidegger’s critical review of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in which he notes the “ontological” status of imagination in the first and third Critiques, which “lies far from Neo-​ Kantianism.”8 Mythos, Heidegger contends against Cassirer, cannot be comprehended by Kantian reason, in that the latter is merely another myth. The Critique of Judgment, for Heidegger, would seem to be a dead end, one that, we have discovered, is merely the rehearsal of

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the subjugation of imagination in the second edition of the first Critique, the violence enacted at the root of “Reason.” Yet, in light of our previous explorations of the impact of Hölderlin’s “Urteil und Seyn” upon Kant’s Idea of the Sublime, it would seem necessary and vital for Heidegger to extend his phenomenological deconstruction more robustly to the third Critique. Such an extension would cast into relief the temporality of thought, and the pivotal role of the imagination, and of the meaning of its failure to grasp, comprehend, either the All, or Being itself. Imagination as temporality would reveal the Law of Being, that of mortality and of the equality of all mortals before death. Indeed, Heidegger, in his suggestions that reason was the transcendental imagination and that with such an origin thought would be a sensuous reason, attunes with Hölderlin’s insights as to the temporality of reason, as the product of the self-​suppression of imagination, an event articulated in the “Analytic of the Sublime” in the Critique of Judgment itself. Even on Kant’s very own terms, therefore, Heidegger’s interpretation seems inescapable, becoming even more so if one also brings into play not only his rejection of the “mythology of consciousness,” but also his affirmation of the death of God. In the wake of the resistance to Kantian reason by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, both of whom were influenced by Hölderlin and German tragic philosophy, Heidegger displaces the foundation of Western thought, metaphysical reason, through the acceleration of the “return of time” orchestrated by the poet philosopher. In this light, Heidegger accords well with Hölderlin’s own perspective upon Kantian and Fichtean subjectivity, of the radical inaccessibility of Seyn to reflective consciousness, and their shared rejection of Christo-​Platonic and modernist hubris. With the disclosure of our ultimate possibility being that of death, and of the radical temporality of existence, the finite self finds itself as a temporal being who is embedded in the historical world. As the “subject” of the “Copernican Revolution” has been exposed as a violent illusion, the mortal self, no longer the subjectum of the world, traverses the Open, articulating a metontological poetics of mortal existence, one of mourning, remembrance, creativity, and intimacy to the truth of life in its opening, unfolding, and closing.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Heidegger’s Poetic Turn

The implicit relationship of Heidegger and Hölderlin becomes explicit with the former’s turn to thought, as the metontology of the topos of finitude. In this chapter, I will consider Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlinian poetics in the context of his distinction between logistical and poetic thought, in his “Letter on Humanism,” in which poetics is the articulation of the disclosure of the ways and manners of the truth of being, as a poetic phenomenology of finite existence, while Thought persists in its meditation about Being.

Prologue: Hölderlin’s Seyn and Heidegger’s Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry In the previous chapter, we noted the accord between Heidegger and Hölderlin with respect to the question of Being. Such an accord is demonstrated in Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin, which became central for his work after he stepped down as rektor of the University of Freiberg in 1934. We have already noted the political battle over Hölderlin and Nietzsche in the hands of Nazi philosophers, such as Alfred Baümler. Heidegger turned away from overtly political engagement toward a poetics of Being, a poetics of resistance,1 against the metaphysical subjectivism of the planetary order. Nevertheless, Heidegger neither had access to Hölderlin’s “Urteil und Seyn,” as noted above, nor did he engage with Kant’s third Critique in the manner that I have suggested—​and he did not regard Hölderlin as a philosopher, or thinker, in Heidegger’s lexico, in his own right.

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Heidegger’s readings of many of Hölderlin’s poems are enacted in a manner that closely resembles that of the early German romantics’ style of criticism, as creative reiteration, described in Benjamin’s essay, which we have considered previously. In light of his intimate hermeneutics of Hölderlin’s work, that which is essential, however, is Heidegger’s distinction between the Thinker and the Poet, and his attribution to Hölderlin a “poetic philosophy,” which requires elucidation by the Thinker. Heidegger writes: The thinker thinks toward what is un-​homelike, what is not like home, and for him this is not a transitional phases; rather, this is his being at home. The poet’s questioning, on the other hand, is a commemorative questioning that puts the homelike itself into poetry.2 As we have noted repeatedly in our previous explorations, such an interpretation is highly questionable, seeming to splice an auxiliary interpretive function onto Hölderlin’s poetics that is alien to the spirit of its enactment. Yet, a proper discussion of Heidegger’s Elucidations, and its politically overdetermined reception, would take an entire work of its own. In this light, we will explore Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlin’s poetics in relation to his task of overcoming the logistics of the restricted economy of infinite thought in his 1946 essay, “Letter on Humanism,” which clearly articulates the philosophical significance of Hölderlin’s poetics of existence and of the logos of Seyn. The Letter, written in response to Sartre’s public address “Existentialism is a Humanism,” articulates Heidegger’s poetic thought in a comprehensive, and retrospective manner that he contrasts to the logistics of the day and the necessity of the “turn” (Kehre). In the context of his retrieval of a poetic pathway of thought, initiated by Hölderlin, we can appreciate the strictly philosophical character of the latter’s work and the necessarily poetic method and configuration in which it was articulated.

The Letter on Humanism: The contemporary significance of Hölderin’s poetics The “Letter on Humanism”3 is a work that was written in response to a series of questions by Heidegger’s French colleague Jean Beaufret (November 10, 1946) with regard to Sartre’s address, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” given at the Club Maintenant in Paris, France, on October 29, 1945. Before Heidegger explicitly addresses the first question of Jean Beaufret, he notes that it would perhaps have been better to respond to the questions in the form of speech, which, he contends, contrary to Derrida, remains in the “element of Being” and maintains and cultivates, in tune with Holderlin’s description of poetry, the “multidimensionality of the realm peculiar

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to thinking.” It is writing that forces us to consider “deliberate linguistic formulation,” and thus facilitates the establishment of the grammar of technical thinking. It is important, at this point, to note that the difficulty of some of the sentences in the Letter can be understood against the background of the question of the ontological difference, of the difference between Being and beings, and of the urgent necessity of a difference in “conceptuality,” or language, in respect of this difference. In this way, Heidegger articulates a distinction between a technical interpretation of thinking, one compatible with beings and with “science,” and a poetical interpretation of thinking, a poetics that will allow the truth of Being to come to language. Heidegger—​as our central focus in this chapter—​rather enigmatically, but significantly, states that Hölderlin “does not belong to ‘humanism,’ precisely because he thought the destiny of man’s essence in a more original way than ‘humanism’ could.” This last reference is important as it will guide the hermeneutics of the meaning of Heidegger’s “higher” interpretation of the significance of “human existence” and the connection of this higher destiny to that of the Greeks (which, he has made all too clear, is not to be found either in Rome or in its “humanism”). “Humanism” is, for Heidegger, an ambiguous term as it relies on auxiliary terms such as “freedom” and “nature,” which differ according to the interpretative context. For instance, Heidegger remarks that neither Marx nor Sartre would need to return to antiquity to use the term humanism in their own senses. Christianity, moreover, has its own sense of humanism, which is concerned with “man’s salvation,” where all of history is seen as the drama of the redemption of man. Nevertheless, irrespective of their alleged disagreements, each of these interpretations of humanism rely on “an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of the world, that is, of beings as a whole.” In this way, Heidegger contends, every humanism is already a metaphysics, and thus already presupposes an interpretation of beings—​and in this way, every “humanism” has already suppressed the question of Being. In this way, Heidegger remarks, the task of re-​asking the question of Being will take place in the labyrinth of metaphysics and will appear initially as a metaphysical question. In agreement with Hölderlin, Heidegger states that which “is”—​ and “is” prior to action, prior to existence, and its pragmatic essence—​is Being. Moreover, it is through thinking that the relation of Being to the “essence of man” is accomplished, unfolded, not as action in the modern sense—​as making or effecting—​but as that which is brought to Being “as something that is handed over to it from Being.”4 In this receiving from Being, as the truth of Being, and our giving back to Being, Being itself comes to language. Heidegger writes, Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

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Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech. Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man. But all working or effecting lies in Being and is directed towards beings. Thinking, in contrast, lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being. Thinking accomplishes this letting. Thinking is the “engagement par l’Etre pour l’Etre” [engagement by Being for Being].5 That which is significant for an understanding of this difficult passage is that mortals are not the main player amid existence, but exist in the midst of the play of Being itself. Heidegger will regard any attempt to impose the interpretive frame of subject and object upon our lived experience as a metaphysical falsification of Ek-​ sistence. Immediately following and flowing from this rather poetic passage that we have just considered is a rather prosaic consideration of the historical meaning of the metaphysical framework of subject and object. Heidegger writes: In this regard “subject” and “object” are inappropriate terms of metaphysics, which very early on in the form of Occidental “logic” and “grammar” seized control of the interpretation of language. We today can only descry what is concealed in that occurrence. The liberation of language from grammar into a more original essential framework is reserved for thought and poetic creation.6 The liberation of thought from grammar is a setting free of our existence from the “technical interpretation of thinking” laid out originally by Plato and Aristotle. For the latter, thinking is “technē, a process of reflection in service to doing and making,”7 or, in other words, of praxis and poiesis. For Heidegger, thinking is not a “practical” endeavor, as it is not in service to action. Neither is thinking merely theoretical. Indeed, and this point resonates in our own era, Heidegger contends that the merely theoretical is a reactive posture that seeks to preserve the “autonomy” of thought in the face of action. And, while this posture attempts to maintain the “prestige” of thinking through the emulation of “science,” Heidegger contends that thinking loses its essence when it becomes a science or a merely theoretical activity. That which is lost, abandoned in the technical interpretation, is the question of Being, an abandonment that is sanctioned by “logic,” a nexus of partial relations, of rules that formulate the behaviour of the technical interpretation as the “technical-​ theoretical exactness of concepts.”8 Such exactness of concepts are enacted in the divisions in thought itself between “logic,” “ethics,” and “physics”—​ even the term “philosophy”

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itself only arose when “original thinking comes to an end.”9 All of these terms, associated with Plato and Aristotle and the subsequent metaphysical tradition, would be emblematic of the technical, logistical interpretation of thinking. But, immediately after these suggestions, Heidegger enters, shifts, into another “saying,” a different way of speaking, the difficulty of which must be understood as a stepping back into a more original saying that is seeking to articulate a poetic thinking of Being prior to ideologies and divisions into sub-​disciplines, such as logic, ethics, and physics—​or, into the discipline of “philosophy” itself. This other way of thinking is attempting to retrieve the element in which thinking can properly be—​for without this element, it can no longer be a thinking at all, but a technical interpretation of thought, or, in other words, an ideology or a worldview. The poetic element, in this way, enables thinking or, in other words, it brings thinking into its essence—​it allows thinking to be accomplished, or it brings the essence of humankind into relation with Being. Thinking is thus a thinking of Being in the sense of, first, that thinking, as with all things, acts, etcetera, belongs to Being as an aspect of Being itself, and second, thinking of Being is a thinking of Being itself, a listening to Being. Thinking arises out of the element of Being as that which belongs to and listens to Being. But, as that which arises from Being itself, as that which unfolds from Being, thinking is the unfolding of the essence of Being, an essence that Being “fatefully embraces.”10 Heidegger poetises that the embrace by Being of its own essence is a favoring or love of its own essence, a loving that means “to bestow essence as a gift.”11 This favoring, gift-​giving, is the essence of enabling, as with the enabling of thinking in the element, in Being; it lets thinking be, its lets being be by enabling, favoring, by giving the gift of Being, of itself. Enabling, as the element that allows something to be, is that which is most possible, it is the “ ‘quiet power’ of the favoring-​enabling, that is, of the possible.’ ”12,13 In an alternation of tone, Heidegger shifts back into critical prose with a consideration of the meaning of possibility once thinking has slipped out of its element in the epoch of “logic” and “metaphysics.” Within these horizons, possibility only has meaning in contrast to actuality. Or, in other words possibility (potentia) and actuality (actus) are thought of in the same way, and are related to, the distinction between essentia and existentia. As we have noted, these are not the terms that are of concern to Heidegger. On the contrary, possibility refers to Being itself, prior to the scholastic distinction between essence and existence, and the ancient doctrine of reflection in Plato, Aristotle, or in the modernist variant in Kant and the romantic tradition. Thinking engenders a relation with Being, and seeks to remain in its element, as a poetics of the truth of being. Heidegger contends, however, that thinking does not—​and has not—​remained in its element, but has become a techné, a technique of explanation from “highest causes.” There is no longer thinking, but the technical discipline of philosophy, which is fragmented into the –​isms of the competitive, modern marketplace of ideas.

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The hegemony of ideologies, Heidegger states, is based upon “the peculiar dictatorship of the public realm.”14 The dictatorship, for Heidegger, arises from the dominance of subjectivity, and is the “metaphysically conditioned establishment and authorization of the openness of individual beings in their unconditional objectification.”15 In this way, language becomes dominated by the necessities, politics, of the public realm, and thereby becomes technical, grammatical communication. Moreover, since a private existence, withdrawn from the public realm, merely shows its own weakness in the face of the dictatorship, Heidegger gives tacit legitimacy to his own type of engagement in the public realm. From this perspective, the technical matrix of the public realm becomes a historically established regime that decides that which is proper and improper with respect to language, thought, and action—​and thus, of existence. Heidegger reminds us that language originally, when it was in its element, was the house of Being, and insists that its technical, grammatical transformation under the metaphysics of subjectivity acts to prohibit mortals from cultivating a relationship with Being, and hence, with their own Being. Heidegger contends, “Instead language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings. Beings themselves appear as actualities in the interaction of cause and effect.”16 Yet, Heidegger suggests, if we are to find the thread that will lead us out of the labyrinth of grammatical, technical language—​ so that we can once again come near to Being—​we must “learn to exist in the nameless.”17 We must take a step back from our seduction to the public realm and the plethora of beings and be open—​in silent showing of poetics—​to the manifestation of the truth of Being, and allow ourselves to be claimed by Being. He immediately asks, however, if such a desire—​of making “man” ready for the claim of Being, of bringing man back into his essence—​is not—​and this is where he finally begins to explicitly address the question—​ at the end of the day, a type of humanism. Heidegger writes, “For this is humanism: meditating and caring, that man be human and not inhumane, ‘inhuman,’ that is, outside his essence. But in what does the humanity of man consist? It lies in his essence.”18 Heidegger contends that all of the various humanisms or humanistic ideologies are dependent on a universally recognized essence of man as an animal rationale. But, such an assumption is so obvious, so universal—​ and unquestioned—​that it is the type of assumption that is never noticed. As it is not noticed, it is established as an answer to the question of the Being of beings. But, in this way, the question of Being is suppressed as is the ontological difference that has been “fixed” by a specific metaphysical interpretation. In this context, the question of Being has been forgotten since it is no longer possible as a question within the context of metaphysics. “Man” becomes just another being among beings; that which is essential to humankind is forgotten. Heidegger writes:

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Metaphysics closes itself to the simple essential fact that man essentially occurs in his essence, where he is claimed by Being. Only from that claim “has” he found that wherein his essence dwells. Only from this dwelling “has” he “language” as the home that preserves the ecstatic for his essence. Such standing in the clearing of Being I call the ek-​sistence of man. This way of Being is proper only to man.19 In other words, man is a temporal, ecstatic openness in the midst of the truth or self-​showing of Being. Being, as we have seen, is the element that gives itself, that shows itself, its truth; it is thinking that brings the essence of man into relation with Being and it is poetic language that maintains this relation with Being, as man lives ecstatically (standing out in the open, as neither subject nor object) amid the truth of Being. By standing ecstatically in the truth of Being, the human preserves the essence of its be-​ing. One is “placed freely” in the clearing of Being, amid the openness of language, the “clearing-​concealing event of Being itself.”20 Moreover, Heidegger writes: As ek-​sisting, man sustains Da-​sein in that he takes the Da, the clearing of Being, into “care.” But, Da-​sein itself, as it occurs as essentially “thrown” (Geworfen), it unfolds essentially in the throw of Being as the fateful sending.21 In this way, with the centrality given to the play of Being—​as Being throws us into the world, into its manifest truth—​the main player of thought is Being itself. Mortals exist in the midst of the play of unconcealment and concealment, as Being remains incomprehensible. Being and Time, Heidegger declares, is opposed to “humanism.” Yet, the higher essence of “man” that he sets forth is not meant in the sense of metaphysical subjectivism (or as anthropocentrism) in which humankind is the tyrant of Being to which each and all is subject. Instead, he writes: Man is rather “thrown” from Being itself into the truth of Being so that ek-​sisting in this fashion he might guard the truth of Being, in order that beings might appear in the light of Being as the beings they are. Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of Being, come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being. But, for man it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-​sisting has to guard the truth of Being. Man is the shepherd of Being.22 But, what then, Heidegger asks, is “Being”? He replies, “It is It itself.”23 Being is not “God” or “cosmic ground,” but is “farther than all being and is yet nearer to man than every being . . . Being is the nearest. Yet, the near

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remains farthest from man. Man at first clings always and only to beings.”24 But, in our clinging to beings, we collapse the ontological difference and forget Being. Heidegger contends our thinking is only ever about beings or the Being of beings, and is never about Being as such. That would be nefas, for Hölderlin. Our thinking, moreover, as long as it does not acknowledge the prerequisite condition of Being, will remain a species of metaphysical representation with its center in a reflective being, a phantasm, such as subjectivity, nature (conceived as a collection of objects) or God. But, in our step back, amid the question of Being, the nearest that is farthest, Being shows itself in its clearing, in its manifestation, as truth (Aletheia), as the unconcealment amid concealment, who signifies the struggle to disclose the truth, to bring it to light, out from under the weight of beings and of metaphysical, subjectivist representation. Heidegger writes, concerning the relation that subsists between the essence of man and Being: Being itself is the relation to the extent that It, as the location of the truth of Being amid beings, gathers to itself and embraces ek-​sistence in its existential, that is, ecstatic essence. Because man as the one who ek-​sists comes to stand in this relation that Being destinies for itself, in that he ecstatically sustains it, that is, in care takes it upon himself, he at first fails to recognize the nearest and attaches himself to the next nearest. He even thinks that this is the nearest. But nearer than the nearest and at the same time for ordinary thinking farther than the farthest is nearness itself: the truth of Being.25 We become ensnared, we fall into beings, and believe that these things are the nearest, are our essence, are what is closest to us. This allusion to the contention that the cogito, the subject, is that which is nearest and most known—​ absolutely clear and distinct to us—​ underscores Heidegger’s attempt to distance himself from Sartre and his metaphysical subjectivism, which, contrary to his own self-​understanding, forces a tacit answer upon him of the essence of man, even before his actions—​and, even his actions are still orchestrated in the confines of metaphysics and in the service to the theoretical construct of the subject, of the cogito. Sartre is ensnared in beings, alludes Heidegger, and has thus foreclosed upon his own ecstatic relation to the truth of Being, a relation that is of and by Being in its gift of the truth of Being, and into which man is thrown. The nearness of Being, Heidegger suggests, is mysterious in its “gover­ nance” of the situation of ek-​sistence. This unnoticed governance, moreover, takes place through, or as, language, conceived as the house of Being, and not as the metaphysical-​animal expression of the subjective and rational animal. In this way, language, as a gift of Being, is the “home of man’s essence.”26 Man ek-​sists, dwells in the truth of Being and guards it, and thus, that which is central in the determination of the essence of man, for Heidegger, is Being and not man, not subjectivity. Being is the “dimension of the ecstasis of

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ek-​sistence.”27 In this way, Heidegger contends that the essence of man as ek-​sistence is not a humanism, if that term is meant metaphysically. The situation is not of the subject, but of Being itself, a situation as a clearing, the place of truth, given by Being. Heidegger writes, “The self-​ giving into the open, along with the open region itself, is Being itself.”28 Being, to repeat our indication of the ontological difference, is not a being among beings. It is meant, Heidegger reminds us, in the sense in which Parmenides said, “esti gar einai”—​“For there is Being.” Such a sense was repeated by Aristotle several centuries later when he asked, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” This is a sense of Being that is neither concerned with what things or beings are (essentia), nor with how things or beings are (existentia), but instead, it is a sense of Being that is concerned with that anything is at all. Such a sense of Being, Heidegger states, is unthought today, but the possibility of such a thought is indicated by Heidegger in his es gibt: There is/​it gives Being. Indications, moreover, of this sense of Being can be traced in the history of Being in “the words of essential thinkers.”29 In this way, a thinking that thinks Being is historical, as it recollects the truth of Being from out of the dispensation of Being itself. The history of Being, as that which houses the truth of Being, Heidegger alludes, is a history that happens as the “destiny of the truth of Being.” Being gives itself, a giving that as aletheia, is also a concealing (Being withdraws with the dispensation of beings), and from this giving the history of Being shows itself. Heidegger states that this giving of the destiny of Being is to some extent disclosed through the philosophy of Hegelian philosophy of Absolute metaphysics, and in the Marxian and Nietzschean inversions of this philosophy (and each of which was in its own way concerned with overcoming mere subjectivism). However, this disclosure has taken place as metaphysics, and indeed, Heidegger contends, the history of Being has had only one epoch to date, and that is the metaphysical. Beyond the epoch of metaphysics, Heidegger “assumes” that man will be able to think Being from the ecstatic openness of ek-​sistence, as standing out in the truth of Being, and not from the perspective of the ensnarement of beings. In an echo of Hölderin, Heidegger states that Being is not a positing or creation of the consciousness of man. He reminds us of his statement from the opening pages of Being and Time: “Being is the transcendens pure and simple.” In many other texts, from his earliest to his latest writings, Heidegger criticized the modern contention that Being is a positing of the ego cogito, from Descartes through Kant and his heirs. Again, that which Heidegger is calling into question is the arrogant pretensions of the subject of metaphysical representation. He writes that Being is “essentially broader than all beings, because it is the clearing itself.”30 At the same time, since we are embedded in the historical epoch of metaphysics, it is at once necessary, on the one hand, to retrospectively consider the essence of Being from the perspective of the clearing of Being, and on the other hand, to prospectively

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seek to find Ariadne’s thread out of the labyrinth so that we can begin to think the truth of Being. It is in this way that Heidegger’s approach to the history of Being, or to metaphysics, differs essentially from the anti-​metaphysicians of the Vienna Circle and of the Analytic tradition in general. Heidegger is not seeking to simple cut out metaphysics root and branch, but through his method of phenomenological destructuring, to retrieve the question and the truth of Being as it had been disclosed prior to its suppression by the prevailing dispensation of metaphysics. This is the meaning of the destruction of the history of ontology, not a crass elimination, but a dismantling of the “machine” so as to approach the event of nearness that lies at the heart of essential thinking. Being, which is not a creation of subjectivity or God, is illumined in the midst of an ecstatic projection that, as ek-​sistence, is itself thrown from Being into the Open, truth, the clearing, of Being. Heidegger writes: “man dwells as the ek-​sisting one without yet being able to properly experience and take over this dwelling.”31 This experience of not being able to take over this dwelling, this inability to come near to Being and find our own essence is explored by Heidegger in his lecture course (1943) on Hölderlin’s poem, “Homecoming.” It is in this context that Heidegger speaks of the homelessness of contemporary man, which is signified by the metaphysics of subjectivity over and against a sense of belonging to the destiny or the history of Being. He contends that Hölderlin’s concern that his countrymen find their essence is not to be meant in any egoistic, patriotic, or nationalist manner, but instead as a sense of a “belongingness to the destiny of the West.”32 Heidegger answers the first question regarding “humanism” via the poetic indication of Hölderlin’s poem. The poem itself is a complex indication of mortal contours, rhythm, strife, and the dance of existence—​the mountainous topography and conflict between peaks, the god overseeing all, the jubilation of coming home, and the lack of a sacred language to express our joy.

Homelessness, Homecoming, and the Holy Heidegger contends that Nietzsche was the “last to experience this homelessness,” and that his only recourse—​and one of futility—​amid the situation of metaphysics was a reversal of metaphysics. The reversal is futile as Nietzsche remains, according to Heidegger, within metaphysics. Hölderlin, on the other hand, as previously suggested by Heidegger,33 has already transcended “humanism” with his non-​metaphysical poetry and his iconoclastic notion of the gods as the objectification and containment of the Holy. In the context of his poem “Homecoming,” the “homeland” has the significance of the “nearness to Being,” in the sense of language (in this case, the German language) being a “house of Being,” or the historical dwelling

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of the German people. And, placing a question over Sartre’s all-​too-​hasty assertion of “atheism,” Heidegger states that it is only within language in its nearness to Being that the question of the Holy, of God and gods, can be decided. Heidegger writes: But the holy, which alone is the essential sphere of divinity, which in turn alone affords a dimension for the gods and for God, comes to radiate only when Being itself beforehand and after extensive preparation has been illuminated and is experienced in its truth.34 Homelessness is an abandonment of Being by beings, and it is in this oblivion of Being that delusion reigns in our thinking. Immersed in beings, we tacitly answer the question of Being through the assertion of the primacy of a being, of an object of metaphysical speculation—​of an infinite being, a finite being, or as that which “encompasses beings.” At the same time, the oblivion of Being occurs “naturally” as Being is that which throws us into the world, as that which dispenses its truth, and, in this way, remains concealed in its self-​showing, in its truth (Aletheia). In our fetishistic obsession with the gifts that we have been given, we forget the giver. Heidegger contends that it is poetry that speaks of the destiny of Being, and in a way that transcends metaphysics as the only extant epoch of the history of Being. It is also in this sense that poetry—​and specifically the poetry of Hölderlin—​transcends humanism as metaphysics. Metaphysics, as it is the ensnarement in beings, unfolds the destiny of the world as one of homelessness. Heidegger contends that we must “think that destiny in terms of the history of Being,”35 and he contends that there is an affinity between such thinking and that of Marx, who thought of the history of human existence as one of estrangement, which Heidegger regards as akin to the homelessness that is engulfing the world. As a further criticism of Sartre (and Husserl, whose Cartesian Meditations can be seen as the background for Sartre’s Existentialism), Heidegger contends that neither scientific phenomenology nor existentialism are capable of a “productive dialogue” with Marx, as neither has grasped the historicity of Being. Nevertheless, despite the early Marx’s thematization of estrangement and historicity, Marxism remains, for Heidegger, ensnared in the metaphysics of subjectivity, in that, following Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, it regards material labor as the “self-​establishing process of unconditioned production, which is the objectification of the actual through man experienced as subjectivity.”36 Heidegger contends that the subjectivistic core of materialism remains veiled by the seemingly impersonal operations of technology, which itself is a “destiny within the history of Being,” as a mode of truth, of aletheuein, disclosure of the truth of Being. He writes: No metaphysics, whether idealistic, materialistic, or Christian, can in accord with its essence, and surely not in its own attempts to explicate

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itself, “get a hold on” this destiny yet, and that means thoughtfully to reach and gather together which in the fullest sense of Being now is.37 Heidegger, in preparation to a more explicit answer to Beaufret’s question, contends that man is both more and less than a “rational animal.” He is “more” in that such a description does not disclose human existence in terms of its essence—​in the sense of his nearness to Being. On the other hand, man is “less” as he is not truly bound up with the arrogant pretensions of metaphysical subjectivity. Reminding us of our essential thrownness, Heidegger declares: “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.”38 With this metaphor, he reminds us of our utter finitude—​and of the Dionysian character of existence amid the temporality of a makeshift “world.” Nevertheless, Heidegger reflects upon his own language of “Man” and concedes that his thinking is a humanism in an “extreme sense”—​ though not to be metaphysically construed. He writes, “It is humanism that thinks the humanity of man from the nearness of Being. But at the same time it is a humanism in which not man but man’s historical essence is at stake in its provenance from the truth of Being.”39 But, again, Heidegger reminds us that he is not speaking of human existence in the sense of the ego cogito (or in light of the distinction between essentia and existentia, but as ek-​ sistence, which is the “ecstatic dwelling in the nearness of Being.”40 Such a comportment with Being is that of “care” and not that of the objectification of representational thinking. Heidegger, in the spirit of his own radical phenomenology, asks us to step back and to disclose mortal existence for ourselves (as in Hölderlin’s poem) and to disengage from a “philosophy” that throws up barriers and obstructions to the movement to the “matters themselves.” He indicates his meaning by stating that “to ‘philosophize’ about being shattered is separated by a chasm from a thinking that is shattered.”41 The shattering is a breach that has forced us to consider the meaning of “humanism”—​what/​how/​that we are—​in a deeper way, and has given us the chance to fathom an “older” (“Greek” in the sense of Hölderlin’s mythos) meaning than the current form that emerged with the Romans. In response to Beaufret’s question to the viability of the term “humanism,” Heidegger asks nevertheless whether it is necessary, or even desirable, to retain the word “humanism” as it is bound up with myriad and fatal misunderstandings and metaphysical obstructions to the truth of Being, and hence, to our very essence. He suggests that perhaps one should undertake an “open resistance to ‘humanism,’ risk a shock that could for the first time cause perplexity concerning the humanitas of homo humanus and its basis?”42 In answer, Heidegger lays out a poetic answer to his questions in the form of an extended poetic engagement in the manner of Nietzsche in some of his speeches in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and in other writings.43 From this passage, it can be fathomed that Heidegger has broken out of the one-​sided plane of formal logic and subjectivist reflective judgement. He writes:

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To think against “logic” does not mean to break a lance for the illogical but simply to trace in thought the logos and its essence, which appeared in the dawn of thinking, that is, to exert ourselves for the first time in preparing for such reflection. Of what value are ever far-​reaching systems of logic to us if, without really knowing what they are doing, they recoil before the task of simply inquiring into the essence of logos?44 Heidegger contends that his pre-​logical reflection upon logos (language) is not that which is irrational, but instead, it is logic that is irrational for denying access to the question of logos. That which Heidegger is calling into question, through his attacks on “value,” etcetera, is not the humane considerations of “culture,” “art,” “human dignity,” etcetera, but instead the notion of value itself, which in the neo-​Kantian legacy from which he himself was liberated, roots all value in the positing of the subject. He contends, “Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be valid—​solely as the objects of its doing.”45 That which Heidegger is suggesting is similar to what Nietzsche had already stated concerning the essence of nihilism and the death of god. Nihilism occurs when the highest values devalue themselves—​God dies the moment he is established as the highest being, that is, such a procedure makes God just another being, and one indeed posited by the subject (as with Kant’s regulative ideas). At the same time, as Heidegger made clear in his lectures on Nietzsche a few years before his Letter, the task is not that of a revaluation of all values—​as this would still be a subjectivizing, and hence, metaphysical. Instead, one must turn away from values and its validating subject and turn instead toward the truth of Being. This again, is not the destruction of values, but a reinterpretation of our own existence and of the true basis for our affirmation amid ek-​sistence. In this way, the human being (Dasein) is neither the earthly being over and against the transcendent, nor is he the subject over and against the world (even an intersubjective subject), but is instead already being-​in-​the-​world as one who is amid the world, prior to the analytical abstraction of the subject-​ object distinction, which, for Heidegger is an artificial construction. And, in this context, his call for a step back into the truth of Being, into the openness of ek-​sistence in the clearing, is the radical meaning of deconstruction—​ from the restricted economy of logic and beings to the general economy of logos and Being (Bataille). Heidegger seeks to step back into mortal thinking, back to the core of wonder prior to the ossification of fundamental experiences into concepts, or in the falsification of existence for the sake of a “higher utility.” Thought must be useless. Thinking does not overcome metaphysics by climbing still higher, surmounting it, transcending it somehow or other; thinking overcomes

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metaphysics by climbing down into the nearness of the nearest. The descent, particularly where man has strayed into subjectivity, is more arduous and more dangerous than the ascent.46 Heidegger is seeking to deconstruct the hubris of thought through an uncovering of an “older” conception of “ethics” in the tragic ethos of Sophocles and Heraclitus. Just as with logos, ethos is that indication of a pre-​ethical state of mortal existence—​not, again as the unethical, but as an abode or dwelling place (attunement in Greek musical theory). Heidegger expounds on the meaning of ethos, a way of life in which the “word names the open region in which man dwells.”47 Heidegger illustrates this indication of ethos through a story told by Aristotle about the thinker Heraclitus in which it is said that once some visitors had come to Heraclitus’ abode expecting to find the thinker at work—​thinking. Instead, when the visitors entered his house, they found him hovering next to a stove, warming himself. Sensing their disappointment, he responded, “Here too the gods come to presence.” Thinking builds upon the house of Being, or language, which is the abode or dwelling place of human existence. Thinking does not create the house but brings human existence, Heidegger writes, into the realm of healing [das Heilens], which, if we recall an earlier reference, is akin to the holy (heilig). It is important, for what is to follow, to keep this in mind and to attempt to think in the manner of logos and ethos, of healing as an attempt of thinking to bring human existence, as with Heraclitus, into the presence of the Holy. In this way, the question of ethos and logos—​and of nomos as law—​ resolves itself into the question of Being and the thinking of Being, as that to which we must attune ourselves as we build the house of Being with our language and poetically dwell within the truth of Being into which we have been thrown. As we poetically dwell in the house of Being, our poetic thinking brings Being to language. In this way, as we ek-​sist in the openness of the flux of Being, the latter is always on the way to language and it is our task to remember Being in its mysterious and pervasive eruption. In anticipation of the usual objection to poetics, an objection that is based upon a stereotype, is met by Heidegger through a reference to Aristotle’s Poetics, where the latter contended that “poetic composition is truer than exploration of beings.”48 That which is essential in this claim is that poetic composition, for Heidegger, acts under the Law of Being, which is prior even to the laws of logic. Poetic thought is claimed by Being, guided by Being and its task is to bring Being into language. In this way, and we should keep in mind the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same in early Greek thought, that which is being said by thought is always the Same, as the unfolding of the recurrence of Being. Arbitrariness is a charge that has not freed itself from metaphysical subjectivism and the voluntarism that is its dangerous possibility. Being is not arbitrary. On the contrary, the demand is to cultivate an ethos of thinking that remains attuned to Being and its Law.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Hölderlin and the poetics of deconstruction This chapter will explore the influence of the Hölderlinian destruction of infinite thought upon poststructuralism with respect to language, power, meaning, and identity. I will examine the relationship between the implications of Hölderlin’s poetic thought and Derrida’s motif of différance, a criticism of Derrida’s understanding of Heidegger’s notion of Being, followed by a brief exploration of Foucault’s contention that Hölderlin’s poetry enacted the schizophrenic divisions of Modernity.

Hölderlin and deconstruction Deconstruction—​ as articulated in the works of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Jean-​ François Lyotard, and a host of others—​ is a critical intervention in the intellectual, cultural, and political dimensions of contemporary “society.” In accord with the cultural critiques of Adorno and Benjamin, deconstruction, arising from the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, is concerned with a dismantling of traditional and seemingly normative philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic categories and conceptual frameworks. In this perspective, the concept, as a designation of “unity,” harbors within itself a suppression of difference, and hence, the schematics of a violent reduction of the diverse context of relations into a discrete, self-​identical “object.” The “object,” Georges Bataille—​ a prominent influence upon poststructuralist philosophy and a central influence upon Foucault and Derrida—​writes in his Theory of Religion and Accursed Share, exists as a homogeneity, an object for consciousness, within a restricted economy of

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utility (production), in distinction from the general economy of nonutilitarian expenditure. This distinction, echoing that made by Nietzsche between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, respectively, discloses the restrictive functionality of conceptuality in the context of profane, utilitarian production. In many ways, such a perspective has resonances with Benjamin and Adorno, though, with its contention that there is an “outside” to the rationality of the restricted economy (or, in other words, in its rejection of the rational totality of Hegel in which the “real is rational, and the rational is real”), Bataille continues the deconstruction of reason through his intimation of the remainder of resistance which eludes the restricted economy of identity. The “outside” is the general economy of existence that can never be subsumed completely into Reason—​and hence by cultural production or the state—​a notion we have already found, in various ways, in Hölderlin (Being), Schelling (the Unconscious), Schopenhauer (the Will), and Nietzsche (Will-​to-​Power). In the following, we will explore the impact of Hölderlin upon post-​ structuralism, a movement that emerged from the influence of the late work of Heidegger upon radical French philosophy after World War II. Derrida was most influenced by Heidegger’s interpretation of poetic language as a mode of expressivity, distinct from the identity logic of Western culture, an identity that is grounded upon the suppression of difference, of radical multiplicity, in Deleuze’s language. We will explore the relation of Derrida to the gesture to the Open in Hölderlin with respect to his poem “Mnemosyne” in an essay of the same name on Paul de Man, which reveals a Schlegelian tendency in Derrida, followed by a detailed reading of Derrida’s essay “Différance.” Closing the chapter, we will briefly explore Foucault’s Lacanian musings on Hölderlin in “The Father’s ‘No,’ ” noting his Heideggerian method of indicating Hölderlin’s artwork, as it shifted to a non-​work, as that which discloses the truth of that which is there—​in this case, the event of the division, the schizophrenia, of Modern culture.

Mnemosyne: Derrida and Hölderlin In his essay, “Mnemosyne,” Derrida invokes Hölderlin’s poetry in an address “in memory of” Paul de Man. While mentioning “Patmos” and “As on a Holiday,” he gives an extended excerpt from “Mnemosyne,” who, Derrida reminds us, is the greatest of the Muses in the ancient Greek tradition. His decision to evoke Hölderlin was due, Derrida confesses, not only to Paul de Man’s great admiration for the poet, but also as a way to introduce the motif of remembrance, in this case, that of de Man himself, and of the meaning of remembrance. Derrida alludes to a criticism of Heidegger by de Man in reference to the world “Natur” in Hölderlin’s poem “As on a Noliday” in which de Man contests Heidegger’s translation of “Natur” into Being (Phusis) and Law (Nomos), whereas de Man laid emphasis on the

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impossibility of the act of naming beyond the domain of the thing. de Man writes: When he states the law, the poet does not say Being, then, but rather, the impossibility of naming anything but an order that, in its essence, is distinct from immediate Being.1 Yet, as we have seen in our explorations of Hölderlin, Being itself (Seyn) is that which, in its intimate association with Logos, establishes the Law. Being, as the Law of Being, reveals the mortal situation of existence through, for Hölderlin, feeling (Gefühl), an epistemic mode that, exceeding reflective consciousness, discloses our radical temporal existence. For Hölderlin, in his early Greek paradigm of Heraclitus and Empedocles, held that Nature, phusis as tragic mortality, to be at once Being and Logos. Indeed, what we can read from de Man’s provocation of Heidegger is closer in line with the notion of infinite approximation in the work of Kant, Fichte, and in line with the irony of Schlegel and his elaboration as the negative-​theology of the fragment. Derrida, in fact, invokes Schlegel on irony, but does not comment on the relationship of Hölderlin and Schlegel. Yet, in his elaboration of his narrative without a narrative, in memory of de Man, Derrida effectively follows a Schlegelian pathway, the “ironie of ironie,”2 in an enactment of remembrance, as an act of devotion amid the desired impossibility of true mourning, as the “ghosts” still persist in our memories, fragments over an abyss, of infinite approximation amid the flux of becoming. Derrida writes: The movement of interiorization keeps within us the life, thought, body, voice, look or soul of the other, but in the form of those hypomnemata, memoranda, signs or symbols, images or mnesic representations are only lacunary fragments, detached and dispersed—​“parts” of the departed other.3 The intensity of de Man’s romanticism is clearly evident in Derrida’s discourse, not only with references and allusions to Wordsworth and Novalis, but more specifically, in the invocation of the “I and thou,” of Schlegel, which, as we ascertained in his Lucinde was the visible sign of Platonic love amid the terrestrial, mortal domain. Derrida closes his essay: Our “own” mortality is not dissociated from, but also conditions this rhetoric of faithful memory, all of which serves to seal an alliance and to recall us to an affirmation of the other. The death of the other, if we can say this, is also situated on our side at the very moment when it comes to us from an altogether other side. Its Erinnerung becomes as inevitable as it is unbelievable: it finds there its origin and its limit, its conditions of possibility and impossibility.4

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Derrida unleashes a discourse, which, relying upon romantic irony, removes from death its sting, and indeed, seeks to take from Heidegger the aloneness of death, and indeed, its own insurmountability through remembrance. Yet, the very exposure of his neo-​romantic strategy of the fragment as the negative mirror of the divine—​negative theology—​subverts Derrida’s ruse of remembrance as the Law of Being, mortality, death itself, is that which gives rise to the necessity of remembrance and its destination in oblivion as memory is fated to erasure. We will turn, in the next section to a detailed treatment of Derrida’s neo-​ romanticism in his essay “Différance,” a play of fragments as the negative mirror, the irony of a discourse that postpones, defers an exposure to our mortality, and thus, denies the question of Being.

The Way That Is Not: Derrida’s Motif of Différance Derrida introduces the motif “différance,” of the purposive misspelling of the word difference, for purposes of “strategy.”5 The playfulness associated with its usage is meant to be disruptive, subversive, and adventurous (note Beaufret’s third question to Heidegger in the “Letter on Humanism,” regarding turning philosophy itself into an adventuress). Différance, according to Derrida, is neither a concept nor a word, but a motif that intimates a play that, he claims, is prior to Being, and the ontological difference between beings and Being. This motif that is neither a word nor a concept is instead a trace of that which does not itself have being, or presence. Derrida informs us, moreover, that he intends the essay with its nameless name to proceed through the intensification of the play of the sign, which, with regard to our customary expectations, is a misspelling—​or perhaps a child’s game of no immediately useful significance. An initial indication that such a misspelling does not concern itself merely with the games of a charlatan is the difference between the two versions of the word, and that the difference itself can only be verified by the text (through our noting an “e” or an “a”). Writing becomes the topical space for the verification of meaning. Nevertheless, the example of différance serves to disclose the instability of reference, even in the written word, in light of the intensification of the play of the alleged error that incites myriad readings, diverse conflicting meanings. In such a situation of uncertainty, of ambiguity, there erupts a proliferation of meanings for even a single sign. In this way, even as writing becomes the ground of meaning vis-​à-​vis the phonetic, vocal aspects of language, it itself is still an abyss, abgrund, in which certified meanings are ceaselessly disrupted and transformed. As the difference in the sign is only detectable in a purely graphic manner, Derrida will suggest that the “a” and “différance” exist as traces

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of something that never existed, of the play, one prior to Being or beings. This method of play is exhibited when he associates, in a seemingly random manner, the shape of the capital A with a pyramid, calling this a tomb, and then inexplicably suggests that this tomb intimates the economy of death that hides in silence, in secret, without presence, before Being and beings—​ he alludes that this economy of death, this tomb of the “a” in différance, intimates the death of the tyrant—​of the absolutization of meaning, of one privileged, proper meaning—​of the capital letter. Not yet sufficiently under his spell, we immediately understand that this is not all merely random, but that the play has a purpose, and one that requires that there is introduced a differing sense of the field upon which we will play. It may be helpful to think of Derrida, in this instance, as setting forth a language game in the manner of Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations.6 From this perspective, Derrida is laying out a sense of his basic agenda through the cultivation of an ensemble of motifs, metaphors, and tactical analyses so as to illuminate a thought that he wishes to convey to the reader. At the same time, with the subversion of the authorial presence that is undertaken with this essay, his very attempt to communicate to the reader will necessarily be subverted also, and he intimates this possibility when he intimates that the motif of différance itself will have to be erased. In a provisional way, Derrida compares the polysemy intimated by the motif of différance to a sheaf, a bundle of things of a similar length, such as a sheath of papers. Moreover, the metaphor of a sheath of papers is further described as having the “complex structure of weaving,”7 of differing meanings, of differing forces, similar in many ways to Nietzsche’s genealogical tracing of the myriad eruptions of will-​to-​power. Both of these metaphors are relevant in that each intimates the practice of writing, as with, on the one hand, a sheath of papers exhibiting vast matrices of words, and on the other, a weaving as in textiles, another metaphor for the strands of sentences and internal relationships within a text and between texts. In this way, Derrida intimates that meaning resides in the interrelation of the signs that are operative within the general economy of the text, of the elsewhere, a place of polysemy beyond the restricted economy of a privileged language game that stands over all as the proper meaning. The motif of différance underlines, as we have intimated, the difference between spoken and written language, a discussion that will become important in dealing with the alleged immediacy of the spoken word in Ferdinand de Saussure, and the intimacy of speech with Being in Heidegger. This issue will disclose itself, for Derrida, as a question of the metaphysics of presence in which the subject is alleged to have an intimate relation to a presence that can be spoken in words—​and is thus the event that becomes to designate the proper. As he has made clear, we can only detect the difference between the motif and the usual spelling by graphic means. In this way, the written text will serve as a rule by which spoken discourse is regulated in terms of its usage. At the same time, however, Derrida questions the purity

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of spoken language in terms of the embeddedness of the latter in a historical culture of phonetic writing, which is enacted within the then hegemonic theoretical framework in which spoken discourse is recorded in written language. For Derrida, our spoken language is already always intermeshed within the texture and sheaf of différance. Moreover, as the distinction has itself broken down between writing and speech, Derrida suggests that the place of différance lies in-​between “beyond the tranquil familiarity which links us to one and the other, occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they are two.”8 This disruption of our usual distinction between speech and writing and the priority we give to the former (in the restricted economy of the metaphysics of subjectivity) is the first subversive fruit of différance. But, as we are to see, as readers, with the intensification of the play of this motif, we will begin to fathom that many distinctions, opposites, such as that between the sensible and the intelligible, will begin to be disrupted, put out of play, destructured and re-​ situated within the field of the general economy.

The “Meaning” of Différance Derrida undertakes an analysis of the approximate sense, or meaning, of différance through a consideration of the semantic roots for the word difference. On the one hand, there is diapherein, which is Greek for a distinction, distance, or polemos between differing things, which Derrida interprets with a predominantly spatial meaning. On the other hand, there is the Latin différer, which, in addition to the spatial meaning of diapherein, has an additional temporal sense of delay, detour, including the sense of temporal delay in the word re-​presentation, for instance. Derrida prefers this Latin sense as it incorporates the spatial and temporal sense of différer, and in a way that would allow, with différance, a subversion and displacement of the traditional distinction between time and space with the alternatives of temporalization and spacing. Différance, in this way, not limited to the historical rules of usage, is “irreducibly polysemic.”9 In this polysemia, différance seems to act in such a way as to subvert the familiar and tranquil illusion that we have cultivated for ourselves. At the same time, Derrida means to make clear that différance, although seeming to be the productive source of difference, of all things (as with Empedoclean strife), is, in light of the “a” of polysemia, neither active, nor passive, but recalls a “middle voice,” a non-​transitivity, prior to the repressive enactment of the hierarchy of the active and the passive (upon which, Derrida muses, philosophy as metaphysics established itself). In terms of classical semiology, the sign is characterized as a substitute that takes place of the thing that is signified. Derrida writes, “We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, deferred presence,” a “signification as the différance of temporization.”10 For Saussure, the character of the sign

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is twofold:  (1)  the sign is differential as it acquires its meaning from the system of differential signs in any language or system of thought; (2) a sign is arbitrary, since it arises from difference and has no positive reference to a thing outside of the system of signs. The sign itself is divided, furthermore, into the signifier and the signified. The latter is the concept or the meaning of the sign; the signifier is an “image” or “psychical imprint” or, the “acoustic phenomenon” of a spoken word.11 As Saussure contends, “Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this:  in language there are only differences. Even more important:  a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.”12 In other words, the signifier and the signified arise from within the system of language itself. In this way, meaning arises due to a systematic play of differences, and we can readily see Derrida’s interest in Saussure in light of his own motif of différance. Derrida writes, “Différance is the non-​full, non-​simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. Thus, the name ‘origin’ no longer suits it.”13 In this way, we are enclosed, to return to a previous metaphor, within a circular texture of a weave of differences, not fully unlike Heidegger’s indication of language as the “House of Being.” We will return to Heidegger below; however, Derrida is insistent that there is no presence outside of the system of difference, to which any sign refers in the manner of the classical theory of correspondence. Meaning is generated from within the matrix of signification, and thus, for Derrida, there is no exit from the system of differences as there is no outside. There is only the play of différance, which makes possible the deferring (temporalization) and differing (spacing) nexus of relation between what we illusorily regard as separate present moments. But, as we will see, différance, for Derrida, is not Being, but is the economy of death prior to Being and its difference with beings. Derrida may be regarded as unnecessarily slippery and perhaps absurd in his seeming unwillingness to play the traditional game of meaning—​or, as Nietzsche writes in “On Truth and Lying in the Extra-​Moral Sense,” of lying according to the established convention. Yet, he asks us to look at the very form of the question that is being asked of him: What is . . .? The form of such a question, as Heidegger and Wittgenstein also repeatedly point out, desires the answer of an unambiguous, simple and full definition, based, Derrida contends, upon some present being. In other words, the “substantive” about which we ask, such as horse, is immediately linked to a “substance” in terms of the metaphysics of subjectivity and presence. Such a desire for a single, authoritative account necessitates a repression of the polysemic play of différance, and indeed, a falsification of the generative topos of meaning in the context—​either a “system” or “makeshift”—​of differences. That which is behind such an insistence on the part of Derrida, and which is linked to the notion of a “metaphysics of subjectivity,” which has been mentioned several times, is a rejection of the existence of a “subject” (and a notion of a “subject” is always metaphysical and operates according to

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a specific grammar) that is somehow outside of the play of differences. In other words, language is not a “function of the speaking subject.” Derrida continues, in a manner that will be relevant to talk of “Being”: This implies that the subject (in its identity with itself, of, eventually in its consciousness of its identity with itself, its self-​consciousness) is inscribed in language, is a “function” of language, comes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform—​even in so-​called “creation,” or in so-​ called “transgression”—​to the system of rules of language as a system of differences, or at very least by conforming to the general law of différance, or by adhering to the principle of language which Saussure says is “spoke language minus speech.”14 Derrida entertains the possible objection that there can be a self-​presence of the self, prior to speech and language, suggesting that such a possibility would be to hold that “something like consciousness is possible.”15 But, he asks, “What is consciousness?” He contends that it has always referred to self-​presence, and thus to a privileged present moment, one whose alleged privilege is the “ether of metaphysics,” of the notion of substance that represses the topos of its own meaning, as traces of the past or futurity and the otherness of that which is “distant”—​or in other words, of différance, infiltrate presence as the temporalization and spatialization of the multi-​ dimensional finite self that abides amid a “system of differences,” of language, as its dwelling. There are important implications that arise amid this tracing of the “subject” back into its own context of emergence—​as the subject is just another name that has arbitrarily arisen from the play of différance, from the system of difference. That it could become a subject as that which stands under (hypokeimenon) or outside the play of différance is the “result”—​for Derrida—​of a repression of the multiplicity of the self and its emergence from the general economy of polysemous difference. Derrida points out that, in the historicity of thought, he has precedents in the priority of the “unconscious” in Nietzsche (he may have wished also to mention Schelling); in the “repressive hypothesis” of Sigmund Freud; in the “Expenditure” of Bataille; in the Aufhebung of Hegel; and in the “Other” of Emmanuel Levinas. Each of these thinkers subvert and displace the notion of a self-​present subject or consciousness that transcends the context of receptivity, alterity, otherness—​or, in other words, that obviates the system of difference that is language in its differing and deferring flux of différance. In this light, différance, at first a seemingly playful game, becomes a haunting threat to our familiar designations of meaning, of the hierarchies between our universals and particulars. It is not enough to merely reject hierarchy—​all one would need to do is to point to hierarchy to refute such a rejection—​or to suppress the one who would unseat a tyrant. Derrida’s strategy is different—​he subverts hierarchy by exposing its weakest link, by

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wilfully intimating the exception, of the originary no-​thing, the motif that will not reassure us in our illusions, but will, on the contrary, remind us that all of our notions of truth, certainty, meaning, hierarchy—​of what is right and proper—​that all of our tranquillity and security is based tenuously upon a tapestry of illusions, enacted and maintained through violence and self-​deception. At the same time, however, Derrida is not merely deploying différance as would a soldier as a strategy in battle, at least one with a definite and final goal. As I  have already indicted, not only is Derrida’s motif of différance strategic, it is also a provocation of Heidegger, who ceaselessly articulates the question of Being, as Aletheia. Indeed, Derrida, in terms of his metaphor of play and playfulness, is unleashing, echoing Schlegel, a strategy without finality, of “blind tactics,” “wandering”—​all motifs that point to Nietzsche’s intimation of an innocence of becoming. After the overthrow of the tyrant, there will be not be a new king, no new arche—​it will be an-​arche, without a ruling principle of authority, of the proper, or, of the absolutism of the metaphysical subject with its self-​ consciousness. As another link with Nietzsche, Derrida is inciting the emergence of the multiplicity of the self, and the complexity of the finite self with respect to its embeddedness within the historical, cultural, psychological, and somatic matrices of existence.

Derrida and Heidegger Derrida begins the final movement of his essay with a turn to Heidegger and a meditation on the “relation” of différance to the ontological difference in Heidegger’s philosophy. From his references to Heidegger, it is clear that Derrida is not merely referring to the account of the ontological difference in Being and Time, but has also taken into account the epochal thinking of Being that had arisen with the turn (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought. Derrida’s basic question seems to be—​in light of his deconstruction of subjectivity and the metaphysics of presence—​whether différance is merely another name for the ontological difference, or instead, if the ontological difference and the question of Being are merely “intrametaphysical effects” of différance. In other words, is différance the general economy from which Being itself and the difference between Being and being is originally generated—​just as we detected in the case of subjectivity and presence? Or, in still another way, is Being (especially as the main actor in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”) the product of repression of the polysemic and open-​ended play of différance? Derrida gives a rather tentative beginning of an answer: The unfolding of différance is perhaps not solely the truth of Being, or of the epochality of Being. Perhaps we must attempt to think this unheard-​ of-​ thought, this silent tracing:  the history of Being, whose thought engages the Greco-​Western logos such as it is produced via the

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ontological difference, is but an epoch of the diapherein (see above as the difference between things). Henceforth one could no longer even call this an “epoch, the concept of epochality belonging to what is within history as the history of Being. Since Being has never had a “meaning,” has never been thought or said as such, except by dissimulating itself in beings, then différance, in a certain and very strange way, (is) “older” than the ontological difference and the truth of Being. When it has this ago it can be called the play of the trace. The play of a trace which no longer belongs to the horizon of Being, but whose play transports and encloses the meaning of Being: the play of the trace, of the différance, which has no meaning and is not. Which does not belong. There is no maintaining and no depth to, to this bottomless chessboard on which Being is put into play.16 The main points of Derrida’s contention here is that (1) Heidegger’s notion of the ontological difference is the same as the Greek diapherein, conceived as the difference of beings or things: such an ontological difference would be that between beings and the being of beings (though not yet of Being as Being); (2) that the epochality of Being, the truth of Being and the history of Being are the same—​and that différance exceeds not only the ontological difference between being and beings, but also, as the trace of the play of difference, it also exceeds the epochality of Being, etcetera. Derrida writes: As rigorously as possible we must permit to appear/​disappear the trace of what exceeds the truth of Being. The trace (of that) which can never be presented, the trace which itself can never be presented: that is, appear and manifest itself, as such, in its phenomenon. The trace beyond that which profoundly links fundamental ontology and phenomenology. Always differing and deferring, the trace is never as it is in the presentation of itself. It erases itself in presenting itself, muffles itself in resonating, like the writing itself, inscribing its pyramid in différance.17 I would like to suggest the possibility that Derrida has given a faulty interpretation of Heidegger in the previous quotations—​though to discern the fault would require a detailed reading, and thus, it is a fault that would be rarely detected, perhaps even by Derrida himself. That which is missing in his account thus far is Being as Being, as the play of the withdrawal of the concealed in unconcealment (truth), which is not the Being of beings (the praesens or the horizon of the presencing beings), but Being itself in its aspect as non-​presence, as the concealed, prior and beyond its disclosure of its truth, as the unconcealing of Being (Seyn). In this context, Heidegger refers to Being as “It” as in the es gibt—​it gives, as the gift. However, the ontological difference that arises from the gift is forgotten in that as it gives its truth, an aspect of Being as concealment, withdraws with the entry of beings, and thus, its articulation as Being is, as

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with différance, a trace of that which is not. In this way, Derrida’s reading falters in his conflation of the being of beings and Being as Being. The latter, after Heidegger’s turn (Kehre) and his radical jettisoning of the last remnants of the “metaphysics of subjectivity,” is no longer associated with presence, nor merely with absence. Instead “It” is truth as aletheia—​a play of unconcealment amid concealment, of presence and absence, showing and hiding, the clearing of the Open. It is through the withdrawal that we forget Being and, as a necessity, inaugurate the history of Being as metaphysics. My critical reading of Derrida is underscored by (1)  his anachronistic reference to fundamental ontology, which is only operative in Being and Time, and is transformed, after the turn, to a metontology18; (2) that the ontological difference is not merely that of diapherein as Heidegger explicitly indicates temporality as the transcendental horizon for the question of Being, which would include the reference to deferral or temporalization; (3) that there is a more complex notion of the ontological difference operative in the later Heidegger as not only that between the being of Being and beings, but also the difference between both of these and Being itself, the undisclosed or the earth, which Hölderlin names the concealed. The fault is also underscored when Derrida explicitly writes that the ontological difference between Being and beings is the “difference between presence and the present.”19 It seems that the confusion arises from Heidegger’s usage of the word Being (even Seyn or Being), which, for Derrida, seems to entail that Heidegger—​à la Levinas—​remains trapped in the “metaphysics of presence,” and perhaps, even of subjectivity as the subjectivity of Being. The difficulty with attempting to criticise Derrida in this context is his insistence on re-​inscribing his interpretation of Heidegger into the lexicon of his own motif of différance and the trace. Derrida quotes Heidegger to the effect that the forgetting of Being leaves not a trace of the difference between Being and beings. Moreover, with Derrida’s suggestion that différance exceeds the ontological difference (it is its own trace in that différance traces the difference) and of the difference between presence and absence, he writes that to forget the difference between Being and beings would be the disappearance of the trace of the trace. It is not clear if this act of re-​inscription into another lexicon is helpful in understanding Heidegger (if there still is a “Heidegger”), or, in fact, the more important question of whether or not Derrida is accurate in his interpretation of Heidegger. Again, we begin to sense the disruptive and subversive implications of his motif, even amid the basic attempt to set forth an assessment of his reading. For, immediately, he sets out a quotation from Heidegger that, Derrida writes, “seems to imply” his re-​ inscription. The quotation refers to the oblivion of Being and how Being withdraws immediately with the destining of Being. This would be to refer to Being as Being and not to the being of beings or to the difference of the latter from beings. In other words, Being as Being withdraws and never comes to presence or its manifest as a thing that is present. Indeed, Being as Being is Nothing (das Nichts) and itself

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exceeds the metaphysics of subjectivity and presence. However, no sooner than Derrida gives us this quotation, he immediately returns to his project of re-​inscription into the lexicon of différance, trace, simulacrum, and erasure. It is in this way that a clear grasp of his criticism of Heidegger is obscured by his own attempt to set forth a motif that is “older” than Being. Derrida writes: “Older” than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language. But, we “already know” that if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally so, not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite system of our own. It is rather because there is no name for it at all, not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of “différance,” which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions.20 While it is arguable that Derrida has not given us a strictly accurate reading of Heidegger, and also that his own project of re-​inscription was more of a hindrance than an aid in an interpretation of Heidegger, there still remains the central question of Derrida’s polemic:  is the use of the word “Being” by Heidegger the attempt to set forth a “master-​name” that eludes the system of difference that has been set forth by Derrida? Moreover, is his conception of Being, as it seems to rely on a faulty interpretation, adequate to his own attempt to criticise Heidegger (especially in light of our linkage of Being as Being with Empedocles notion of the play between strife and love in the “Letter on Humanism”)? Finally, is Being a name, or instead, is it a recollection from our own historicity of the gift? Derrida writes: There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance.21 The question in other words is this—​is Heidegger, in light of that which we have heard in the “Letter on Humanism,” especially with regard to the discussion of homelessness and the poetry of Hölderlin as that which articulates language as the house of Being, seeking to discover “the proper word and the unique name”? Derrida gives a quotation from Heidegger in which he writes, “in order to name the essential nature of Being, language would have to find a single word, the unique word. From this we can gather how daring every thoughtful word addressed to Being is. Nevertheless such daring is not impossible, since Being speaks always and everywhere through language.”22 The question is whether such a unique word, though not

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impossible, is ever to indicate that which exceeds the gesture of Derrida’s motif of différance. Yet, in light of Holderlin’s “Urteil und Seyn,” such a word indicates, as the logos, our fundamental mortal status amid an event that occurs upon a topos in which being is said in many ways. Being as Being remains inaccessible to thought, remaining a symbol for our feeling of radical finitude.

Foucault on Hölderlin: The absence of the law of the father In his review of Jean Laplance’s Hölderlin et la Question du Pére, entitled “The Father’s ‘No,’ ” Foucault engages in a polemical discourse surrounding various interpretations of the poet Hölderlin in light of his descent into madness, silence, or in Foucault’s terminology, his schizophrenia. Praising the Hölderlin Jahrbuch of 1946 for its dissolution of the image of Hölderlin constructed by Stephan George (who is praised by Adorno in his own “Parataxis”) as a pious poet of the gods and their return, of nature, Foucault engages in what he names, despite his further praise of the Hölderlin Jahrbuch for remaining “alien” to the “babbling of psychologists,”23 the “psychopathology of poets,”24 the possibility of which he attributes to Hölderlin in an era in which “European culture discovered, as linked to a single investigation, the finitude of men and the return of time.” Foucault writes: In relation to this event, Hölderlin occupies a unique and exemplary position; he created and manifested the link between the work and the absence of a work, between the flight of the gods and the loss of language. He stripped the artist of his magnificent powers—​his timelessness, his capacity to guarantee the truth and to raise every event to the heights of language. Hölderlin’s language replaced the epic unity commemorated by Vasari with a division that is responsible for every work in our culture, a division that links it to its own absence and to its dissolution in the madness that had accompanied it from the beginning.25 Hölderlin, from Foucault’s “anti-​ psychiatric” perspective, is indicative, symptomatic of a division that he, “unique and exemplary,” created in his own work, a division between the “work and the absence of work.” We can understand his affirmation of Laplance’s rejection of Blanchot’s emphasis upon a “breach” in the Hölderlin text. Hölderlin, responsible for the “return of time,” becomes the topography by means of which we can ascertain the division in our own culture—​in every “work in our culture, a division that links its own absence to its dissolution and madness.” Resonating with the political thought of Deleuze and Guattari,26 Foucault names Hölderlin as the

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incipient exemplar of the schizophrenia of capitalist culture. The difference between the work and the absence of work: this is the breach of meaning, of the epic unity of Vasari, in his intricate descriptions of Renaissance artists, a case study of the “death of art” in the age of mechanical reproduction, of its vivisection by the division of labor. The procedure of Foucault in the case of Hölderlin, however, while illuminating with respect to the dismal fate of poetry and of the transformation of the political economy of art and existence in the early nineteenth century, is an intimation of the context of tragic silence, of the disorientation of Hölderlin and the absence of his work—​and one that is symptomatic for the era as a whole. A discourse was at once initiated and destroyed by Hölderlin, one that in its event, served to create the division of schizophrenic culture. Whether or not his claims are strictly true, for Foucault, as with the emblem in Discipline and Punish,27 or the painter in the painting in The Order of Things,28 “Hölderlin” serves as the artwork, in Heidegger’s sense, in his “The Origin of the Work of Art,”29 that discloses the truth of that which is there. Hölderlin, the artist, is tragically crushed under the weight of the new order, his work is the topos of the breach in modern European thought and discourse and his madness is our own. Such a perspective is of course allegorical, mythic, and is perhaps is tainted by a tacit anachronism, and even a failure to present a balanced picture of Hölderlin in the decades in which he lived with the family of Erik Zimmer. Foucault is extremely understanding of the intensity of Hölderlin’s suffering, and does not overtly judge his later work with regard to his “madness,” yet, in his indication of Hölderlin as a symptomatic topography of an era, he has confined him to a face which he cannot change. Yet, we can never be Hölderlin in his last decades, and the inordinate obsession with “madness” prejudices his work, which as we have seen, is a work that is a philosophy in its own right, and something that Foucault, along with many others, does not acknowledge: Hölderlin’s vast philosophical significance.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

All in all: The poetics of intimacy

With the deconstruction of Cartesian-​Kantian “consciousness” and the metaphysics of order, the barriers of rational delineation and the pathos of distance of reason become disoriented in the play of the tragic (or comic) sublime, of mortal existence, in which the hegemony of an order has been placed into question, is challenged, overthrown, displaced. That which is being displaced is the incarceration of windowless turrets, divisions, the fragmentation of modernist/​postmodernist thought. These constructs are cast away disclosing the inescapable intimacy of mortal existence in the Open.

We have come to the final chapter of our present study of Hölderlin’s relationship with what we name “philosophy.” What we have found is that Hölderlin was himself a philosopher, but one who articulated his philosophy as poiesis, and for necessary philosophical intentions, as with the early Greek thinkers of the tragic age. Such a tragic poiesis would perhaps be, in the manner of Keat’s Lamia, a hot philosophy, immersed in a passionate lifeworld, one that discloses the affirmative truth of mortal existence. With the radical displacement of the constructive illusion of the Copernican subject, Hölderlin discloses the intimate opening of mortality as our fundamental characteristic aspect and metontological horizon. With the deconstruction of the Kantian sublime, and thus with the dissolution of modernist “Reason,” exposed as a secularized Christian illusion, Hölderlin enacts the “return of time” with his retrieval of early Greek tragic thought, one that climaxes with Nietzsche’s “death of God.”

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In this way, we can agree with Foucault that Hölderlin was “unique and exemplary,” not, however, as a romantic poet who went mad, but as the initiator of the Kronian revolution, characterized by the radical temporalization of European thought.1 Amid the chaos of the transfiguration of infinite thought in its demise, Hölderlin establishes a deeper grounding for thought in the groundless, in the abyss of temporality, the topography of which is oriented to his persistent mediation upon the epochal discordance thrown into relief in the juxtaposition of early Greek tragic thought (and not the Ancients as such) with that of Christian modernism in the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and romanticism. It was perhaps the latter who were closest to Hölderlin’s vision, yet, as oriented to the Kantian Idea of Freedom and, as outlined by Benjamin, in reflective judgment, the German romantics failed to comprehend the relationship between philosophy and poetry in its pre-​Platonic dissemination in tragedy. The aversion to tragedy by Kant and Schlegel reveals their undeniably Christian allegiances, and for the latter, reveals his conversion to conservative Catholicism to be unsurprising. With the extrication of his work from the confines of Kantian philosophy, Hölderlin was able to retrieve the mortal thought, the logos of early Greek thought and to enact an echo of tragic poetry in his own participation in the radical transformation of his contemporary age of love and strife, of revolution, war, passion, disease, and death. It is in this context that we can understand Hölderlin’s statements that tragedy was an intellectual intuition of existence. As his notion of the intellectual was that of the Heraclitean logos in its lawful relationship with Being, tragedy is an intellectual intuition of the unity of opposites, of the each and All. In this way, Kantian objections to intellectual intuition are irrelevant and the coincidence of usage of the phrase between various philosophers must call not for a facile equation, but for a deeper investigation of the precise meaning of the phrase, in the context of each respective philosophy. We have found that Hölderlin’s meaning is radically distinct from its other uses, even with that of Schelling, who remained within the rationalist paradigm of the system. It is Hölderlin’s throwing down of the ladder of cold philosophy, and his enactment of mortal thought as poiesis that is the singular event of the post-​Kantian intellectual revolution in European thought. Hölderlin enacted his revolution within the revolution, disclosing the Open of Seyn, and articulated the poetic language that was required to express the tragic predicament and the radical possibilities of our personal and collective situations. Such a philosophy of mortal existence would not, however, be the end to science or even to heuristic systems, but would be a re-​affirmation of science as the creative search for truth, and a matrix of theoretical and practical endeavors that is ultimately grounded upon the abyss of poetry, upon the poetic words, such as phusis, of making manifest, of nature, which are the prerequisite topos upon which sciences can have any philosophical possibility. We must, with Nietzsche, engage in science through the lens of

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art, the sense of the aesthetic context of mortal existence and the “space-​ time continuum,” another of the poetic phrases that inhabit the vast lexicon of scientific research. That which such a mortal philosophy accomplishes is a clarification of the possible and the instantiation of a Law of Being that displaces the anthropocentric conceptualizations of existence with an ecological thought, in which an ever-​evolving human existence has its place and its necessary limits. As we have explored, it is the situation of tragedy, of the radical contrast between the One of the divine, and the Many of the mortal, that discloses our temporal predicament of historicity and Fate. Such is the necessary situation for any mortal, and it intimates our equality before death. For Hölderlin, such a predicament is not atheism; our predicament is mortality and our utter lack of comprehension of our situation. All we have for orientation is the story, the words left behind by other mortals. In his flights to other lands and to worlds of the past, as in his poem “Patmos,” and many other poems, as we have seen, Hölderlin meditates upon the discordance between ancient myth and Christian dogmatics. He seeks to comprehend the narrative strife in the diverse disclosures of the divine in the wake of the displacement of Paganism by Christianity. Yet, in light of Spinoza’s notion of the historically conditioned expressions of the divine in his Tractatus Theologicus Politicus, and his own articulation of the historicity of tragic thought, Hölderlin retrieves the paradigm of tragic existence as the site of a novel disclosure of the divine, of a new era, placing “Christianity” as an intermediary form of remembrance, subsequent to the return of a sense of the holy, which, in Heidegger’s view, is the prerequisite event prior to any possible consideration of the question of gods. We will recall, in our discussion of Hyperion and The Birth of Tragedy, the difference between the perspectives of Hölderlin and Nietzsche on the decline of Greece. For Hölderlin, the gods were a late objectification of the divine, naming as a means of control, referring to the clerics and their political control in ancient religions, as was the case in Europe until the declaration of the “death of God” by Nietzsche. Nevertheless, Hölderlin addresses the gods in his poetry who are already here, and suggests the arrival of others. In the intimacy of his poetic world, he speaks of the mountains, “summits of Time,” and the rivers that they give to us, lightning, the sun, and moon, and stars, all vastly durable (and for all intents and purposes) immortal in terms of their indefinite existence. As with Spinoza, Hölderlin creates a radical immanence in his poiesis, through a juxtaposition of the vast indefiniteness of cosmic repetition and our own fleeting and ephemeral existence, drawn in a straight line, as the rise and fall of worlds. We are a “sign without meaning,” but “near, though hard to grasp, is the god.” Such is the situation of the mortal being, affirming a meaningless and finite existence and, in our radical incapability to comprehend Being per se, experiencing the lived existence of the community and taking note of the many great men and women who distinguish

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themselves for a time from the others. Yet, each is equal before mortality and the justice and freedom of human existence is confirmed not only by our equality before death, but also, paradoxically, by our capability to commit suicide, to die by one’s own choice, at any time, as Schlegel remarked in Lucinde, or to overthrow the corruption of a political tyranny, which in its hubris, claims to rule by either divine right or manifest destiny. In the dynamic context of Hölderlin’s world, a temporal opening of Love and Strife, we as mortal are capable only of a makeshift organization amid the overwhelming forces of the aorgic cosmos. Yet, amid the temporal world, there are not merely the Many as with monads without windows, but mortals, of flesh and imbued with passion. With an honest acceptation of the mortality and utter singularity of our existence, we are paradoxically set free to create an organizational space of equality through which each will fulfil his or her freedom, social, political economic, cultural and personal. In this way, moreover, we are free to deconstruct and dismantle currently existing hierarchies and totalitarian regimes, which seek to flee in the face of the insurmountability of human equality before mortality. Such “anarchy of power” reins through the falsification of mortal existence with its rejection of its necessary and fleeting meaninglessness; in other words, freedom is an openness to becoming, transfiguration, an affirmation of fate, of birth and death, a poetic mythos as our only glimpse of “eternity,” a word, whose meaning must forever elude us, as Diotima taught Socrates. In a letter to his half-​brother, Karl Gok, in 1799, Hölderlin reveals the character of his philosophical intervention in the form of tragic poetry: The trouble lies not so much in their being what they are as in their considering what they are to be the only possible mode, refusing to countenance anything else. I  am against selfishness, despotism and misanthropy, but otherwise I am coming to like people more and more because in all aspects of their activity and characters I  see, more and more, the same basic character: the same fate. And, indeed, this striving, this giving up of a certain present for something uncertain, different, better and yet better again I see as the original ground of everything the people around me work at and do.2 In this expression of intimacy, in a letter to a member of his family, his intimates the sterility of his age and his own striving to invoke through his language a different feeling in the people, who, as with Heraclitus’ statement that most mortals live in their own private worlds, seem incapable of imagination, of thinking differently—​so as to embrace the uncertain, that which is different and better. The tragic revolutionary Hölderlin comes to the fore in this letter, as he delves into the state of affairs of homogeneity, captive to a picture, since it is inexorably repeated to us in our language.3 Hölderlin, through his poetry, his philosophy, seeks to subvert the restricted economy of a language that orchestrates the reproduction of the cultural

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“ideological units” and the status quo. In this way, Hölderlin does not blame the people for the cage in which they have been placed. Indeed, he has an enormous sympathy for people, whom he “likes more and more” in light of their common and equal Fate, that of mortality. In his condemnation of selfishness, despotism, and misanthropy, Hölderlin provides us with a transference of his mortal thought, his philosophy, into a social, cultural, and political philosophy of community and equality before the Law of Being. Hölderlin’s “politics of the festival” has been described as utopian. Yet, for the poet-​philosopher in a tragic age, in an era of revolution and revolutionary changes, such as that of the French calendar, and with the intimacy of war in his native Germany, Hölderlin, involved in the republican revolutionary movement in Europe with his close friend Isaac Sinclair, was seeking to instigate radical changes in the people at the level of culture, of feeling. Through his poetic intervention, Hölderlin has assured the people that not only will change occur, but that it is occurring always amid the temporality of existence, in the general economy of the aorgic flux. The political and cultural state of affairs maintains its seemingly “natural” status through, as Adorno indicated, a culture industry, of the reproduction of homogeneity and the status quo, which are not merely natural, but are forms of organization, constantly cultivated and policed so as to institute the reproduction of its basic character as an epochal hierarchy. In his essay, “Ground of Empedocles,” Hölderlin indicates the overall trajectory of his poetic strategy with respect to a Dionysian, aorgic infiltration of nature into the homogenous politico-​cultural order. Such change could not be incited through a systematic philosophical expression, as such one-​ dimensionality is merely a repetition of the artificiality of knowledge. Change, as it occurred in France, for instance, was not the direct result of any philosophical treatise, but of the explosion of feeling (Gefühl) of the people, in the streets, as they stormed the Bastille, releasing its prisoners and initiating an insurrection and overthrow of an order of inequality, underwritten by the notion of the divine right of Kings. Hölderlin writes, in what could be regarded as a description of the cultural revolution he envisioned: In the middle lies the struggle, and the death of the individual, that moment where the organic lays down its selfhood, its particular existence, that had become an extreme, and the aorgic lays down its universality, not as at the start in an ideal mixture, but in the real highest struggle, in that the particular at its extreme must actively and increasingly universalize itself toward the extreme of the aorgic, must increasingly tear itself from its centre, and the aorgic must increasingly concentrate itself towards the extreme of the particular and increasingly gain a centre and become the most particular of all, where, then the organic which has become aorgic seems to find itself again and seems to return to itself, in that it supports itself upon the individuality of the aorgic, and the object,

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the aorgic, seems to find itself, in that, at the selfsame moment where it assumes individuality, it also finds the organic at the greatest extreme of the aorgic, so that in this moment, IN THIS BIRTH OF THE GREATEST ENMITY THE GREATEST RECONCILIATION SEEMS TO BE REAL.4 Nature and art, the unity of opposites, of the aorgic and the organic, are only opposed, for Hölderlin, “harmoniously.”5 Yet, in the radical context of ceaseless flux, of the historicity of existence—​ as we can ascertain from a meditation upon its trajectories and patterns—​it is clear that the contemporary era, for Hölderlin, had constructed itself to the most extreme of the organic, of artificiality and dissociation from reality. In the context of this dissociation from reality, Hölderlin’s poetics is meant to directly intervene in the direction of the radical transformations that were already and manifestly underway in the inaugural event of the French Revolution. Against the artificiality of organic construction, in its dissociation from reality, it is Hölderlin’s task to inject the aorgic into the artificial, to deconstruct the order, and displace it with an artwork, an organization that becomes attuned with the real. Indeed, we can see, from this perspective, that contrary to Foucault’s picture of Hölderlin, that the latter was not only already aware of the dissociation from the reality of his age, but also enacted a work that sought to deconstruct the dissociation, to tragically end an order of things out of tune with the reality not merely of radical mortality, but also with the equality of mortals before death. In this light, Hölderlin’s strategy resembles Nietzsche and the activity and philosophy of the surrealists, most notably Bataille, in the invocation of the unconscious, of imagination and feeling for the purposes of revolutionary transformation, in which art becomes a political and cultural force in its own right. In his struggle against the “all-​too-​organic,”6 in an era in which poetry was a powerful cultural force, Hölderlin reveals the poet as an agent of radical cultural revolution, and indeed, one who knows himself through this engagement. He gives, in his essay, “When the poet is once in command of the spirit,” a rule for the free poet: Put yourself through free choice in harmonious opposition with an outer sphere, just as you in yourself are in harmonious opposition, by nature, but unrecognizably, as long as you remain in yourself.7 And: In this way he fulfils his destiny, which is—​knowledge of the harmoniously opposed in himself, in his unity and individuality, and again knowledge of his identity, his unity and individuality in the harmoniously opposed. This is the true freedom of his being, and if he does not attach too much to this external harmoniously opposed sphere, does not become identical with it, as he is with himself, so that he can never abstract from it, nor

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is too attached to himself, and can abstract too little from himself as an independent person, if he neither reflects too much on himself, nor reflects too much on his sphere and his time, he is then on the right path of his destiny.8 Hölderlin counsels the revolutionary poet to place oneself in “harmonious opposition” to the historical world, to engage with the world, and that, amid the “unity of opposites” of mortal existence, to discover his identity and destiny through his artistic endeavors that serve as a mirror for the mortal artist. In his free opposition to an “external sphere,” artistic creativity takes place in the middle, between the harmoniously opposed of the inner and outer spheres, amid the radical vortex of temporality and the world. Yet, it is not merely action that reveals mortal knowing and thought, but also an existential, imaginative distancing of his poetic meditation from an all-​ too-​organic immediacy with “his sphere and his time.” He seeks to gather together the traces for an intimate sketch of the “makeshift” trajectory of worlds and epochs, of the radical temporality of existence, and the every-​ fluctuating character of mortal existence. Hölderlin describes his artistic process in a letter to his mother: To express his little world the poet must imitate creation, where not everything is perfect and where God sends rain on good and evil and on the just and the unjust. The poet must often say something untrue and contradictory which then of course resolves itself into truth and harmony in the great whole, where it is said as something transitory and perishable. And just as the rainbow only shows its beauty after a storm, so in the poem truth and harmony emerge with even greater beauty and pleasure from falsehood and from error and suffering.9 This letter to his Christian mother, to a woman who withheld from Hölderlin his inheritance from his father since he refused to become a priest, is thick with irony, but discloses the basic parameters of his mortal thought. Not only does Hölderlin express Nietzsche’s later poiesis of the artwork as the lie that alone is capable of telling the truth, but he gives us, in the three words that are italicized in the letter, “truth,” “transitory” and “perishable,” a direct instruction of the character of mortal thought.10 The poet creates his “little world,” disclosing his truth of the whole through misdirection and illusion, in the context of his own engagement with the world, one that promoted an artistic and intellectual revolution that he felt was “realizable,” and which, considering the trajectory of thought in the nineteenth century, was partially realized. Hölderlin sought, through artistic praxis, to “re-​balance” the world in the apprehension of the tragic character of existence, one that had not changed, despite the sedimentation of the historical layers of metaphysical and religious superimposition that acted to suppress, cover over, silence, the

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song of the Earth, of Dionysian, tragic existence and its articulation in tragic poetry and drama. Hölderlin’s definitive departure from Platonic philosophy, which was the habitation of the romantics, is signified by the lie that tells the truth, and the reestablishment of the tragic poet and his mechane as the conduit of philosophical truth. With the infiltration of the polis by the revolutionary poets, the possibility of writing the tragic end of the order of things with the word that kills, becomes a real and dangerous possibility. Such a portrait of Hölderlin as a revolutionary poet-​philosopher and as the initiator of a “discursive formation” of radical historicity of existence, of the “return of time,” runs against the grain of many, who have, for their own reasons, portrayed Hölderlin as a contemplative or a tortured artist, who descended into madness, or merely as an exemplary national poet. Yet, in light of our study, it is urgent that we consider Hölderlin as a philosopher in his own right, but one who remains at a distance from us, withdraws from us in light of our artificiality, but at once, one who still speaks to us, awakening us to the feeling of overwhelming intimacy of mortal existence, and of the radical and ungovernable freedom of the human spirit.

Epilogue: The revolution of the mortal

In this epilogue, I  will close with a meditation upon the implications of mortal thought for the planetary existence of human beings. That which must be emphasized in this meditation is the utter fragility of human existence, one that has been intensified with the disruption of the physical ecosystems by the activities of human organization, artificiality, of the all-​ too-​organic, a matrix of power and exploitation underlined ideologically by the destructive and fatal illusions of the various nihilistic monotheistic religions and by the arrogance and hubris of Copernican “subjectivity.” In light of our Hölderlinan deconstruction and displacement of Kantian freedom and Platonic eternity by tragic thought, of a hegemony of reason that had embedded its despotic artificiality and dissociation from reality reason into the political economy of existence, the task of mortal thought and action must be to dismantle the homogenous order of the restricted economy amid a radical and equitable reconfiguration of human existence with an emphasis upon openness, mutual aid, and sovereignty over one’s body. It is our radical freedom, equality before mortality, which discloses the openness, yet limits of mortal possibility amid a community of individuals fated to death. Such a sensus communis, in its honesty with respect to its fate, will prioritize a “this-​worldly” orientation, which will seek to fulfil the dead-​letter of equality with the “deadly letter” of revolutionary thought, dissemination, and praxis. The establishment of a temporal world of radical equality before mortality will at once be one that cultivates a harmony with nature, amid our fragile habitat, in light of participation within, and not domination of, the community of nature. As human existence has always been characterized by tragic mortality, such a world of harmony would be possible at any moment. Yet, it has been our failure to reject selfishness, despotism, and misanthropy that has led to the failure of each human civilization, and will lead, if we do not heed the words of our “prophets,” to the annihilation of our own fleeting world.

NOTES

Opening: Mortal thought 1 This poem is by the author. 2 Indeed, there may be different strands of early German romanticism, arising as it did from the witch’s brew of Kantian freedom, Fichte, Johann Herder, Jacobi’s Spinoza and Hume, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Classicism), but it seems necessary to regard Hölderlin, as we will see, as not a romantic at all—​as something else besides, as Benjamin suggested, in his essay “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” where he leaves us, in a note, with a statement that what he has to say about Novalis and Schlegel does not apply to Hölderlin.

Chapter One 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe and Elizabeth Anscombe, London: Blackwell, 2003. 2 Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poetry, ed. Eric L. Santer, New York: Bloomsbury, 1990. 3 Please see Chapter 10, “Heidegger and the question of being.” 4 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), trans. T. Greene and H. Hudson, Harper Torchbooks, 1960. 5 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 6 James Luchte, “Of Freedom: Heidegger on Spinoza,” Epoche: A Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 1, Fall 2015, pp. 131–​147. 7 Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elisabeth Millan, Albany: SUNY, p. 210.

Chapter Two 1 Friedrich Schlegel: “There is a kind of poetry whose essence lies in the relation between ideal and real, and which therefore, by analogy to philosophical jargon, should be called transcendental poetry. It begins as satire in the absolute difference of ideal and real, hovers in between as elegy, and ends as idyll with the absolute identity of the two. But just as we wouldn’t think much of

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an uncritical transcendental philosophy that doesn’t represent the producer along with the product and contain at the same time within the system of transcendental thoughts a description of transcendental thinking: so too this sort of poetry should unite the transcendental raw materials and preliminaries of a theory of poetic creativity—​often met with in modern poets—​with the artistic reflection and beautiful self-​mirroring that is present in Pindar, in the lyric fragments of the Greeks, in the classical elegy, and, among the moderns, in Goethe. In all its descriptions, this poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.” “Athenaeum Fragments,” Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. P. Firchow, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, Fragment 238, p. 195. 2 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. G. H. R. Parkinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 3 Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? New York: Penguin, 2010. 4 Novalis, Hymns to the Night, Athenaeum (1800), trans. George MacDonald, 1897, 1. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 2. 8 Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” Lucinde and the Fragments, 116, p. 175. 9 David Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, p. 59. 10 Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar, Albany: SUNY, 1997, LLI #99. 11 Schlegel, (KA XVIII, 518). 12 Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, p. 98. 13 Ibid., p. 102. 14 Ibid., p. 106. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 107. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 108. 19 Ibid., p. 110. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 112. 22 Ibid., p. 113. 23 Ibid., p. 114. 24 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Her Recovery,” Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 13. 25 Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, p. 117. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 118. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 120. 32 Ibid., p. 128. 33 Ibid., p. 129.

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34 James Luchte, “Makeshift: Phenomenology of Original Temporality,” Philosophy Today, 2003. 35 Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye, San Francisco: City Lights, 2001. 36 Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, p. 132. 37 Ibid., p. 137. 38 Schlegel, “Critical Fragments,” Lucinde and the Fragments, 48, p. 149. 39 Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, p. 139. 40 Ibid., p. 138. 41 Schlegel, “Critical Fragments,” Lucinde and the Fragments, 104, p. 155. 42 Ibid., 112, p. 156. 43 Schlegel, “Blütenstaub,” Lucinde and the Fragments, 2, p. 160. 44 Schlegel, “Critical Fragments,” Lucinde and the Fragments, 108, p. 156. 45 Ibid., 115, p. 157. 46 Schlegel, “Blütenstaub,” Lucinde and the Fragments, 3, p. 160. 47 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” Lucinde and the Fragments, 3, p. 161. 48 Ibid., 28, 165. 49 Ibid., 61, p. 169. 50 Ibid., 104, p. 173. 51 Ibid., 105, p. 173. 52 Ibid., 116, p. 175. 53 Ibid., 116, p. 175. 54 Ibid., 214, p. 190. 55 Ibid., 168, p. 183. 56 Ibid., 125, p. 178. 57 Ibid., 216, p. 190. 58 Ibid., 222, p. 192. 59 Ibid., 227, p. 193. 60 Ibid., 234, p. 194. 61 Ibid., 262, p. 200. 62 Ibid., 292, p. 203. 63 Ibid., 338, p. 214. 64 Ibid., 344, p. 215. 65 Ibid., 451, p. 240. 66 Plato, Timaeus, New York: Penguin, 2008.

Chapter Three 1 Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poetry, ed. Eric L. Santer, New York: Bloomsbury, 1990. 2 Michel Foucault, “The Father’s ‘No,’ ” Language, Counter-​Memory, Practice, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 68–​86. 3 Ibid. 4 Frank Edler, “Alfred Baeumler on Hölderlin and the Greeks: Reflections on the Heidegger-​Baeumler Relationship,” Janus Head, Spring, 1999; “Philosophy, Language, and Politics: Heidegger’s Attempt to Steal the Language of the Revolution in 1933–​34,” Social Research, 57.1, Spring, 1990, pp. 197–​238.

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5 Friedrich Hölderlin, “To Friedich Schiller” (September 4, 1795), Essays and Letters, London: Penguin, 2009, p. 62. 6 Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 7 Hölderlin, “Judgment and Being,” Essays and Letters, p. 231. 8 Ibid. 9 Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, New York: Penguin, 1968. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. 11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Harper and Row, p. 62. 12 Hölderlin, “Letter to Schiller,” September 4, 1795, Essays and Letters, pp. 62–​63. 13 Hölderlin, “Judgment and Being,” Essays and Letters, p. 232. 14 Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008.

Chapter Four 1 Veronique Foti, Epochal Discordance Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Tragedy, Albany: SUNY, 2007. 2 David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1986. 3 We will recall, as I have explored in Early Greek Thought: Before the Dawn, that Socrates mocked Anaxagoras and his notion of “Mind.” 4 James Luchte, Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration: Wandering Souls, London: Bloomsbury, 2009. 5 Friedrich Beiser, The Fate of Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. 6 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes to the Oedipus,” Essays and Letters, London: Penguin, 2009, p. 319. 7 Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, London: Penguin, 2009, pp. 225–​339. 8 Rainer Nägele, “Poetic Revolution,” A New History of German Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 511–​516. 9 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone,” Essays and Letters, p. 325.

Chapter Five 1 Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, London: Methuen Publishing, 1974. 2 Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Ground of Empedocles,” Essays and Letters, London: Penguin, 2009, p. 259. 3 Ibid. 4 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Bread and Wine,” Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, London: Penguin, pp. 151–​159. 5 Ibid., p. 153. 6 Ibid., p. 155.

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7 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1992, Part Two. 8 Hölderlin, “Bread and Wine,” pp. 155–​157. 9 Ibid., p. 157. 10 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. 11 Ibid., p. 159. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz, Albany: SUNY, 1999. 16 For a penetrating criticism of Badiou on this point, please see Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg, “Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology,” Critical Inquiry, 37.4, 2011, pp. 583–​614. 17 Francois Laruelle, Anti-​Badiou: The Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy, London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2013. 18 Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Desire,” Infinite Thought, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011, p. 36. 19 Alain Badiou, “ ‘The Contemporary Figure of the Soldier in Politics and Poetry’,” UCLA, 2007. 20 Ibid.

Chapter Six 1 Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poetry, ed. Eric L. Santner, New York: Bloomsbury, 1990. 2 Graham Parkes, “The Symphonic Structure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, London: Bloomsbury, 2008. 3 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes for the Antigone,” Essays and Letters, London: Penguin, 2009, p. 330. 4 Ibid., p. 328. 5 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Bread and Wine,” Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, London: Penguin, 1998, pp. 151–​159. 6 Ibid. 7 James Luchte, Early Greek Thought, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. 8 Hölderlin, “Notes for the Antigone,” p. 330. 9 Ibid. 10 It is significant that Holderlin regards Oedipus at Colonus as merely a national, and not a Greek, drama, for the latter is that which is in a state of spiritual rebellion. Indeed, this could explain why he did not translate it, as it would have been expected in light of Sophocles’ trilogy. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone,” p. 330. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., pp. 325–​332. 13 Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

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14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out Of the Spirit of Music, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, 1967, Sections 13–​15. 15 Hölderlin, “Notes for the Antigone,” Essays and Letters, pp. 325–​332. 16 Ibid. 17 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out Of the Spirit of Music, Section 2. 18 Ibid. 19 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books, 1992, pp. 303–​320. 20 Plato, “The Republic,” Collected Dialogues, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 575–​844.

Chapter Seven 1 Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Poet’s Vocation,” Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, London: Penguin, p. 79. 2 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Nature and Art, or Saturn and Jupiter,” Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 75. 3 Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Archipelago,” Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 111. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Dionysos Dithyrambs, The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche, trans. James Luchte, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 247–​315. 5 Hölderlin, “Nature and Art, or Saturn and Jupiter,” Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 75. 6 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, London: Arrow Publishing, 1994. 7 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin, 2008. 8 Nietzsche, Dionysus Dithyrambs, The Peacock and the Buffalo, pp. 246–​315. 9 Ibid., p. 249. 10 Ibid., p. 251. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 253. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 255. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 259. 17 Ibid., p. 265. 18 Ibid., p. 267. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 271. 21 Ibid., p. 273. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 277. 24 Ibid., p. 279. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 285. 28 Ibid., p. 287.

NOTES

191

29 Ibid., p. 299. 30 Ibid., p. 301. 31 Ibid., p. 305. 32 Ibid., p. 313. 33 Ibid., p. 315. 34 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common, London; New York: Allen & Unwin; Macmillan, 1923.

Chapter Eight 1 Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles, trans. David Farrell Krell, Albany: SUNY, 2010, p. 115. 2 Ibid., pp. 150–​151. 3 Ibid., p. 151. 4 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 5 Franz Brentano (1874), Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister, London and New York: Routledge, 1995. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Classics, 1995. 7 In his introduction to his translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Graham Parkes outlines this unique role of woman, of the goddesses, in the metamorphoses of Zarathustra. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 327.

Chapter Nine 1 Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, note 287, p. 198. 2 Walter Benjamin, “Two Poems of Friedrich Holderlin,” Selected Writings, Vol. 1, p. 20. 3 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Über Urtheil und Seyn,” in H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770–​1801, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. 515–​516. 4 Frank Edler, “Alfred Baeumler on Hölderlin and the Greeks: Reflections on the Heidegger-​Baeumler Relationship,” Janus Head, vol. 1, no 3. Spring 1999. 5 Theodor Adorno, “Parataxis: On Holderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. S. W. Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, p. 143. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.

192

Notes

Chapter Ten 1 Henri Bergon, “The Idea of Duration,” Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 2 James Luchte, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2007. 3 James Luchte, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2008. 4 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. 5 Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Truth and Lying in the Extra-​Moral Sense,” The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York:Viking Press, 1976. 7 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 112. 8 Ibid., p. 189.

Chapter Eleven 1 Michael Roth, The Poetics of Resistance, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. 2 Martin Heidegger, “Remembrance,” Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry, trans. K. Hoeller, New York: Humanity Books, 2000, p. 151. 3 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 213–​265. 4 Ibid., p. 217. 5 Ibid., pp. 217–​218. 6 Ibid., p. 218. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 219. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 220. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 221. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 223. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 224. 19 Ibid., pp. 227–​228. 20 Ibid., p. 230. 21 Ibid., p. 231. 22 Ibid., 234. 23 Ibid.

NOTES

193

24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 235. 26 Ibid., p. 237. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 238. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 240. 31 Ibid., p. 241. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 225. 34 Ibid., p. 242. 35 Ibid., p. 243. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 244. 38 Ibid., p. 245. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 246. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 248. 43 Ibid., pp. 249–​250. 44 Ibid., p. 250. 45 Ibid., p. 251. 46 Ibid., p. 254. 47 Ibid., p. 256. 48 Ibid., p. 264.

Chapter Twelve 1 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 261. 2 Jacques Derrida, “Mnemosyne,” Memoires for Paul de Man, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 21. 3 Ibid., p. 37. 4 Ibid. 5 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968, p. 7. 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, London: Blackwell, 2003. 7 Derrida, “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, p. 3. 8 Ibid., p. 7. 9 Ibid., p. 8. 10 Ibid., p. 9. 11 Ibid., p. 10. 12 Ibid., pp. 10–​11. 13 Ibid., p. 11. 14 Ibid., p. 15. 15 Ibid., p. 16.

194

Notes

16 Ibid., p. 22. 17 Ibid., p. 23. 18 David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 26. 21 Ibid., p. 27. 22 Ibid. 23 Michel Foucault, “The Father’s ‘No,’ ” Language, Counter-​Memory, Practice, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 71. 24 Ibid., p. 86. 25 Ibid. 26 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, New York: Viking Penguin, 1978. 27 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, New York: Vintage, 1995. 28 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, New York: Vintage, 1994. 29 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: HarperCollins, 1975.

Chapter Thirteen 1 In the light of a quite unusual consensus between Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, de Man, Foucault, and others, of the uniqueness of Hölderlin, it would be appropriate, in light of his radical distinction with respect to the German romantics (not to mention Hölderlin’s lack of any contact with either Novalis or the Schlegel brothers) to name him a tragic philosopher in the age of romanticism. 2 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Letter to Karl Gok,” Essays and Letters, London: Penguin, p. 135. 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, London: Blackwell, 2003, No. 115. 4 Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Ground of Empedocles,” Essays and Letters, p. 262. 5 Ibid., p. 261. 6 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes to the Antigone,” Essays and Letters, p. 328. 7 Friedrich Hölderlin, “When Once the Poet Is in Command of the Spirit,” Essays and Letters, p. 290. 8 Ibid., p. 291. 9 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Letter to Johanna Christiana Gok,” Essays and Letters, p. 150. 10 Given what we know of his relationship with his mother and the scrupulous manner in which he composed his frequent letters, it is unlikely that these italics are a mere coincidence.

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INDEX​ Adorno, Theodor  4, 10, 49, 82, 131–​137, 161, 162, 173, 179, 191, 194 Aesthetic ideas  18, 21, 25, 29, 31–​33, 98 Aletheia (Truth)  154, 155, 157, 169, 171 Althusser, Louis  83 Amor fati 120, 124 Anaxagoras  60–​61, 188 Anaximander  57, 59, 60, 63, 71 Antigone  3, 57, 59, 62, 65–​66, 68, 74, 93–​94, 118–​120, 188, 189, 190, 194 Apollonian  5, 14, 29, 30, 35, 60, 63, 66, 69, 75, 76, 79, 81, 91, 94, 95, 96, 108, 162 Arendt, Hannah  131 Aristotle  18, 125, 140, 150, 151, 155 Badiou, Alain  73, 76, 81–​84, 132, 189 Bataille, Georges  39, 78, 83, 96, 159, 161, 162, 168, 180, 187, 189 Baumgarten, Alexander  141 Bäumler, Alfred  49, 96, 132, 135, 147 Beaufret, Jean  148, 158, 164 Beiser, Frederick  10, 11, 50, 62, 188 Benjamin, Walter  4, 10, 25, 28, 31, 49, 50, 131–​137, 148, 161, 162, 176, 185, 191, 194 bios 62, 118 Bowie, Andrew  10 Brentano, Franz  122, 191 Bruno, Giordano  52, 90, 188 Burkert, Walter  94, 189 Camus, Albert  3, 69, 90 Christianity  4, 16, 26, 31, 37, 41, 50, 57, 58, 85, 96, 97, 120, 133, 149, 177

classic/​classical/​classicist  13, 25, 39, 41, 44, 45, 78, 89, 91, 93–​95, 166–​167, 186 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  22, 26, 34 Critical Philosophy  14–​16, 26, 44, 50–​51, 53, 62, 145 Critical Project  9, 14–​15, 25–​26 Critical Theory  4, 50, 131–​137 Cultural revolution  45, 57, 78, 92, 98, 103, 123, 127, 179–​180 Death  2, 3, 10–​11, 18–​20, 25–​26, 28–​31, 37–​38, 40–​41, 46, 47, 49, 55, 57, 62–​63, 66– ​67, 70–​71, 74, 77, 79, 81, 84–​85, 92–​96, 98, 102–​103, 105, 109–​110, 112, 117–​119, 121, 123–​127, 141, 143–​146, 159, 163–​165, 167, 174–​180, 183, 191 De Man, Paul  10, 49, 162–​163, 193, 194 Democritus 90 Derrida, Jacques  10, 49, 55, 81, 83, 132, 135, 148, 161–​174, 193 de Saussure, Ferdinand  165 Descartes, René  3, 5, 62, 98, 155 Dionysian  14, 48, 62, 66, 69–​71, 76, 78–​79, 85, 90–​92, 94–​99, 101, 103, 109–​110, 120–​121, 123, 126–​127, 137, 158, 162, 179, 182 Edler, Frank  49, 135, 187, 191 Empedocles  3, 4, 11, 14, 19, 28, 35, 49, 57, 68, 90, 96, 117–​127, 133, 163, 172, 179, 188, 191, 194 ethos  19, 62, 71, 109, 118, 160 Euripides  94–​95, 97, 120 Existentialism  4, 148, 157, 188 Fate  1–​4, 10, 13–​14, 19, 25, 33, 40, 43, 48, 58, 61, 64–​68, 70–​71,

200

Index

74–​75, 85, 90–​96, 102, 106, 110–​113, 117–​118, 120–​123, 126, 132, 141, 151, 153, 164, 174, 177–​179, 183, 188 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  4, 10–​13, 15, 26–​28, 34, 39, 43, 45, 47, 49–​53, 55, 57, 67, 139, 144, 146, 163, 185 Foti, Veronique  10, 11, 188 Foucault, Michel  3, 10, 48–​49, 132, 161–​174, 176, 180, 187, 194 Frank, Manfred  10, 50, 185 French Revolution  12, 27, 45, 73, 93, 97, 142, 180 Freud, Sigmund  144, 168 George, Stefan  10, 173 German Idealism  9–​10, 27, 49, 74, 132 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  13–​14, 26, 39, 45, 49, 131, 185, 186 Habermas, Jürgen  131 Hegel, Georg  5, 10, 13, 16, 17, 26, 28, 43, 49–​50, 67, 73–​75, 91, 96, 132, 136, 139, 142–​143, 155, 157, 162, 168, 191 Heidegger, Martin  4, 10, 39, 49–​50, 52, 60, 74, 81–​84, 94, 96–​97, 102, 119, 131–​132, 135–​136, 139–​146, 147–​160, 161–​165, 167, 169–​172, 174, 177, 185, 187, 188, 191, 192, 194 Henrich, Dieter  10, 50 Heraclitus  3, 14, 19, 28, 54–​55, 57, 69, 74, 90, 97, 133, 160, 163, 178 Herder, Johann  185 Horkheimer, Max  131 Hubris  2, 46, 53, 58, 70, 71, 73, 94, 103, 117–​118, 135, 146, 160, 178, 183 Hume, David  12, 15, 16, 63, 85, 141, 185 Husserl, Edmund  140–​142, 145, 157 Intellectual intuition  11, 48, 50–​52, 59, 62–​63, 69, 176 Islam 58, 97 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich  4, 11–​12, 26, 48, 62, 185

Kant, Immanuel  3–​5, 9–​23, 25–​34, 36, 39–​45, 48–​58, 59–​60, 63, 67, 70, 73–​74, 79, 81–​82, 85, 98, 132–​135, 139–​142, 144–​147, 151, 155, 159, 163, 175–​176, 183, 185, 186, 192 Keats, John  175 Kierkegaard, Søren  90, 139, 142–​143, 145–​146, 192 Krell, David Farrell  4, 10, 11, 50, 60, 186, 188, 191, 192, 194 Kronos/Kronian  1–​2 , 103, 176 Lacan, Jacques  22, 144, 162 Leibniz, Gottfried  34, 41, 98, 141, 176 Levinas, Emmanuel  168, 171 Locke, John  15, 27, 83 Logos  3, 5, 13, 19, 32–​33, 54–​55, 57, 60–​63, 67, 74, 82, 98–​99, 133, 136, 148, 159–​160, 163, 169, 173, 176 Lyotard, Jean-​François  84, 161 Maimon, Salomon  12, 49, 51, 54–​55, 60, 62, 106 Marcuse, Herbert  49, 131 Marx, Karl  16, 49, 63, 83, 132, 136, 149, 155, 157 matheme 82, 84, 98 mechane  4, 14, 68, 182 Mendelssohn, Felix  12 Metontology  60, 62, 66, 73–​74, 77, 136, 146, 147, 171, 175 Mythos  13, 19, 32–​33, 92, 134, 144–​145, 158, 178 nefas  11, 46, 57, 65–​66, 70, 75, 102–​103, 118–​119, 154 Neo-​Humean  12, 28 Neo-​Kantian  9, 12, 139–​141, 145, 159 Niethammer, Friedrich  4, 10, 26, 32, 49 Nietzsche, Friedrich  3– ​4, 16, 32–​34, 39, 49–​50, 60, 62–​63, 69, 71, 75, 81–​84, 87, 89–​99, 101–​115, 117–​127, 137, 139–​140, 142–​147, 155–​156, 158–​159, 161–​162, 165, 167–​169, 172, 175–​177, 180–​181, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192

Index nomos  119, 126, 160, 162 Novalis  4, 14, 25, 28–​32, 33, 49–​50, 67, 112, 133, 163, 185, 186, 194 Oedipus  3, 59, 62, 64–​65, 68, 74, 92, 118, 125, 188, 189, 194 Paganism  14, 31, 46, 58, 62, 95, 106, 135, 177 Paine, Thomas  27 Parmenides  64, 90, 133, 155 Phenomenology  5, 17, 21, 60, 63, 69, 82, 83, 95, 125, 140–​142, 144, 147, 157–​158, 170, 187 Plato/Platonic/Platonism  4, 10, 14, 16, 19, 21, 28, 32–​33, 35, 37, 40–​43, 46, 50, 57, 60–​61, 63, 67, 69, 73–​74, 76, 78, 82, 84–​85, 90, 95–​99, 107, 115, 133, 146, 150–​151, 163, 176, 182–​183, 187, 190 poetological tables  68, 90 poiesis  5, 13, 39, 43, 57, 62, 67, 69–​70, 77, 80, 82, 90, 94, 102, 106, 108, 111, 125, 150, 175–​177, 181 post-​Kantian  4, 10–​12, 32, 73, 98, 135, 176 post-​structuralism  4, 81, 161–​174 praxis  57, 68, 69, 71, 75, 78, 91, 92, 96, 98, 101, 122, 133, 150, 181, 183, Pythagoras  61, 62, 69, 71, 117, 118, 188 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard  26 Republican  27, 39, 43, 45, 84, 85, 96, 119, 179 romantic/romanticism  4, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 22, 25–​46, 47–​52, 55, 57, 59, 62, 67, 70, 73, 74, 81, 92, 98, 107, 131–​133, 135, 142, 148, 151, 163, 164, 176, 182, 185, 191, 194 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques  21, 36–​37, 135, 188 Sartre, Jean-​Paul  3, 69, 74, 90, 148–​149, 154, 157, 188 Schelling, F. W. J.  3, 5, 10, 13, 16, 26, 28, 39, 43–​4 4, 49–​50, 67, 71, 73–​75, 79, 91, 98, 106, 139, 144, 162, 168, 176

201

Schiller, Friedrich  4, 10, 13, 14, 26, 49, 50–​52, 188 Schlegel, Friedrich  4, 14, 25–​46, 49–​50, 55, 57, 67, 70, 73, 85, 90, 107, 112, 127, 132–​133, 162–​163, 169, 176, 178, 185–​187, 194 Schopenhauer, Arthur  16, 43, 63, 81, 125, 143–​144, 162 Schulze, G. E.  12 Schürmann, Reiner  131 sensus communis  13, 17, 19, 23, 27, 31, 33, 39, 45, 52–​53, 67, 137, 183 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  26 Spinoza, Benedict  11, 17, 26, 34, 39, 45, 74, 91, 97, 98, 176, 177, 185, 186, 190 Temporality  2, 4, 5, 10, 28, 34, 56, 61–​64, 68, 74, 79, 105, 112, 122, 134, 137, 140–​143, 145–​146, 158, 171, 176, 179, 181, 187 Theoretical Philosophy  9, 12, 16,  108 topos  27, 45, 60, 66, 71, 120, 122–​124, 127, 137, 147, 167–​168, 173–​174, 176 tragic/tragedy  3–​5, 9–​14, 20–​21, 27–​28, 30–​31, 33, 34–​36, 38– ​40, 43–​4 4, 47–​51, 57–​58, 59–​71, 74–​75, 80– ​82, 85, 89–​99, 101–​115, 117–​127, 133–​134, 139, 142–​146, 163, 174, 175–​183, 186, 188, 190, 194 Transcendental Philosophy  9, 26, 48, 53, 140–​141, 186 Vasari, Giorgio  98, 173, 174 Vienna Circle  156 Wagner, Richard  27, 89, 96 Wilkur 21 Wille 21 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  81, 144, 165, 167, 185, 193, 194 Wordsworth, William  22, 26, 33, 34, 163