Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich (1770–1843)

2. Fundamental themes

If poetry is ‘made of words not ideas’, there is an obvious danger in abstracting selected themes from their complex aesthetic context. But Hölderlin ’s work articulates rather than illustrates a developing and penetrating body of coherent concerns and a distinctive mode of spiritual perception. In the first instance, it aesthetically prefigures a comprehensive reconciliation of the great polarities and disabling dualisms bequeathed by Kantian thought, principally the bifurcation between subject and object, spirit and nature. Yet the anti-identitarian, literally ‘anti-monarchical’, moment of Hölderlin’s thought also resists the institution of a single controlling principle, that would suppress diversity and differentiation, in favour of an ontology of reciprocal interaction (1946–85 vol. 6: 300–1). The rehabilitation of finitude and fragility, of an acknowledged interdependence of subject and object, art and nature, is typically connected with an ethics of gratitude that is more than an ideology of subservience or deference. Many poems express the thought of an intrinsic dependency of the ‘divine’ dimension upon the sphere of mortal experience if it is to find fulfilment through an appropriate human ‘correspondence’ which constitutes neither an identity nor an antithesis. Despite the repudiation of a traditional metaphysical concept of an infinite creator-God independent of the created world, there remains a permanent ‘theological’ residue, a sublimated Christian element, in Hölderlin’s recognition of our inherent ‘creatureliness’ within the economy of nature, our privileged vocation as the finite site for the self-manifestation and self-enjoyment of life through the indispensable, cultivating addition of human ‘art’ (1946–85 vol. 6: 326–30). Perhaps Hölderlin’s most lasting significance lies in this powerful utopian vision of reconciled dwelling, rooted in a conception of art as liberating praxis that has only become central in our own time. This work is less a unique subjective and personal expression – though it is also that – than a compelling articulation of universal human aspirations for a transformed relationship to inner and outer nature. Aesthetic formalist tendencies can arguably do little justice to work which ‘aesthetically’ questions the supposed ‘autonomy of the aesthetic’ as a subjective and sequestered sphere of private experience, and implicitly challenges some of our most cherished modern philosophical assumptions.