Abstract
The dense network of positions summarized under the label German Idealism unites not only some of the most significant philosophers of this period, namely Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. A number of poets are also part of this constellation, foremost among them Schiller, Goethe, and Hölderlin. Into the same context belongs the Romantic movement with its main philosophers Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Together with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and the somewhat younger Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling (1775–1854), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) pursued first a two-year study of philosophy, followed by a three-year study of theology, which ended in the fall of 1793 (for Schelling in the fall of 1795). Both during this time together in Tübingen and afterwards, the young men worked through Immanuel Kant’s new critical philosophy. The Hegel biographer Karl Rosenkranz reports that, in Tübingen, they read “Plato..., Kant, Jacobi’s Woldemar and Allwill, the letters concerning Spinoza, and Hippel’s life, in ascending order.”1 These shared studies, in which Hölderlin participated from the beginning, formed a basis for philosophical discussion.
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Notes
Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 40.
See Violetta L. Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 1794–1800 (Paderborn: Schöning, 2000), 17–48.
Friedrich Hölderlin to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jena, January 26, 1795, Essays and Letters, ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), 48 (MA 2:568). References to Hölderlin’s work cite the English translation, where available, followed by the corresponding German reference to Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Michael Knaupp, 3 vols. (München: Hanser, 1992), abbreviated MA, followed by volume and page number.
See Baruch de Spinoza, Ethik in geometrischer Ordnung dargestellt. Lateinisch-Deutsch, ed. Wolfgang Bartuschat (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999), pt. 1, propositions 14–15 (pp. 30–31).
This criticism may have been one of the reasons why Fichte moved away from the idea of the absolute I and from his quantitative method in the Grundlage of 1794/95 and turned to the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, which he composed from 1796 to 1799. The quantitative method assumes the totality of the reality of the I in the idea, in order to show subsequently how the quanta of reality under the conditions of finite consciousness between the I and the not-I — that is, between the spontaneous efforts of the subject active in mental accomplishment and its objects -are distributed. Dieter Henrich has devoted a major study to Hölderlin’s criticism of Fichte and Hölderlin’s draft of a response in Seyn, Urtheil, Modalität (Henrich employs the title of the earlier edition, Urtheil und Seyn), which also includes the philosophical constellation of time. See Dieter Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein. Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992).
On the equiprimordiality of theory and praxis in Hölderlin and the accompanying “primordial separation [Urtheilung]” of the theoretical and the practical in Seyn, Urtheil, Modalität, see also Michael Franz, “Das System und seine Entropie. ‘Welt’ als philosophisches und theologisches Problem in den Schriften Friedrich Hölderlins” (Ph.D. diss., Universität des Saarlandes, 1982), 41ff.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion; or, The Hermit in Greece, trans. Ross Benjamin (Brooklyn: Archipelago, 2008), 107 (MA 1:683).
See Friedrich Hölderlin, Hölderlin Texturen 4. “Wo sind jezt Dichter?” Homburg, Stuttgart 1798–1800, ed. Ulrich Gaier, Valérie Lawitschka, Stefan Metzger, Wolfgang Rapp, and Violetta Waibel (Tübingen: Hölderlin-Gesellschaft, 2002), 133–262.
Friedrich Hölderlin to Christian Ludwig Neuffer, Homburg, June 4, 1799, Essays and Letters, 131–32 (MA 2:764–65). As far as I can tell there are no attempts, besides a couple minor beginnings, to reconstruct Hölderlin’s reception of Shakespeare extensively from the few documents. Cyrus Hamlin sets forth the interesting thesis that Hölderlin’s obvious monologism in his Empedokles fragment is due to examples such as that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. See Cyrus Hamlin, “Hölderlin’s Hellenism: Tyranny or Transformation,” Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 35 (2006–7): 278–80.
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader: The “Ethics” and Other Works, trans. and ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pt. 2, prop. 43 (p. 142).
For a more rigorous introduction to Spinoza’s theory of affects in the Ethics, see Wolfgang Bartuschat, Spinozas Theorie des Menschen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1992), 291–310;
Reiner Wiehl, Die Vernunft in der menschlichen Unvernunft. Das Problem der Rationalität in Spinozas Affektenlehre (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1983);
and Thomas Kisser, “Affektenlehre als Ethik. Spinozas Begriff des conatus und die Konzeption menschlichen Handelns,” in Spinozas Lehre im Kontext, ed. Achim Engstler and Robert Schnepf (Hildesheim: Olms, 2002), 215–44.
See also Violetta L. Waibel, “Philosophieren als Weg. Anmerkungen zu Spinoza und Fichte mit einem Exkurs zu Hölderlin,” in Affektenlehre und amor Dei intellectualis. Die Rezeption Spinozas im Deutschen Idealismus, in der Romantik und in der Gegenwart, ed. Violetta L. Waibel (Hamburg: Meiner, 2012), 200–230.
See Violetta L. Waibel, “Voraussetzungen und Quellen: Kant, Fichte, Schelling,” in Hölderlin. Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Johann Kreuzer (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 90–106.
Friedrich Hölderlin, “Half of Life,” in Odes and Elegies, trans. and ed. Nick Hoff (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 181.
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Waibel, V.L. (2014). From the Metaphysics of the Beautiful to the Metaphysics of the True: Hölderlin’s Philosophy in the Horizon of Poetry. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_21
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