I have gone on a bit about Hölderlin’s life as a background for explicating the philosophical significance of his poetry not because the biographical detail helps to understand the meaning of the poems (although that is no doubt true) but because the philosophical principles instantiated by the poems have to do with the concept of a “course” of a life. It is not possible here to give a detailed interpretation of any one of the hymns (a term Hölderlin did not use to characterize these poems, but one that has become commonplace in the secondary literature on them), let alone several. I wish, however, to forward a schema according to which some of the complexity of one poem may be hinted at in terms of one central concept. The poem in question is “Remembrance” (“Andenken”) and the concept in question is that of the title (StA II: 188–9). “Remembrance” or “recollection” is a concept that charts the dialectical structure drawn from “Urteil und Sein” in temporal terms. “Andenken” is one of Hölderlin’s river hymns; others are “Der Ister,” “Der Nekar,” and “Der Rhein.” These poems conceive of their rivers as manifestations of the general process of human life under conditions of high self-awareness. Courses of rivers develop through geological time incrementally, influenced by various other physical processes that are themselves in a process of interactive change. The course that a river takes over time as a physical matter is unscripted. The rivers in question in the hymns are great European rivers that have, from antiquity onwards, provided transportation and sustenance for the development of human culture. Hölderlin presses the idea that, when thinking of the river as a whole as a source for life and a force for directing life along its course, one must if one thinks deeply enough consider the beginning of the river in its source and the end of the river in its outflowing into a greater body of water as mutually reinforcing. The same is true for the river as a source for life at the stations along its path; its farms, fortresses, towns, and cities provide homes out of which the inhabitants travel out into the greater world and, in some cases, back again. “Andenken” involves the confluence of two rivers. The Garonne has its source to the south in the Pyrenees, flows by Toulouse and on to Bordeaux, after which it joins with the Dordogne to form the Gironne estuary, which in turn empties out into the sea. The Dordogne has its source to the east in the Auvergne. Bordeaux has been France’s great port on the Atlantic for over three centuries and had that status at the time of Hölderlin’s short stay there. Hölderlin composed the poem after his return to German-speaking lands. So, the poem is a form of remembrance and takes as its subject matter particular actions of mariners going out from Bordeaux to “India” and other, to Hölderlin, “exotic” ports and returning to their homes, if they do. They also “remember” their homes in Bordeaux as their sources and the river as both the source of that home and their path away from it. In Hölderlin’s case, he is remembering all of this from his return to home, that is, what was to become Germany, and his distant port of call was in fact Bordeaux, which it may be recalled was the end of an arduous and impecunious trek on foot. And all of this is to be understood as anchored in the master trope of the river as a reciprocal combination of source and mouth.
The image of a river as a combine of mutually influencing beginnings and endings is a product of the poetic rendering of a river as a narrative of a life or lives, and that forms the background for understanding the nature of remembrance. An Andenken is both a memory and an object that evokes memory, a souvenir. Hölderlin’s main project in this poem, and others as well, is to put into poetic practice an action of memory—to instantiate the action rather than declare or describe it—that has a retrospective synthetic power of making the past present as the past it was. To “remember” in this sense (Hölderlin also uses the words “Gedächtnis” and “Erinnerung” at times to refer to the action) is to register within a narrative synthesis the path from (1) a “home” source out to (2) a “foreign” element from which one gains differentiation from the source and can understand it better by contrast as the source that it is, and (3) a return to the source, where the source is changed for one, while still retaining its status as source, by having gone away from it. It is crucial that memory is operative in each stage. In (1) one remembers in a rather immediate way, due to the fact that no contrast with home is yet achieved. In (2) the strangeness of what is foreign is contrasted with the memory of home, but that very strangeness recedes a bit to allow the contrast to refine the memory of home, not merely honing a coarse material that is stable through the process, but by moving memory itself along a narrative continuum that now includes home-understood-by-what-is-not-home. But what-is-not-home is also changed in the process. The homecoming is thus not a return to a place that is preserved from change relative to the understanding of she who comes home; it is a changed place but, in its change, still home enough, perhaps even more understood as home, for the homecoming. For the sailors leaving the Bordeaux harbor, the sea is the foreign element. Hölderlin’s extreme care to include detailed images of and references to the environs of Bordeaux operate in two complementary ways then. On the one hand, he invokes the home of the sailors, their intimate knowledge of it, and its richness as the source of life that they both start out with and, changed, come back to. On the other hand, as his, Hölderlin’s, foreign element the detail functions to root the foreign element in concrete life. What is foreign is not just a neutral prop for remembrance for Hölderlin; the force within remembrance of what is not-home lies in the real experience of it by the agent who is remembering. So, the lyric detail charts, among other things, the overlap between the remembrance of the sailors and Hölderlin’s own, where what is home for one is not-home for the other. Of course, matters are not even that simple, since Hölderlin’s act of remembering and the poem’s status as a souvenir include both structures in overlap. The ambiance of these poems is like that of a cavernous reverberation chamber of memory. The temporal quality of such memory is that what is remembered is remembered as leading up to one—the quality of the past is tempered by its role in the whole of the narrative (i.e. by its being-remembered in this way). Thus memory is not just plucked out of the past and the past presented to one as the past perfect; it is rather that the past is structured as past by its recall. In fact, both the Garonne and the Dordogne are subject to tidal bores in which waves travel cyclically upriver against the current. Had Hölderlin known this, it would have no doubt suggested to him a ready physical echo of the sort of memory he holds is the main structure of self-understanding.
Dilthey’s Das Erleben und die Dichtung (1905) inaugurated systematic philosophical interest in Hölderlin. Over the past century, there have been three main camps of Hölderlin reception: “phenomenological” (Heidegger), “classical” (Dieter Henrich), and “social-psychological” (Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin). Heidegger’s interpretations of Hölderlin have installed themselves as formidable objects of both great admiration and heated dispute. The basic precepts of his own thought as it developed in the 1930s and 1940s dictate Heidegger’s interpretative approach. In the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935), Heidegger presents a complex, idiosyncratic account of the role of art in truth,26 and he understands Hölderlin’s poetry to anticipate important parts of that account. Hölderlin’s verse displays truth in its nascent form, that is, at the point at which world and language first diverge. Heidegger holds that an appreciation of this primordial form of truth is especially evident in the language of pre-classical Greek poetry, the descriptive character of which is suffused with a pre-descriptive reverence for the inherent nature of things. This accounts for both Heidegger’s concentration on Hölderlin’s great hymns and his contention, with Nietzsche and Norbert von Hellingrath,27 that the most important aspect of Hölderlin’s thought is his conception of the relation of German to Greek poetry.28 The structuring hymn for Heidegger—the one he deploys as a lens through which to view the others—is “Der Ister”;29 even in his treatments of other major poems, the idea Heidegger finds in “Der Ister,” that is, that “b
eing” is a process of continual renewal issuing from an ever receding source, is pervasive.30 For Heidegger the importance of Hölderlin relative to German idealism consists in offering an alternative to its overly subjective and modern character. He was not moved to reconsider this view even after the appearance of “Urteil und Sein” in 1962. By contrast Henrich’s “classical” interpretation takes “Andenken” as the main poem in terms of which the rest of the work unfolds.31 Here “Urteil und Sein” provides the crucial background, allowing the reader to track systematic philosophical principles at work in the poetry. Henrich holds that Hölderlin presents universal truths in a particularly “active” form, that is, as embedded in the particularity of life, and reflected upon in memory as so embedded, in ways that can reform and deepen the subjectivity of the reader. In effect “remembrance” forms the basis for a systematic reworking within the idealist tradition of a conception of dialectic that is allegedly superior to Hegel’s. Henrich does not deny the pertinence of Greek thought to Hölderlin, but emphasis is placed firmly on the specifically German context of his writings.32 The “social-psychological” branch of Hölderlin interpretation has its main representative in Adorno. For Adorno, Hölderlin’s significance lies in the hymns seen in light of the late poetic fragments. Hölderlin is for Adorno a high modern thinker avant la lettre, whose most important contribution is his “paratactic” mode of discourse.33 Hölderlin’s poetry is a particularly resonant instance of how alienation due to crushing social, economic, and political conformity heightens subjectivity to the breaking point of near incommunicability. Hölderlin’s lyrics express “reconciliation” (Versöhnung) to being marginalized in a world that is developing by attempting to eliminate individuality; however, the reconciliation in question is not at all triumphantly Hegelian; it is, rather, steeped in suffering, that is, reconciliation to being a sufferer equipped with only a bare, open-ended hope that one is able to keep alive something relatively untouched by instrumental reason.34
Hölderlin is a screen upon which philosophers have cast images from their own magic lanterns. Each of the outlined approaches to Hölderlin’s work has pros and cons. It is difficult not to view the background commitment to Heideggerian ontology as substantively burdensome and procedurally ex ante. That said it is also hard not to admire the painstaking attention to the poetic language and sheer philosophical ambition of the reading. The classical treatment is the antipode of Heidegger’s; countering the anti-subjective cast of that approach with the figure of Hölderlin as the poet of idealist subjectivity. Here scrupulous attention is paid to historical materials in reconstructing the literary and philosophical context for the work, and that is an advantage. The classical approach also excels at the details of the verse. But, again, dependency on background undermines somewhat the rather large philosophical claims made on behalf of Hölderlin. The problem here is not taking on board too much exogenous matter, as is the case with the phenomenological interpretation. It is, rather, that too little background—really a very slim portfolio of philosophical writing—is made to support too much. Finally, the social-psychological reading, according to which Hölderlin forwards a more advanced account of subjectivity than that on offer in German idealism, achieves what theoretical heft it enjoys at some remove from discussion of the actual poetry.35
13.5 SUMMATION
German romanticism is a vibrant but often overlooked set of philosophical alternatives or additives to idealism. The barriers to entry into its conceptual domain are severe, however. One must be conversant with the systematic idealism of its day, as well as with German counter-Enlightenment thought, literary history and practice, and the developing disciplines of anthropology, historical linguistics, and hermeneutics. Moreover, once one steps over its threshold it is difficult not to try to understand it in terms of what is more familiar, in particular in terms of idealism. This can have the distorting effect of viewing Novalis’ thought as superior to that of Schlegel, as I argued before. But it also has ramifications for comparisons between the Jena writers and Hölderlin. One sometimes sees Hölderlin proffered as a more “radical” thinker on the basis that his view of the absolute is more ontologically basic. This opinion is based in the observation that Novalis and Schlegel’s conception of absolute pertains to the ground for subjectivity (i.e. within subjects) while Hölderlin’s conception involves the broader idea of the ground for all things, full stop. The idea seems to be that the extent to which Novalis’s and Schlegel’s absolute could claim the broader scope would have to do with a “constitution” claim that makes the world depend on subjects, something Hölderlin plainly rejects. In a way, it might be argued, the Jena writers retain a (radicalized) Kantian/Fichtean bearing, while Hölderlin divests himself of such a bearing altogether. Viewing matters in this way is understandable, but it is also debatable. The fact of the matter is that all of the romantics, Hölderlin included, view the absolute in terms of its subjective effects, which effects are constitutive of subjectivity and objectivity. None of them hold the absolute itself to be subjective (or, for that matter, objective). It is especially Schlegel’s ironizing that can seem overly subjective, since the workings of irony have as their result imaginative projections meant to drive home the identification with/distance from the absolute dichotomy for the benefit of subjects (and communities of them). There is not much consideration of non-human nature in Schlegel to be sure (more is in Novalis, especially in his Heinrich von Ofterdingen), but that hardly entails disregard of it in principle. So, functionally speaking, there is a difference of emphasis but not in kind to my mind between the “subjective” and the more “ontological” romantics. What is more telling of their differences are the existential dimensions of the protocols they urge as constitutive of subjectivity “lived to the full”: inversion, irony, and recollection.
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