IEP 508: Nature in Romantic and European Thought

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 4. Friedrich Holderlin

I. Introduction to Friedrich Holderlin

The next figure we will look at is Friedrich Holderlin. Holderlin was one of the German Romantics who started off very concerned at human separation from nature and sought to overcome it through art. However, as his thought developed he became increasingly critical of the attempt to overcome our separation from nature. By looking at his thought we can see some interesting problems with any such attempts.

Brief biography:

As well as writing poetry, Holderlin wrote a number of theoretical essays (mostly from 1794 to 1800), which largely survive only in fragmentary form. In addition Hölderlin wrote dramas and a novel Hyperion (published 1797-1799), while some of his poems are better described as ‘hymns’ – that is, they are songs which celebrate or praise the gods. During his earlier years (esp. up until 1800), Hölderlin was a very close interlocutor of Schelling and Hegel. Yet in 1802, Hölderlin began to show signs of mental disturbance and in 1807 he was admitted to psychiatric hospital. Discharged as incurable, he continued, tragically, to suffer mental distress for the rest of his life and had to be looked after.

II. Holderlin's philosophical fragments.

These are a range of letters, jottings, and short pieces which set out Holderlin's general idea of nature, which goes on to inform his later reflections on our separation from nature and how/whether we can regain unity with it. These fragments are very abstract and you can skip this subsection if you like!

Holderlin wrote many of these fragments in response to another German philosopher writing at the time, J. G. Fichte.

Fichte in turn was responding to Kant. Kant had argued that all knowledge is shaped, actively, by the knowing subject. Fichte wanted a more systematic study of how the subject shapes the forms of its own knowledge. He thought that all knowledge necessarily involves self-consciousness (consciousness of myself as a subject), because as knowing is active I must at some level always know that I am engaged in it. So the basic fact is that each of us is always self-conscious, and all the various ways we know things must be derived from this constant. However, Fichte argued, when we are aware of the external world (nature) this is a limit on our self-consciousness, each of us is aware of something that is not us. We therefore engage in an infinite striving, as he saw it, to transform nature and make it into something through which we can be aware of ourselves again. He spoke, rather dismayingly, about the human need to cultivate marshes and wild areas and make into places that reflect human consciousness.

Holderlin's early fragments engage with these claims of Fichte's. Please have a look now at his fragment called 'Being Judgement Possibility' from 1795 (in the reader). Don't worry if you find it utterly puzzling at this point - one of our aims is to just to get more familiar with Holderlin's way of writing and thinking.

Holderlin is making several points here (against Fichte):

(i) All consciousness involves a 'limitation' - whenever I am conscious of any object then I am at some level aware that this object is not me. But if as Fichte thinks self-consciousness is not initially limited, then it cannot be a form of consciousness at all - it cannot be a subject.

(ii) This basic, unlimited, reality cannot be said to be self-conscious as this already involves a sense of difference between two 'selves' (the one that's comparing and the one being compared). Self-consciousness already involves reflection, judgement, something less than absolute unlimitedness.(iii) The basic reality must therefore be something not conscious, unified in a very deep way. It is something which precedes consciousness, precedes the relation of subject and object. It is an original unity of subject and object, 'the blessed unity of being'.

(iv) This unitary being cannot be known. We cannot be conscious of it because whenever we are conscious, we're conscious of objects, things that aren't the same as us. But this sense of difference is lacking from unitary being.

(v) This original being, the basis of everything, is nature.

Why does Holderlin identify this original being with nature? He is relying on the ancient Greek understanding of nature (physis) - Holderlin was very immersed in the Greeks - as that which 'loves to hide'. Because being is unknowable, always disappearing, breaking up into separate subjects and objects, it can be said to 'love to hide' and so identified with nature.

Or as J. Bernstein explains this: 'nature as the ground [that is, the basis, origin] of the human cannot appear because it would have to be judged, but if judged, then it is already in a state of dispersion' (Bernstein, 'Introduction' to Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, p. xxvi).

Overall conclusion of this early fragment: Nature is the origin, the basis of all of us as humans; but this is not nature in the usual sense, that is, as an object (or set of objects) which humans encounter. It is something deeper, a unity of human subjects and objects. Because it is mysterious, unknowable, this deeper nature is divine, it is something deserving of awe and reverence.

III. Holderlin's views of nature in his novel Hyperion.

For Holderlin, then, we cannot know nature, yet we have some awareness of it as our basis and origin; we feel separated from it, and are always nostalgic for the nature we have lost. Because we are cultural, historical beings, we are always cut off from nature (where everything about being cultural is fundamentally a matter of being engaged in making judgements upon objects). [This is a variant on the general German Romantic idea that we get cut off from nature by becoming too reflective, too immersed in thought. Holderlin's ideas here also recall Steven Vogel's discussion of the way in which humanity seems separate from nature, artificial.]

However, for Holderlin, we endlessly strive to be reunited with nature. 'To be united with nature, with a unique infinite totality, is the goal of all our aspirations' he says in the preface to Hyperion.

Holderlin thought that the role of art was to depict humanity as engaged in this striving. This is the closest we can get to knowing nature - observing our own efforts to rejoin with it.

Please now read the section from Hyperion that is your main piece of reading for this week. It comes from the very start of the novel and is written, as you can see, in a series of letters which Holderlin is writing to his friend Bellarmin. You could think about the following questions:

Think

(i) How does Holderlin depict the effort to reunite with nature here? How does he characterise our separation from it?

(ii) What do you think of Holderlin's very strange language and style? What does it evoke - how do you think it's connected with his attempt to portray nature itself as best as he can?

(iii) What connections, if any, can you see between this section of the novel and the early fragment that you looked at above?

(iv) How do you think Holderlin's thoughts on human separation from nature might bear on the problem that Steven Vogel raised (see block one) - i.e. that if humanity is part of nature, then it seems that nothing humans do can properly be counted as 'unnatural' or 'artificial'? Does Holderlin have an answer to this question, or does the question pose a problem for his thought, in your view?

IV. Holderlin's views on tragedy

Holderlin went on to develop his thoughts on our separation from nature by thinking more closely about ancient Greek tragedy.

The last piece of reading by him that we are looking at this week is his very short fragment 'The significance of tragedy' (from 1802). Please have a quick read of it now.

What on earth does it mean? It's very condensed, but here's part of what's going on here: the tragic hero strives for unity with nature, but is engulfed by nature, destroyed, reduced to nothing (to a zero = 0) - this destruction of the hero depicts a moment of reconciliation with nature, where the 'sign' is absorbed back into original unity with nature (and therefore nature at this point appears 'straight out' - it appears fully - rather than only 'in its weakness', i.e. as divided up into the hero and the world opposing him).

Holderlin spent a lot of time obsessively writing and rewriting a tragedy in the ancient Greek style, about a man called Empedocles, who sought unity with nature and eventually committed suicide to achieve it. He sought to escape from individuality, from separation from nature. There is a great article about this by Francoise Dastur in Philosophy and Tragedy - see below for full details. She says that if Empedocles 'does not die, then the divine dimension will be lost, the totality will become particularity, the intensity of life will crystallise in a particular being and thus there will be ... no sphere simultaneously human and divine, but a total flatness of a "human, too human" life' (p. 84).

Holderlin redrafted his tragedy The Death of Empedocles several times - he got dissatisfied with how he'd depicted Empedocles' death. He came to think that there were two solutions to separation from nature - (1) the Greek, which is to dissolve yourself and leave the world, (2) the 'Hesperian', which is to lead a living death, to endure separation from nature. This is the modern way. It involves putting up with the tension of being cut off from nature, the inevitable feeling of limitation.

Now, crucially, Holderlin came to see this as better because he came to think that the desire to reunite with nature is hybristic - that is, it's arrogant (from the Greek word hybris). This is a really important criticism of the desire for unity with nature, which bears back on his own earlier work and on the whole German Romantic project. The basic point for Holderlin now is that the attempt to overcome separation from nature is itself arrogant, human-centred. Why does he think this? We can break down his train of thought into the following stages (he himself didn't, but it's helpful for us to try to get some analytical clarity at this point):

(a) If, initially, humanity is truly one with nature, then their separation cannot come from any activity on the part of humanity just as such. The separation must arise from nature, with which humanity is at this point united. Nature must divide itself – into humanity on the one hand, and an objectified version of itself on the other. As human beings, to construe ourselves as responsible for this division is (paradoxically) to go on thinking of ourselves as beings who are separate from nature as a whole - this assumption being shown in that we are presuming ourselves to be capable of acting independently of this whole.

(b) It follows, Hölderlin thinks, that it is not an appropriate response to try to overcome the separation– to try to do something about it, to actively strive for the restoration of the earlier unity. To suppose that we can do anything against this separation is anthropocentric, in that it continues to see humans as capable of independent action, and action that goes against what nature itself has done (i.e. divided itself). We've been separated from nature by its power alone, and hence it isn't within our power to overcome the separation.

(c) The appropriately modest response is to endure separation, to wait for nature itself to bring about a change in its mode of being. Our best response, as individuals in the modern age, is just to experience and undergo the suffering of being separated from nature.

(d) So, the whole Romantic attempt to use art to restore unity with nature (even in the minimal way the early Holderlin thought - by depicting striving for unity) is misguided. It's anthropocentric, assuming we can do something to gain unity (via art). Nonetheless, Holderlin does still think there is an important role for art - but a different one. Art can give recognition to the suffering of our modern fate. The function of art is to bear witness to this suffering. Art can only do this if it recognises the necessity of the suffering, as deriving from nature itself.The appropriate kind of art for this role, Holderlin thought, was lyric poetry - which is what he wrote from now on - not tragedy or drama.

[If you've enjoyed the Holderlin material, you might like to read some of his poems at this point which are available in a translation from German by Michael Hamburger - his introduction to the volume is also very good. Especially worth reading are the poems 'The Ister', 'The Rhine', 'Germania', 'Remembrance', 'Patmos' and 'As On a Holiday'.]

V. Interesting ways in which Holderlin's philosophy relates to ecology/environmental thought

(a) The relation between humanity and nature. If humans are cultural beings, who lead a rather artificial, intellectualised, life, then are they non-natural?

Holderlin's answer seems to be - they are both natural and non-natural, because humanity is the place where nature divides itself up, where nature turns against itself. The condition of being non-natural - opposed to the rest of nature - is itself something inflicted on us by nature. This is a very intriguing view of humanity. Holderlin takes it partly from one of the choruses in Sophocles' tragedy Antigone where man is said to be the 'uncanny' being, the 'violent' being.

(2) The idea that we cannot overcome separation from nature, but must accept disenchantment.

Rather than it being the attempt to re-enchant nature which is aligned with environmental concerns, Holderlin thinks that it is the acceptance of disenchantment, of separation, of meaninglessness, which reflects a more properly 'environmental' stance, in the sense that this acceptance is the properly non-anthropocentric attitude.

Question: one of last year's students said (rightly, I think!) that Holderlin's thought is like deep ecology, but in reverse. How do you think this might be so?

- Here you could think about - what sort of attitudes is Holderlin advocating? How do these contrast to the attitudes which deep ecology thinks that we should adopt?

Another question: what, do you think, are the practical implications of taking a resigned attitude as Holderlin advises? Does this amount to a rather worrying acceptance of the destruction and damaging of the environment that's going on all around us - i.e. is Holderlin recommending 'quietism'? Or is it the case that, even if what he advises is quietism on one level, on another level it is a shift in attitude which might ultimately be best for the environment?

In thinking about these questions, do bear in mind that the ideas considered this week are difficult, especially those of Hölderlin; you do not need to be worried if it takes you a while to feel that you are getting to grips with them.

For further reading on Holderlin, including the full details of the texts by Bernstein and Dastur and the other Holderlin pieces referred to above, please see the general course bibliography.

Web notes by Alison Stone updated March 2005