Hölderlin’s Heraclitean Canon

Abstract

This essay argues that Hölderlin develops a new understanding of canonicity by way of related concepts such as law, measure, and harmony. The final version of his novel Hyperion “bends” the straight rule of the canon—the metaphor underlying the notion of a literary canon—against itself, transforming it into a Heraclitean bow: a dynamic play of conflicting tones or voices. Diotima, the novel’s female protagonist, has an especially important role in this transformation: not simply through her diffuse physical beauty, which flows out into her surroundings rather than being concentrated into a plastic form, but through her voice and above all her words, which correct Hyperion’s own Platonizing interpretation of the Heraclitean doctrine—an interpretation that tries to conceive of the discordant unity as visual rather than radically acoustic and musical. This counter-Platonic reading of Heraclitus contributes to the political radicalness of Hölderlin’s novel, which regards the agonistic polis, ultimately extended to include the relationship between human beings and nature, as itself representing the highest unity.

Keywords:

• Hölderlin
• Diotima
• canon
• Heraclitus
• music
• sound

Notes

1 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 20.

2 A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, rev. and ed. Frederick William Danker, 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2021), 450; Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie-Ausgabe), vol. 3 (Berlin: Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900-), 517.

3 The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, ed. J. Diggle, B.L. Fraser, P. James, O.B. Simkin, A.A. Thompson, and S.J. Westripp, vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 743.

4 The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, vol. 2, 743.

5 This usage appears, for example, in the Katatomē Kanonos, a short treatise from around 300 BCE, typically known under the Latin title Sectio Canonis, which is conventionally attributed to Euclid.

6 Early Greek Philosophy, ed. and trans. André Laks and Glenn W. Most, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), vol. 3, 296.

7 Early Greek Philosophy, vol 3, 161.

8 It is quite possible that Hölderlin had read Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, which describes the origins of counterpoint from a chorus of noisy, croaking barbarian voices. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings of Rousseau, translated and edited by John T. Scott, vol. 7 (Hanover, NH: The University Press of New England, 1998), 330.

9 Friedrich Hölderlin, Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Friedrich Beissner, vol. 2.1 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1957), 143, 167. (hereafter GSA).

10 GSA, vol. 3, 9, 19, 21.

11 Friedrich Gundolf, Hölderlins Archipelagus, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: Weiss’sche Universitäts-Buchhandlung: 1916), 11 (my translation).

12 GSA, vol. 3, 12.

13 GSA, vol. 3, 13.

14 GSA, vol. 3, 12. The source of this, as Beissner notes, is an epigram directed to the “geliebten Knaben Astēr,” which is then Latinized into the feminine noun Stella. (see GSA, vol. 2, 441)

15 GSA, vol. 3, 13.

16 See Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst (Dresden and Leipzig: Verlag der Waltherischen Handlung, 1756).

17 GSA, vol. 3, 17.

18 GSA, vol. 3, 25.

19 GSA, vol. 3, 53.

20 GSA, vol. 3, 222.

21 GSA, vol. 3, 54; “Diotima’s Auge öffnete sich weit, und leise, wie eine Knospe sich aufschließt”

22 GSA, vol. 3, 55.

23 GSA, vol. 3, 54.

24 Hölderlin describes this, curiously, in a letter to his own mother. See GSA, vol. 6.1, 147; also, Ulrich Herrmann, “Hölderlin als Hauslehrer. Erziehungserfahrung und pädagogische Reflexion bei Friedrich Hölderlin,” Zeitschrift für Pedagogik 42.1 (1996): 85–98.

25 GSA, vol. 3, 54.

26 GSA, vol. 3, 81. I have Romanized the Greek, but following Hölderlin’s unorthodox orthography: he omits the breathing mark at the beginning.

27 Such, for example, is the position of Friedrich Aspetsberger, Welteinheit und epische Gestaltung: Studien zur Ich-form von Hölderlins Roman ‘Hyperion’ (Munich: W. Fink Verlag, 1971). A contrasting view is offered by Emery E. George, “‘[…], das konnte nur ein Grieche finden, […].’: Wer spricht in der Athenerrede?” Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 33 (2002-3): 169–92.

28 GSA, vol. 3, 81.

29 Early Greek Philosophy, vol. 3, 161.

30 Ibid., 167.

31 Ibid., 167.

32 GSA, vol. 3, 81.

33 GSA, vol. 3, 32.

34 Plato, Symposium, 201 d; References to Plato, given in the Stephanus pagination, are to Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. II (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1901). Translations are my own.

35 Plato, Symposium, 210 a-b.

36 GSA, vol. 3, 169.

37 GSA, vol. 3, 53.

38 GSA, vol. 3, 53.

39 GSA, vol. 3, 55.

40 GSA, vol. 3, 79.

41 GSA, vol. 3, 85.

42 GSA, vol. 3, 86.

43 GSA, vol. 3, 86.

44 GSA, vol. 3, 87.

45 GSA, vol. 3, 88.

46 GSA, vol. 3, 94.

47 GSA, vol. 3, 95.

48 GSA, vol. 3, 96.

49 GSA, vol. 3, 101.

50 GSA, vol. 3, 148.

51 For an extensive reading of the Heraclitean dimension of Diotima’s dying words, see Anthony Curtis Adler, Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: ‘Hyperion’ and the Choreographic Project of Modernity (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2021), 221–77.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony Curtis Adler

Anthony Curtis Adler is professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, where he has taught since 2006. He is the author of Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life (Fordham University Press, 2016) and Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: Hyperion and the Choreographic Project of Modernity (Camden House, 2021).