The basis for the unity of experience in the thought of Friedrich Hölderlin

ABSTRACT

Friedrich Hölderlin argued that consciousness requires division and unity. Consciousness emerges through the fundamental distancing of the subject from its surroundings, without which the subject-object distinction would collapse and both objectivity and consciousness would be lost. Nevertheless, insofar as conscious knowledge is unitary, division demands a ground for unity. Hölderlin calls this ground ‘Being [Seyn].’ However, once Being is affirmed, the question of how it is accessed arises. Hölderlin’s scholars disagreed on this issue. This disagreement gave rise to two camps: those who deny that Hölderlin accepts the idea of direct access to Being and believe that he proves Being through an act of reflection (Henrich); and those who argue that for Hölderlin, ‘Being’ is directly accessed. Those who hold the latter position can be further divided into those who conceive of this direct access as knowledge (Frank) and those who argue that this access does not have a cognoscitive character, but rather an aesthetic one (Waibel). This article considers these positions and shows that the direct apprehension of ‘Being’ is part of Hölderlin’s argument aimed at solving a fundamental problem; an argument that differs both from the postulate of access to Being as knowledge of transcendence and from the affirmation of a purely aesthetic mode of access.

KEYWORDS:

• German Idealism
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte
• Friedrich Hölderlin
• absolute subject
• Being as fundament
• intellectual intuition of Being
• aesthetic intuition of Being

1. The significance of Hölderlin’s thought and his step from the subject toward Being

Hölderlin’s philosophical manuscripts are usually less well known than his literary works. They hold, however, a decisive importance in the move from the subjective idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte toward the early romantic thought of Friedrich Schelling.¹ The relevance of Hölderlin’s thought can be noted already in some of his literary texts, which contain significant philosophical reflections. Consider, for example, Hyperion,² or the preface to the penultimate draft of Hyperion.³ It is especially in his philosophical writings, however, that his arguments are more widely developed.

Hölderlin studied together with Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his roommates at the Tübinger Stift, a prominent seminary that served to prepare Protestant pastors for Württemberg. The friendship between these three philosophers was reflected, after their graduation from the Stift, in meetings and letters of high philosophical significance.⁴ In addition, it is usually understood that the manuscript ‘The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism,’ whose authorship is disputed, was produced jointly by the three former schoolmates.⁵

In Hölderlin’s theoretical writings, the question of the basis of the unity of experience (despite the division between subject and object present in all conscious knowledge) arises early on. Prior to Schelling, Hölderlin becomes aware of the difficulties of founding the unity of experience in the subject, and he finds a solution to this problem, which determines the course of philosophy in the passage from Fichte to Schelling.⁶

Hölderlin understands that human beings arrive at consciousness and the capacity to discern objects due to the fundamental distance between the subject and its environment.⁷ However, conscious knowledge was united. Both knowledge of objects and self-knowledge comprise the unity of the subjective and objective poles. It is important, then, to investigate the foundation underlying this unity and how unity becomes possible despite division. If there were a primordial separation only, there would be no unity but rather a ‘losing oneself in division’,⁸ a fall into mere dispersion, into a severing of the relationship between subject and object. Without unity, Hölderlin suggests, this separation would lead to an ‘absolute division and isolation’.⁹ Separation must be preceded by an original unity as a condition of a division between subject and object in conscious knowledge that does not lead to complete dispersion.¹⁰

The foundation of such unity cannot be provided by the subject, as is the case in Fichte’s account.¹¹ Either the I is conscious and therefore conditioned by the object and not absolute, or it is absolute and unconditioned, yet unconscious, because of the lack of an object.¹² Hölderlin suggests that there must be a foundation that, in contrast with that outlined by Fichte, does not have the character of an I. He calls this foundation ‘Being [Seyn]’.¹³

2. Three interpretations of Hölderlin’s thought

Affirming this Being raises the question of the mode by which it is accessed. Hölderlin’s scholars disagreed on this issue. One interpretation is that for Hölderlin, Being is validated through the act of reflection put forth to explain the possibility of conscious knowledge.¹⁴ A second group argues that for Hölderlin, Being is directly accessed. Moreover, among those who hold this position, we can further distinguish between those who attribute to this access the character of knowledge¹⁵ and those who argue that this access does not have a cognitive character but rather an aesthetic one.¹⁶

2.1. Henrich: being as a supposit

Dieter Henrich argues that Hölderlin goes a step beyond Kant and Fichte by affirming a Being prior to the division between subject and object.¹⁷ The division refers to unity as a condition for the unity of conscious knowledge. Henrich holds that, since original unity cannot be a subject for Hölderlin,¹⁸ it must transcend consciousness and be fundamentally distinct from it.¹⁹ ‘[W]hat precedes every relation of the subject to an object’, ‘must be deemed “Being”’.²⁰

Henrich explicitly addresses the questions of access to Being and the mode of knowing it, discarding the option of direct or immediate knowledge.²¹ The radical separation that Hölderlin sets between consciousness and the original Being means the rejection of direct knowledge of the latter.²² Henrich suggests a second mode of access to Being in the form of reflexive knowledge.²³ The original Being that precedes judgment is the condition under which the reflexive mind arrives, which is presupposed because it is necessary to account for the unity of subject and object.²⁴

2.2. Frank: being known through intellectual intuition

In contrast to Henrich, Frank argues that there is textual evidence in Hölderlin favouring an intellectual intuition as the ‘organ’ that grasps the unity at the basis of the division between subject and object; of intellectual intuition as the ‘way of accessing Being’.²⁵ Frank specifies that this is no objective knowledge, which, as dividing knowledge, presupposes the original cognition about which Hölderlin is speaking.²⁶ Despite this, Being must be understood cognitively. If instead one takes Hölderlin to maintain, as Henrich does, that Being possesses a transcendent character, ‘[t]hen’ – writes Frank – ‘I no longer understand what epistemic status “intellectual intuition” has. It is indeed a (if also a mystical) way of grasping Being and not Being itself’.²⁷ Since Hölderlin’s allusions to intellectual intuition presuppose a distinction between Being and intuition, the two cannot be correctly understood without treating this intuition as grasping Being.

Moreover, Frank believes that intellectual intuition as an organ of the apprehension of Being fulfils two systematic roles in Hölderlin’s work. These functions cannot be fulfilled by the presupposition asserted by Henrich. In the first place, this intellectual intuition is essential to explain the unity between the I as a subject and the I as an object despite the judicative division or ‘Ur-theilung,’ and the ‘evident feeling of identity and oneness in my consciousness of myself’.²⁸ The objective knowledge that I has of itself carries with it a thematization of I. In this scheme, I was separated from itself. The fact that, despite their division, subject and object are not dispersed and, even more importantly, that the I as a subject is experienced as a ‘self-sameness [Selbigkeit]’,²⁹ means – for Frank – ‘that immediate knowledge of this unity already existed [the unity at the basis of the division between the I as a subject and the I as an object], prior to the act of originary separation [Ur-theilung]’.³⁰

Second, Frank argues that there needs to be a criterion that allows the recognition of oneself among sensoperceptible objects. ‘One cannot see by the mere intuition of the represented object, that the person one represents in the consciousness is identical with the represented [the I as senso-perceptible object]. Without additional information, the objectified intuition would appear to man as the intuition of something strange and indeed not the intuition of himself […] Now, if I know the other as myself, then this object-knowledge must occur through and be accredited by a pre-objective knowledge, like knowledge in which Being becomes apparent (thus through intellectual intuition)’.³¹ For man to recognize himself among intuitable objects, he must already know unity on the basis of the division of himself in the subject and object, that is, to know Being. Primeval knowledge does man dispose of a criterion through which he can recognize himself among what is distinct.³²

Frank’s interpretation, in understanding Hölderlin as taking intellectual intuition as a direct and cognitive access to Being, must face the problem of attributing it to Hölderlin’s claim that there is transcendent knowledge. This leaves Hölderlin opposed to the basic approach of Kantian criticism, for which theoretical knowledge is limited to experience.³³

2.3. Waibel: intellectual intuition as aesthetic intuition

Violetta Waibel writes that for Hölderlin, Being is ‘presumably accessible through aesthetic experience [Erleben],’ not, by contrast, ‘through a theoretical act’.³⁴ This ‘aesthetic experience’ is distinct from the reflexive knowledge of Being as a postulate or presupposition of thought (Henrich’s thesis), because it exists before all reflection. Waibel also distances herself from any epistemic explanation akin to Frank’s. The direct access to ‘Being’ – which Hölderlin identifies with ‘beauty’ – does not have a ‘cognitive’ character.³⁵ Waibel’s interpretation overcomes the problem of the inadequacy of reflexive access to Being (as Henrich) without slipping into the dogmatism that seems to befall those who argue for direct and cognitive access to Being.

However, it is important to ask how this aesthetic and noncognitive access to Being should be understood.

Against this backdrop, Waibel turns to Kant. In Critique of Judgment, he argues for a purely aesthetic and non-cognitive experience. Kant asserts that the ‘aesthetic idea’ rests upon ‘an intuition […] for which a concept can never be found adequate’.³⁶ The aesthetic idea is not cognitive, by means of which we arrive at a real correlation beyond the subject. Aesthetic representations, according to the standard reading of the third critique, do not point to some known real correlate but rather to a relationship of potencies or mental faculties: to a ‘correspondence of the faculties of cognition with each other (of imagination and understanding)’.³⁷ This is what the notion of a purely aesthetic experience means as an experience that is eventually no more than the result of a play of imagination and understanding.³⁸

However, it is highly problematic to interpret Hölderlin’s access to Being as aesthetic access if aesthetics are understood as expressing the sole relationship between subjective faculties lacking all cognitive references beyond the subject. Hölderlin might describe the aesthetic as non-objectifiable but not as that which is deprived of access to Being.³⁹

The distinction between the theoretical or objective and the aesthetic (as it is not objectively determined) is common among Hölderlin scholars. However, this distinction does not necessarily preclude access to Being. Woezik, for example, argues the following: ‘Since knowledge belongs to the dimension of judgments, of Being no scientific knowledge in the strict sense is possible.’ ‘Being is inaccessible to reflection, but we can somehow intuit it’.⁴⁰

3. Hölderlin’s intellectual intuition of the I: neither objective nor purely aesthetic

There is a difference between Hölderlin and all positions that lead beauty back to the faculties of the subject. For Hölderlin, intellectual intuition means access to Being independent of the subject and the bare relationship between its mental faculties. If, as we have seen, for Kant – and in Waibel’s reading of the third critique – aesthetic experience alludes to no knowledge of something independent of the subject, but rather to the relation between mental faculties, to ‘the subjective play of the powers of knowledge’;⁴¹ if it is ‘merely a subjective experience of reflecting judgment as it is in Kant’,⁴² for Hölderlin, by contrast, this experience ‘is a revelation of the ultimate unity of existence or the Absolute’.⁴³ The ‘Being’ reached by aesthetic experience, according to Hölderlin, prevents us from speaking of a purely aesthetic experience.⁴⁴ For Hölderlin, ‘Beauty’ and ‘Being in the unique sense of the word’ converge.⁴⁵

The direct apprehension of Being is part of an argument Hölderlin puts forward to solve a fundamental problem that is neither solvable, as Henrich suggests, by reflexive access to Being as a condition presupposed by the unity of consciousness, nor through the idea of a purely aesthetic experience towards which Waibel seems to point.

In ‘Being Judgement Possibility,’ Hölderlin states that the division between the I as a subject and the I as an object – expressed in the statement ‘“I am I”’ – ‘is the most apposite example of this concept of an original division [Urtheilung], as a theoretical division’; and, consequently, also the most apposite example of the need, that appears with the subject-object division, for ‘a whole of which object and subject are the parts’.⁴⁶

The suitability of the statement ‘I am I’ seems to depend on the fact that, in this case, the evidence of the unity at the basis of the division is stronger than in other cases of theoretical division. Manfred Frank writes, in this sense, of an ‘evident feeling of identity and inseparability;’ an undeniable ‘experience of unity’ or of ‘self-sameness [Selbigkeit]’ that the I has of itself, despite its division into subject and object.⁴⁷ Furthermore, the evidence looks stronger here than in the ‘practical division’ case. At least, Hölderlin does not write in ‘Being Judgment Possibility’ about the evidence of unity in practical experience. There he does stop in the (theoretical) division of the I regarding itself, noticing the requirement of unity, and suggesting access to unity in the mode of ‘intellectual intuition’. Hölderlin writes: ‘[T]he I is only possible by virtue of the separation of the I [as subject] from the I [as object] […] Self-consciousness’ is only ‘possible […] [b]y opposing me to myself, separating me from myself, but notwithstanding this separation, recognizing myself in the opposition as one and the same’.⁴⁸ In self-objectification, the I is separated from itself. Its unity cannot be derived from a judgment or separation. Despite this division, the I knows itself. Hölderlin stresses the difficulty of proving unity, despite division, by asking – after admitting that the I is capable of recognizing itself in the opposition ‘as one and the same’—: ‘But to what extent the same?’ He adds: ‘I can, I must ask this; for it [i.e. the I] is opposed to itself in another respect’.⁴⁹ Since it is not possible to prove this access through the reflexive or objectifying way, Hölderlin infers that I can recognize ‘myself in opposition’ only from direct access to the unity at the ground of the division (of the I as a subject and the I as an object), in the form of an ‘intellectual intuition’.⁵⁰

Objective knowledge is also insufficient to produce recognition of the I amongst the other objects in the world: ‘The reflection model of self-consciousness […] fails to explain how my awareness that in dealing with the other of myself [i.e. of my objective I in the sensible world] I am indeed dealing with myself (as ‘the same self’)’.⁵¹ Identifying an I-subject with an I-object requires existential access to both the subject and the object. That is, not access to the I as presented in the representational knowledge of an object but rather to the being of the I. Without this existential access, man would be incapable of grasping and interpreting anything existentially; in other words, of grasping and interpreting something that happens in the objective sphere as something that is happening to himself. He could not understand the divided terms as parts of the same I, which, despite its judicative division, is existential.

The relationship between the I as a subject and the I as an object is ‘the most apposite example’ for addressing the aforementioned problem (of the unity and division of subject and object as a theoretical problem) as access to Being is here a condition of evident facts. These evident facts are the very identity or ‘self-sameness [Selbigkeit]’ of man, despite the division between the I as a subject and the I as an object, and man’s recognition of himself in the world. This evidence is lacking in other cases, especially in practical divisions. Hölderlin points out that the original practical division is the one that occurs between the subject and an object that is ‘Not-I [Nichtich]’.⁵² In ‘Being Judgement Possibility,’ he writes: ‘In the practical original division [Urtheilung] I is opposed to the Not-I, not to itself’.⁵³ Man faces something that is not part of him but is extrinsic to him. How, then, does one demonstrate the experience of unity in this case? I have mentioned that in ‘Being Judgment Possibility,’ Hölderlin does not pose the problem of finding an experience that expresses knowledge of the unity at the base of the division of the subject and the object in general. In that text, however, he provides a relevant clue: we must look at practical experience.⁵⁴

4. Hölderlin’s spherical experience

In a manuscript written after ‘Being Judgement Possibility,’ the so-called ‘Fragment of Philosophical Letters’,⁵⁵ Hölderlin refers to the required evident experience of the unity of subject and object in general (including the object that is ‘Not-I’). In this text, he formulates his notion of the ‘sphere.’ Hölderlin also considers this question of the sphere in a letter to Sinclair⁵⁶ and in the fragment ‘When the poet is once in command of the spirit … ’.⁵⁷ There is also an annotation in the margin of the hymn ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage … ,’ in which Hölderlin refers to the sphere: ‘Die [höhere]/Sphäre/die höher/ist, als/die des Menschen/diese ist/der Gott’.⁵⁸

With ‘sphere,’ he alludes to an experience in which direct access to Being plays a necessary role. Once that experience is accredited, it is more difficult to sustain the argument that to affirm knowledge of Being is to affirm knowledge of transcendence. Instead, it is the statement of knowledge of Being supported by an analysis of the conditions of an experience that accuses evidence.

The ‘sphere’ is the context in which man exists and in which the encounter between subject and object occurs.⁵⁹ We have direct access to this sphere. The human being, Hölderlin argues, ‘experiences’ and ‘feels’ a ‘sphere’ in which ‘there is more than machinery’; he ‘experiences’ and ‘feels’ that he exists ‘in a more lively relation, raised above need’; ‘experiences a more infinite, more thorough satisfaction than the satisfaction of needs’; ‘in it, he feels himself and his world, and everything he possesses and is, as being united’.⁶⁰ It is a realm of an encounter between the subject and the object, of unity that is at the ground of both, despite their separation. The sphere is a ‘realm in which one lives and breathes […] the encompassing [Umfassendes], something that, beyond all doubt, is something effective, immediately lived [erlebtes], and experienced’.⁶¹ ‘Hölderlin […] terms the whole ‘being,’ as that within subject/object, I/not-I relationships take place’.⁶² The subject and object are embedded in this spherical whole, of which they are parts, and within which they are in relation to one another. The unity of the sphere comes to be ‘that unity with all that lives,’ precisely that which Hölderlin calls ‘Being,’ a unity that is ‘intuited [geahndet],’ that ‘can be known [erkannt] by the spirit’.⁶³

Man feels capable of acting within a sphere. He finds himself in a context where – let us recall – ‘there is more than machinery,’ in such a way that man can feel or experience his existence ‘in a more lively relation’.⁶⁴ This practical capacity experienced within the ‘sphere’ is consistent with the affirmation made in ‘Being Judgement Possibility’ regarding the ‘practical original division [Urtheilung],’ by which the subject ‘is opposed to the Not-I, not to itself.’ Spherical unity includes the unity of man as a subject and object, along with the unity of I and the ‘Not-I.’ The sphere’s capacity is rooted in the fact that spherical experience is both theoretical and practical.

Theoretical determination produces a difference between I as a subject and as an object (i.e. objectively thematized). This division does not explain the difference between I as an object and objects that are Not-I. In the theoretical knowledge of I (as an object) by I (as a subject), everything objective is in principle I.⁶⁵ The emergence of a sphere of intuited objects in which I and Not-I can be distinguished requires practical division and knowledge. Without these, we are left with the purely contemplative I as the subject and its objectivized thematization.

For the emergence of a sphere in which Not-I and I can be distinguished, there must be a ‘practical original division’ and, with that division, a known activity that faces resistance. This division occurs between I as an agent and as a practical object. Here, the object is not something concerning which one remains in a representational attitude without the ability to act. Rather, the object is something that opposes I as an agent (endowed with an active impulse) but on which I can act.⁶⁶ The spontaneous impulse at the basis of the action makes an object appear to oppose resistance and can therefore be understood as Not-I.

The sphere has the character of unity that includes within itself a multiplicity but in such a way that unity precedes multiplicity. There is a ‘whole’ whose parts are possible only in the whole and not the whole through the parts.⁶⁷ This unity is distinct from another type of whole, where totality is posterior to the multiplicity of parts that add up to make a whole. In this second type of totality, the parts precede and are independent of the whole.⁶⁸ When ‘the one differentiated in itself […] was well known [kund geworden] to men,’ when ‘the whole was there’ – writes Hölderlin in Hyperion – ‘classification became possible,’ ‘the infinitely one [das Unendlicheinige] […] could be analyzed, taken apart in men’s minds, it could be reconstituted from its components, and so the essence [das Wesen] of the highest and the best could be increasingly known’.⁶⁹ Hölderlin’s ‘sphere’ is a context prior to the encounter and division between subject and object. The spherical whole operates as the encounter zone between them.⁷⁰

Man is intimately connected to the sphere, and he comes to feel the sphere as its own. In some sense, it is, in fact, his own sphere: it emerges inaugurally endowed with an individual character. Every man has ‘his own sphere,’ Hölderlin argues.⁷¹

However, a sphere is fundamentally open and total. It opens in two directions. Other humans appear and are endowed with their own spheres. One’s own sphere and the spheres of others are mutually permeable: Man ‘can indeed also put himself in the place of another, can make the sphere of the other his own sphere’ and can pass out from his particular sphere towards the ‘common sphere’.⁷²

In the second sense, the sphere was open. It refers to Being as an ultimate foundation. Humans have direct access to the sphere and unity. However, with direct access, man may ignore how he emerges in the sphere. He was unaware of having produced the sphere. The evident experience of the sphere is referred to as Being, which remains mysterious even as it is accessed. We can grasp Being; we have access to it.⁷³ Access, however, is only to the fact that Being is the mysterious source and foundation of unity, not, in contrast, how it arises.⁷⁴ The remission of man and the sphere to an unfathomable and uncontrollable Being implies a demand to recognize otherness. The alterity of Being makes it plausible to acknowledge the alterity of other humans. At the same time others break into my sphere (in its objective pole), they break in as irreducibly to the strictest immanence of the objective pole of my sphere.

5. Access to being

The sphere’s apprehension is direct. Hölderlin argues that this immediate grasp operates beyond thought and objective knowledge. The sphere ‘can, admittedly, also be thought, but not merely thought’.⁷⁵ Thought can reach ‘merely the conditions which make that connection possible [i.e. “that more infinite connection of life”], not the connection itself,’ not ‘the more intimate connection of life’ and ‘its own peculiar character’.⁷⁶ Nor can man reach it ‘from the objects surrounding him’.⁷⁷ The objects are only one of the poles of the sphere. Neither as mere thought nor as a determined object nor as purely aesthetic representation – the apprehension of the sphere is access to a totality that includes both subject and object and whose origin is independent of the conscious subject.⁷⁸

Access to the unitary basis of the whole cannot merely be spatial, as if man were a being in the whole without grasping it. Since the original Being is the ground of both the exterior and interior, of the object and the subject, and the foundation of the whole in which they meet, it cannot be purely exterior, nor can it be accessed in a purely external way. It is impossible to be in it without grasping it because man is not only spatial or exterior but also interior. Such access can only be an apprehension or feeling of the unitary fundament of the whole in which man is, which makes the encounter between the subject and object possible.⁷⁹

Without an apprehension of the unitary Being, the idea of the whole as the total unity of the multiples remains unintelligible to man. He cannot reach that notion, and the mind cannot formulate it. The objects would be a multiplicity of desultory parts extrinsic to one another. As a whole, the unity of multiplicity would be radically unknown.⁸⁰ By contrast, a sphere is an unquestionable experience. Its character as a totality is intelligible precisely because it reveals itself as a unitary whole of parts: because man ‘knows [weiß] the whole,’ ‘knows [kennt] […] the hen diapheron eautô (the one differentiated in itself)’.⁸¹ The sphere also includes meaning: a ‘more infinite connection that goes beyond need,’ a ‘higher fate’ where we find a ‘more infinite, more thorough satisfaction’.⁸² Hölderlin attributes a ‘holy’ or ‘religious’ character to this aspect of the sphere;⁸³ and to the notion of ‘beauty’:⁸⁴ to beauty as a constitutive aspect of the spherical experience (not as a mere effect of the relationship between subjective faculties). ‘The unity of meaning is not a product of reflection, but rather belongs to ‘tangible’ life and is felt in it’.⁸⁵

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico [grant number 1230072].

Notes

1 See for example: Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism — The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Dieter Henrich, ‘Hölderlin on Judgment and Being: A Study in the History of the Origins of Idealism’, in Dieter Henrich, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, trans. Abraham Anderson and ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 71–89; Der Grund im Bewußtsein. Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 2004); Manfred Frank, Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995); ‘“Intellektuale Anschauung”. Drei Stellungnahmen zu einem Deutungsversuch von Selbstbewußtsein: Kant, Fichte, Hölderlin/Novalis’, in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. Ernst Behler and Jochen Hörisch (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöning Verlag, 1987), 96–126; Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 2003), 83; Richard Thomas Eldridge, ‘“Doch sehnend stehst / Am Ufer du” (“But Longing You Stand On the Shore”): Hölderlin, Philosophy, Subjectivity, and Finitude’, in The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, ed. Dalia Nassar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 130–1; Stefanie Roth, Friedrich Hölderlin und die Deutsche Früromantik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 123; Martin Bondeli, Im Gravitationsfeld nachkantischen Denkens: Reinhold und Hölderlin (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2019), 101; Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung. Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), 259–60; Jürgen Stolzenberg, ‘Selbstbewußtsein. Ein Problem der Philosophie nach Kant. Zum Verhältnis Reinhold–Hölderlin–Fichte’, Daimon. Revista de Filosofía 9 (1994): 75, 77; Charles Larmore, ‘Hölderlin and Novalis’, in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 146–7, 151; Johannes Brachtendorf, ‘Hölderlins Eigene Philosophie? Zur Frage der Abhängigkeit seiner Gedanken von Fichtes System’, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 52, no. 3 (1998): 384. On the relationship between Hölderlin and Schelling, see Michael Franz (‘Schelling und Hölderlin — ihre schwierige Freundschaft und der Unterschied ihrer philosophischen Position um 1796’, Hölderlin Jahrbuch 31 [1998–1999]: 75–98), Guido Schmidlin (‘“Die Psyche unter Freunden”. Hölderlins Gespräch mit Schelling’, Hölderlin–Jahrbuch 19–20 [1975–1977]: 303–27), Violetta Waibel (‘Kant, Fichte, Schelling’, in Hölderlin–Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Johann Kreuzer [Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2011], 103–6); with Hegel, see Herbert Anton (‘“Eleusis”. Hegel an Hölderlin’, Hölderlin–Jahrbuch 19–20 [1975–1977]: 285–302), Dieter Henrich (‘Hegel und Hölderlin’, in Hegel im Kontext, ed. Dieter Henrich [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981], 9–40); Henry Harris (‘Hegel und Hölderlin’, in Der Weg zum System: Materialien zum jungen Hegel, ed. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990], 236–66); Manfred Baum (‘Metaphysischer Monismus bei Hölderlin und Hegel’, Hegel–Studien 28 [1993]: 81–102); Peter Reisinger (‘Hölderlin zwischen Fichte und Spinoza oder der Weg zu Hegel’, in Poetische Autonomie? Zur Wechselwirkung von Dichtung und Philosophie in der Epoche Goethes und Hölderlin, ed. Helmut Bachmeier and Thomas Rentsch [Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1987], 15–69), Klaus Düsing (‘Ästhetischer Platonismus bei Hölderlin und Hegel’, in Homburg von der Höhe in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte. Studien zum Freundekreis um Hegel und Hölderlin, ed. Christoph Jamme and Otto Pöggeler [Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1981], 101–17); Sieglinde Grimm (‘Hölderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt: Hegels ‘Dissertatio’ über die Planetenbahn und Hölderlins Dichtungstheorie’, Hölderlin–Jahrbuch 31 [1998–1999]: 139–41); with Schelling and Hegel, see Johann Kreuzer (‘Hölderlin im Gespräch mit Hegel und Schelling’, Hölderlin – Jahrbuch 31 [1998–1999]: 51–74); Otto Pöggeler (‘Hegel, der Verfasser des ältesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Idealismus: Ein handschriftlicher Fund’, in Hegel–Tage–Urbino 1965, ed. Hans-Georg Gadamer [Bonn: Bouvier, 1969], 17–32), Eckart Förster (‘“To Lend Wings to Physics Once Again”: Hölderlin and the “Oldest System–Programme of German Idealism”’, European Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 2 [1995]: 190–3), Manfred Frank (Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über die neue Mythologie [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982], 153–87), Frank-Peter Hansen (‘Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus’. Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation [Berlin & New York: Meiner, 1989]), Michael Franz (‘Hölderlin und das ‘Älteste Systemprogramm des Deutschen Idealismus’, Hölderlin Jahrbuch 19–20 [1975–1977]: 328–57).

2 See Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York, NY: Continuum Press), 1990.

3 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke (Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe), ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Wilhelm Kohlhammer Verlag, 1946–1985), III:236–237.

4 See Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009).

5 See Hölderlin, Essays and Letters.

6 See Frank, Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie, chap. IV.

7 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke VI/1:155. Hölderlin linked the notion of judgment (‘Urtheil’) with an act of primordial division, an ‘Ur-Theilung’. Judicative knowledge operates upon the basis of an inaugural division thanks to which ‘object and subject first become possible’; Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 231; Historisch–Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurter Hölderlin–Ausgabe), ed. Michael Franz, Hans Gerhard Steimer, Wolfram Groddeck and Dietrich Eberhard Sattler (Frankfurt & Basel: Stroemfeld & Roter Stern, 1975–2008), XVII:156; see also Hölderlin’s letter to Niethammer, dated 24 February 1796, in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke VI/1:202–3; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Nachgelassene Schriften. Zu Platners ‘Philosophischen Aphorismen’ 1794–1812. Gesamtausgabe, vol. I., ed. Reinhard Lauth and Hans Gliwitzky (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Fromann–Holzboog, 1976), 182; Violetta Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte 1794–1800 (Padeborn: Schöningh, 2000), 140–62; Rüdiger Safranski, Hölderlin. Komm! ins Offene, Freund! — Biographie (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2019), 117. On the relationship between Hölderlin’s argument here with the earlier thought of Reinhold, see Jürgen Stolzenberg, ‘Selbstbewußtsein’, 71–2; Martin Bondeli, Reinhold und Hölderlin, 93–115.

8 Volker Rühle ‘Geschichtserfahrung und poetische Geschichtsschreibung’, in Hölderlin–Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Johann Kreuzer (Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2011), 129; see Manfred Frank, Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie, 63–6.

9 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 304; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:267–8.

10 ‘The concept of division itself contains the concept of a reciprocal relationship between object and subject, and the necessary premiss of a whole of which object and subject are the parts’; Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 231; Historisch–Kritische Ausgabe, XVII:156.

11 See Panajotis Kondylis, Die Entstehung der Dialektik — Eine Analyse der europäischen Aufklärung und der geistigen Entwicklung von Hölderlin, Schelling und Hegel bis 1802 (Heidelberg; dissertation, 1977), 753–4; Uwe Beyer and Ursula Brauer, ‘Streit und Frieden hat seine Zeit’. Hölderlins Entwicklung seiner Geschichtsphilosophie aus der Anschauung der Gegenwart: Fünf Zeitgedichte vor 1800 (Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2000), 335–8; Michael Franz, ‘Hölderlin und das “Älteste Systemprogramm des Deutschen Idealismus”’, 351–2; Andrew Bowie, ‘Romantic Philosophy and Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 183.

12 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke VI/1:155, 164. Referring to Fichte, Hölderlin writes: ‘[H]is absolute I […] contains all reality; it is everything, & outside it there is nothing; therefore, for this absolute I there is no object, for otherwise, all reality would not be in it; but a consciousness without an object is not conceivable […] [A]s an absolute I I have no consciousness, and insofar as I have no consciousness I am (for myself) nothing, therefore the absolute I is (for me) nothing’; Essays and Letters, 48; Sämtliche Werke VI/1:155; see Manfred Frank, Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie, chap. IV. For the relationship between Hölderlin and Fichte’s philosophy, besides Waibel, see Jeremy Tambling, Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy — Readings in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Benjamin (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), 63–4; Karin Schuiter, Narrating Community after Kant: Schiller, Goethe and Hölderlin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 168; Jeffrey Barnow, ‘“Der Trieb, bestimmt zu werden”. Hölderlin, Schiller und Schelling als Antwort auf Fichte’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 46 (1972): 248–93; Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, ‘Nature and Poetic Consciousness’, in Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. Rochelle Tobias (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 31–2; Wolfgang Wirth, ‘Transzendentalorthodoxie? Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis von Hölderlins Fichte–Rezeption und zur Kritik der Wissenschaftslehre des jungen Fichte anhand von Hölderlins Brief an Hegel vom 26.1.1795’, in Hölderlin. Lesarten seines Lebens, Dichtens und Denkens, ed. Uwe Beyer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), 159–233; Rochelle Tobias, ‘Introduction’, in Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. Tobias Rochell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 4–5; Frank Völkel, ‘Im Wechsel des Urteils und Seins — Zu Fichte und Hölderlin’, in Sein — Reflexion — Freiheit. Aspekte der Philosophie Johann Gottlieb Fichtes (Amsterdam: B. R. Gruner Publishing Company 1997), 95–113; Wolfgang Janke, ‘“Dieses Seyn muß nicht mit der Identität werwechselt werden”. Hölderlin im Jena der Fichtezeit’, in Entgegensetzungen. Studien zu Fichte – Konfrontationen von Rousseau bis Kierkegaard. Fichte – Studien – Supplementa 4, ed. Wolfgang Janke (Amsterdam: Brill, 1994), 119–33. On the text of Hölderlin, Andreas Graeser, ‘Hölderlin über Urteil und Sein’, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 38 (1991): 111–27; Reisinger, ‘Hölderlin zwischen Fichte und Spinoza’, 15–69.

13 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 231; Historisch–Kritische Ausgabe XVII:156.

14 See Dieter Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein, 526, 670; ‘Hölderlin on Judgment and Being’, 86.

15 See Manfred Frank, ‘Unendliche Annäherung’. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 725–6, 751–2, 828; ‘Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self–Consciousness from Kant to Kierkegaard’, Critical Horizons 5, no. 1 (2004): 92–3.

16 See Violetta Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte.

17 Cf. Henrich, ‘Hölderlin on Judgment and Being’, 85, 87. ‘Hölderlin was the first to, as a result of his thought process and the seriousness of his poetic vocation, make a critical turn against Fichte and to establish his own philosophical system’; Henrich, ‘Hölderlin on Judgment and Being’, 88; see Der Grund im Bewußtsein; Between Kant and Hegel. Lectures on German Idealism, ed. David S. Pacini (Cambridge MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 291–5. On Henrich’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s thought, see Luke Fischer, ‘Hölderlin’s Mythopoetics: From “Aesthetic Letters” to the “New Mythology”’, in Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. Rochelle Tobias (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 146; Rüdiger Görner Hölderlin und die Folgen (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2016), 102–4; Tom Spencer, ‘Divine Difference: On the Theological Divide between Hölderlin and Hegel’, The German Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2011): 438; Andrzej Warminsky, Readings in Interpretation. Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 8–11; Hugo E. Herrera, ‘Knowledge of the Whole in Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Being Judgement Possibility”: Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank’s Interpretations’, Idealistic Studies 50, no. 3 (2020): 222–4; Beiser, German Idealism, 667 note 45.

18 See Henrich, ‘Hölderlin on Judgment and Being’, 85.

19 ‘[I]f philosophical reasons should arise to assume an absolute before all consciousness; one must then distinguish it from all consciousness. One would therefore do well not to misleadingly call it “I”’ (Henrich, ‘Hölderlin on Judgment and Being’, 86; cf. 76).

20 Henrich, ‘Hölderlin on Judgment and Being’, 75–6.

21 ‘Neither in the text nor in the theoretical system of Hölderlin’s draft [Henrich refers here to “Being Judgement Possibility”] does anything indicate such knowledge of “Being [Seyn]” lost in “judgment” [in the original division]. Rather, this knowledge seems to be excluded from Hölderlin’s conceptual system. In this respect, inasmuch as Hölderlin goes beyond the immanent-epistemological analysis of I-consciousness in the direction of an origin that is itself no longer epistemological, at the same time he nevertheless always has the Kantian critique in mind and, along with it, the grounds for determining the limits of knowledge and the conditions for responsible philosophizing with clarity concerning its own process’ (Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein, 112–3).

22 See Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein, 295–6; ‘Hölderlin on Judgment and Being’, 75–6; Gottfried Meinhold, ‘Die Deutung des Schönen — Zur Genese der intellectualen Anschauung bei Hölderlin’, in Evolution des Geistes: Jena um 1800 — Natur und Kunst, Philosophie und Wissenschaft im Spannungsfeld der Geschichte, ed. Friedrich Strack (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1994), 378; Franz, ‘Theoretische Schriften’, in Hölderlin–Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Johann Kreuzer (Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2011), 229.

23 ‘The central thesis in Hölderlin’s conception is that a ground for consciousness, which does not itself have the constitution of consciousness and is only accessible as a prerequisite, must be presupposed’; Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein, 670.

24 ‘The ground is […] presupposed and can be known or deduced only as such a presupposition’; Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein, 526; cf. 261, 296, 297, 526–7, 599–600, 670. Henrich’s interpretation is followed by other writers, including Gosetti-Ferencei and Larmore. See Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2004), 118, 119; Larmore, ‘Hölderlin and Novalis’, 148. Larmore’s adherence to Henrich must be qualified, as he looks into the final draft Hyperion and admits that there Hölderlin alludes to an ‘Ahndung’ of Being, a term he translates as ‘“inkling”’ (Charles Larmore, ‘Hölderlin and Novalis’, 159 note 12). Henrich does not appear to be completely satisfied with his interpretation. He suggests that for Hölderlin ‘nature preserves a reminiscence of the original unity’ (Henrich, ‘Hölderlin on Judgment and Being’, 84). Man reaches a confirmation of the presupposed ground when he manages to ‘interpret’ the unitary meaning of the beautiful: ‘beauty brings unity to appearance’ (Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein, 302). As ‘harmony without opposition’, it manifests a unitary meaning, which cannot be rationalized. Henrich limits however the scope of his interpretation. He argues that Hölderlin ultimately rejects an aesthetic grasping of unity (as the access sketched in the preface to the penultimate draft of Hyperion; see Der Grund im Bewußtsein, 301). Hölderlin’s statement would be a literary excess. For him, the unity of consciousness would not depend on ‘the presence of the unity in the form of the beautiful’ (Der Grund im Bewußtsein, 301).

25 See Frank, ‘Unendliche Annäherung’, 828. On intellectual intuition’s epistemic role in Hölderlin, see for example Adler and Louth, ‘Introduction’, in Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, xxxiii, xxxv–vi; Harmut Buchner, ‘Editorische Bericht zu Schellings “Briefen”’, in Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus, Historisch–kritische Ausgabe, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann– Holzboog 1975), III:34, 37; Cia van Woezik, God — Beyond Me: From the I’s Absolute Ground in Hölderlin and Schelling to a Contemporary Model of Personal God (Leiden & Boston, MA: Brill, 2010), 13, 195, 305; Gunther Martens, Friedrich Hölderlin (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1996), 69–70; Michael Knaupp, ‘“Kommentar” to Friedrich Hölderlin’, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. 3 vols., ed. Michael Knaupp (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2019), III:385; Franz Gabriel Nauen, Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel and the Crisis of Early German Romanticism. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idées no. 45 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 63; Marion Hiller, “Harmonisch Entgegengesetzt”. Zur Darstellung und Darstellbarkeit in Hölderlins Poetik um 1800 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2008), 6.

26 See Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung”, 725–6, 751–2; ‘Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self–Consciousness’, 92–3.

27 Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung”, 828; cf. 725; Auswege aus dem Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007), 282.

28 Frank, ‘Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self–Consciousness’, 93.

29 Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung”, 751; see 726–8; ‘Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self–Consciousness’, 92. Frank writes of the ‘fact of self-sameness [Faktum der Selbigkeit]’ as the ‘actual and evident experience of “I am I”’ (“Unendliche Annäherung”, 751), as the experience of the original unity of the self, prior to the division, ‘which is inderivable from judicative relations’; “Unendliche Annäherung”, 751.

30 Frank, ‘Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self–Consciousness’, 92; see “Reduplikative Identität.” Der Schlüssel zu Schellings reifer Philosophie (Stuttgart & Bad Cannstatt: Fromman–Holzboog, 2018), 2, 128; “Unendliche Annäherung”, 751–2; Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie, 63, 65–6.

31 Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung”, 728.

32 On the scope of the reflexive model, see Dieter Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 12–31; Selbstverhältnisse (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), 62–3; Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 125; “Unendliche Annäherung”, 751–2; Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 72–3. Frederick Beiser adopts an interpretation close to that of Frank. He argues that, for Hölderlin, knowledge is not confined to discursive knowledge. Direct access to Being is, he remarks, ‘a necessary condition for the proper functioning of reason and the understanding’ (Beiser, German Idealism, 395; see 396). Reason and understanding are capacities that proceed ‘from the parts to the whole’ (German Idealism, 396). They presuppose the whole but cannot provide us with access to it by themselves. Needed, then, is ‘some prior knowledge of the whole’ (Beiser, German Idealism, 396; see 393; 666 note 37; 667 note 48).

33 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A 67-68 /B 92-3; B 148-9; A 286-90/B 342-6; A 373-4; A 478-9/B 506-7 note; Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit III. Ernst Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburger Ausgabe) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000), vol. IV, 1–2; Richard Kröner, Von Kant bis Hegel (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 56–7.

34 Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 144.

35 Ibid., 115. Kuzniar mentions along similar lines: ‘Hyperion calls this ultimate experience ‘beauty’ but in the next breath admits that he does not yet know it; he only intimates it’; Alice A. Kuzniar, Delayed Endings. Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin (London: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 152.

36 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 218.

37 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 217; see Rudolf A. Makreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant. The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 119–20; Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgment (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 127–34.

38 Waibel draws connections between Hölderlin and Kant of the third critique, as interpreted in the sense mentioned above. She points out that in the Critique of Judgment, Kant notes aesthetic judgment as having a ‘non-objectifiable’ character, as being ‘founded in a feeling’. It is endowed with a ‘general validity’, it is, however, a merely ‘subjective generality’; Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 93, 96. In contrast with aesthetic judgment, Waibel argues, ‘objectifiable judgments […] are those founded in a principle that can be converted into a concept and whose acceptance can be demanded of every rational being capable of knowledge’; Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 93, 96. She thinks that: ‘To Hölderlin’s ‘Being as such’, which is present to us in beauty, there theoretically corresponds a subjective generality’, not, by contrast, a ‘general objective validity’; Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 96.

39 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke VI/1:181, 203; III:236–7; Historisch–Kritische Ausgabe XVII:156. In its original order, the text says: If such ‘Being in the unique sense of the word […] were not accessible [nicht vorhanden wäre] […], without an intuition [Ahndung] of it […], we would not think and we would not act; there would not even be anything at all (for us); we would ourselves be nothing (for us) […]. It [such Being] is accessible [vorhanden]—as beauty’; Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke III:236–7. Despite that Waibel does distance Hölderlin’s conception from Kant’s, and states that ‘for Hölderlin beauty is not […] thinkable merely as subjective form in the Kantian sense’ (Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 103; see 97), she sows confusion in affirming that access to ‘Being’ or ‘beauty’ ‘cannot be directly grounded in knowledge’ (Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 115). Without further clarification, this means that it cannot be grounded in any knowledge (objective and non-objective) or access to something independent of the subject (despite the fact that Hölderlin himself characterizes the ‘philosophical sceptic’ as someone who ‘knows the harmony of perfect beauty, which is never thought’; Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 66; Sämtliche Werke III:81). Waibel also misleads by turning to Fichte in determining the meaning of the notion of purely ‘subjective general validity’ and, from there, to the idea that the validity of a statement ultimately depends on an absolute subject (see Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 89–97), that is to say (though for reasons distinct from Kant’s), with no reference to a being independent of it. Finally, Waibel goes off course in arguing: ‘If Hölderlin believed that his proposal [of “Being Judgement Possibility”] was still compatible with Kant’s third critique, or if, by contrast, he consciously overstepped Kant’s boundary here, remains an open question in the text’ (Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 145).

40 Woezik, God — Beyond Me, 195. ‘Beauty is another term frequently used by Hölderlin for Being. The perfection of our ground, Being, “that which is One and All” […] is alive among us as Beauty’; Woezik, God — Beyond Me, 210–11. Since Being and Beauty coincide in the instance ‘Being’, we find ourselves on the point of admitting the reference of intellectual intuition to the real. The followers of this position, which we can call ‘realist’, include Wegenast (Hölderlins Spinoza–Rezeption und ihre Bedeutung für die Konzeption des “Hyperion” [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990], 192–4), Friedrich Strack (Ästhetik und Freiheit. Hölderlins Idee von Schönheit, Sittlichkeit und Geschichte in der Frühzeit [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1976], 140), Nauen (Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel, 62–3), Beyer and Brauer (‘Streit und Frieden hat seine Zeit’, 342), Uwe Beyer (Mythologie und Vernunft — Vier philosophische Studien zu Friedrich Hölderlin [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993], 28), Pöggeler (‘Philosophy in the Wake of Hölderlin’, Man and World 7, no. 2 [1974]: 164), Johannes Heinrichs (Revolution aus Geist und Liebe. Hölderlins ‘Hyperion’ durchgehend kommentiert [München: Steno Verlag, 2007], 293), Fischer (‘Hölderlin’s Mythopoetics’, 146), Adler and Louth (‘Introduction’, xxxiii, xxxvi), Meinhold (‘Die Deutung des Schönen’, 390; on the notion of ‘the mantic’, to which he alludes here, see also Wolfram Hogrebe, ‘Hölderlin mantischer Empirismus’, in Ahnung und Erkenntnis. Brouillon zu einer Theorie des natürlichen Erkennens, ed. Hogrebe [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996], 102–23; Gideon Stiening, Epistolare Subjektivität. Das Erzählsystem in Friedrich Hölderlins Briefroman “Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland” [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2005], 285; Christoph Jamme, “Ein ungelehrtes Buch”. Die philosophische Gemeinschaft zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt 1797–1800 [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2016], 98; Priscilla A. Hayden-Roy, “A Foretaste of Heaven”. Friedrich Hölderlin in the Context of Württemberg Pietism [Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994], 222–3; Bondeli, Reinhold und Hölderlin, 110–2; Sunao Otuska, ‘Nemesis–Begriff und Schicksalslied: Zu Kraft, Macht und Gewalt in der anthropologischen Systemtheorie im Zeitalter Hölderlins’, Keio — Germanistik Jahresschrift 18, no. 3 [2001]: 71; Johannes Epple, Transformationen schöpferischer Vernunft. Kant — Hölderlin — Nietzsche [Paderborn: Brill and Wilhelm Fink, 2021], 64). The following draw a distinction between the intellectual intuition of Hölderlin’s earlier works and the aesthetic intuition of his later works, complicating the relationship: Wegenast (Hölderlins Spinoza–Rezeption, 192), Roth (Friedrich Hölderlin, 138), Stiening (Epistolare Subjektivität, 286), Xavier Tiliette (Untersuchungen über die intellektuelle Anschauung von Kant bis Hegel [Stuttgart–Bad Canstatt: Frommann–Holzboog, 2015], 117; ‘Hölderlin und die intellektuale Anschauung’, in Philosophie und Poesie. Otto Pöggeler zum 60. Geburstag, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert [Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1988], vol. I:231–3), Stephan Wackwitz (Friedrich Hölderlin [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985], 75–6), David Farrell Krell (‘Three Ends of the Absolute: Schelling on Inhibition, Hölderlin on Separation, and Novalis on Density’, Research in Phenomenology 32 [2002]: 67–8), William Davis (‘One with Everything: Hölderlin on Acrocorinth’, European Romantic Review 26, no. 1 [2015]: 64–5), William Andrew Behun (The Historical Pivot: Philosophy of History in Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin [Chicago, thesis, 2006], 128), Camilla Flodin (‘Hölderlin’s Higher Enlightenment’, in Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth–Century British and German Aesthetics, ed. Karl Axelsson, Camilla Flodin and Mattias Pirholt [New York & London: Routledge, 2021], chap. 12). Franz argues (complicating his previous position) that the whole is ‘knowable, only thanks to the inspired poet’, in some way ‘taken possession of by God’; Franz, Tübinger Platonismus. Die gemeinsamen philosophischen Anfangsgründe von Hölderlin, Schelling und Hegel (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2012), 226.

41 Meinhold, ‘Die Deutung des Schönen’, 385.

42 Fischer, ‘Hölderlin’s Mythopoetics’, 147.

43 Ibid.

44 See Friedrich Strack, Ästhetik und Freiheit, 140; Meinhold, ‘Die Deutung des Schönen’, 385; Beiser, German Idealism, 375.

45 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke III:236–7; cf. Lawrence Ryan, ‘Hyperion oder Der Eremit in Griechenland’, in Hölderlin–Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Johann Kreuzer (Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2011), 179.

46 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 231–32; Historisch–Kritische Ausgabe XVII:156.

47 Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung”, 728, 751, 752.

48 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 231; Historisch–Kritische Ausgabe XVII:156.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Frank, ‘Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self–Consciousness’, 92.

52 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 231–2; Historisch–Kritische Ausgabe XVII:156.

53 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 231; Historisch–Kritische Ausgabe XVII:156.

54 Taking these considerations into account, the objection that might be made to Beiser’s affirmation that Hölderlin maintains the knowledge of a transcendent object has a force lacked by the objection to Frank’s affirmation that there is knowledge at the ground of the division of the I as a subject and the I as an object, as a condition of the experience of the identity or unity of the I. In the case of the division of the subject and the object in general, the knowledge of Being does not express itself through evident experience. This knowledge is not philosophically accreditable based on an analysis of the conditions and features of an evident experience, as occurs in the case of the experience of the self-sameness of the self.

55 Not among the texts upon which Frank focus his attention. The fragment dates from February-March of 1796, according to Knaupp (‘Kommentar’, III:385); or from 1796 to 1797, according to Groddeck and Sattler (in Hölderlin, Historisch–Kritische Ausgabe XIV:11–2); from between 1796 and 1800, according to Charlie Louth (‘“jene zarten Verhältnisse”: Überlegungen zu Hölderlins Aufsatzbruchstück’, “Über Religion/Fragment Philosophischer Briefe”. Hölderlin–Jahrbuch 39 [2014–2015]: 124–38). On the text, see Andreas Thomasberger, ‘Mythos — Religion — Mythe. Hölderlins Grundlegung einer neuen Mythologie in seinem “Fragment philosophischer Briefe”’, in “Frankfurt aber ist der Nebel dieser Erde”. Das Schicksal einer Generation der Goethezeit, ed. Christoph Jamme and Otto Pöggeler (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1983), 284–99; and though very briefly, Kuzniar, Delayed Endings, 154–5. Frank does not mention this text. Beiser does mention it once, but he does not consider the issue regarded here; cf. Beiser, German Idealism, 397.

56 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke VI/1:299–301.

57 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 289–93; in German: ‘Wenn der Dichter einmal des Geistes mächtig ist … ’, in the Stuttgart ed. “Über die Verfahrungsweise des poëtischen Geistes”; Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:241–65, with regard to the sphere: 255–9. Kreuzer situates this last text in the first half of 1800 (see Kreuzer, in Hölderlin, Theoretische Schriften, ed. Johann Kreuzer [Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998], 122).

58 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke II/2:675, lines 31 and 32. Beissner dates this last text to the end of 1799; cf. Beissner in: Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke II:667. On the antecedents of this notion in Herder, see Helmut Hühn Mnemosyne: Zeit und Erinnerung in Hölderlins Denken (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 1997), 84, 91; Ulrich Gaier, ‘Rousseau, Schiller, Herder, Heinse’, in Hölderlin–Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Johann Kreuzer (Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2011), 84.

59 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:275, 277–8.

60 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 234–5; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:275–80; see Helmut Hühn, ‘Hölderlins Briefe ‘Über Religion’ — theologische und religionsphilosophische Fragen’, Hölderlin Jahrbuch 31 (1998–1999): 126–8.

61 Nicolai Hartmann, Die Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), 185–6.

62 Bowie, ‘Romantic Philosophy and Religion’, 183; see Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 271; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:282; Anja Lemke, ‘The Transition Between the Possible and the Real: Nature as Contingency in Hölderlin’s “The declining fatherland … ”’, in Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. Tobias Rochelle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 165.

63 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:267–8; see Fred Lönker, Welt in der Welt. Eine Untersuchung zu Hölderlins “Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes”. Palaestra: Untersuchungen aus der Deutschen, Englischen und Skandinavischen Philologie, ed. Dieter Cherubim, Armin Paul Frank, Walther Killy, Fritz Paul, Hans Schabram, Albrecht Schöne, Karl Stackmann, Horst Turk, Christian Wagenknecht, Theodor Wolpers (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 52. I translate ‘Ahndung’ as ‘intuition’ and ‘ahnden’ as ‘to intuit’. I follow here Thomas Pfau’s ‘Glossary of Terms’ (Pfau, in Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988], 183). With respect to the notion, Eldridge notes: ‘“Ahndung” is Hölderlin’s archaic Swabian spelling of Ahnung—presentiment, foreshadowing, or intuitiveness’; ‘“Doch sehnend stehst / Am Ufer du”’, 135; see also Eldridge, ‘Poetry and Emphatic Truth: Walter Benjamin’s Reading of Hölderlin’, Análisis. Revista de investigación filosófica 2, no. 2 (2015): 303 note 8. ‘Clue’ could also be a suitable translation. The German expression ‘Keine Ahnung’ is frequently used to indicate that the speaker admits to having ‘no clue’. The sense of ‘clue’ highlights the ineffability of being. Thus, it becomes possible to underline that, in the case of Being, aesthetics is more closely related to mystical apprehension than to knowledge in the strict sense. On the meaning of the expression as praesensio or Vorempfindung and its origin in Kant, see Rainer Nägele, Text, Geschichte und Subjektivität in Hölderlins Dichtung. “Unerfaßarer Schrift gleich” (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1985), 157–8 and Johann Kreuzer, ‘Einleitung’, in Friedrich Hölderlin. Theoretische Schriften, ed. Johann Kreuzer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1998), XXXII note 36. In ‘The lyric, in appearance idealic poem … ’, Hölderlin advances the claim that all works of tragic character ‘must be based on one intellectual intuition, which can be no other than that unity with all that lives’ (Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 303; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:267). One reaches this unity by dwelling upon ‘the impossibility of an absolute division’ (Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 304). Yet, in addition, this unity can ‘be intuited [geahndet]’ (Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:268; Essays and Letters, 304). Also note Larmore’s translation of ‘Ahndung’ as ‘“inkling”’: see Larmore, ‘Hölderlin and Novalis’, 159 note 12.

64 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 234; cf. 234–8; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:275–80.

65 Frank’s interpretation lacks sufficient clarification of the question of man’s recognition in the field of intuited objects. He affirmed that, for Hölderlin, there is a necessary reflective division between an I-subject and an I-object, as well as a knowledge of the unity at the basis of that division. In addition, he dwells on the fact that the conscious subject has a sphere of intuited objects before it. He also dwells upon the need Hölderlin posits for an intellectual intuition of man for he to be able to recognize himself amid intuitable objects. By contrast, his explanation does not yet clarify how, for Hölderlin, the emergence of the sphere of intuited objects and the identification of man therein are possible.

66 See Herrera, ‘Knowledge of the Whole’, 226–8.

67 See Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 67; Sämtliche Werke III:82. The manifold rests on the limitations of the previous totality. Hölderlin’s ‘sphere’ operates in a way strikingly similar to that of Kant’s time: as totum, as a context prior to the encounter between subject and object. The spherical totum is comprehensible (as time must be comprehensible) and operates as the substratum of the encounter between subject and object. As the totum-time is individual, but it remains open to the other, Hölderlin’s spherical totum is also at once individual and open to the other (see Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:275–80, and his 24 December 1798 letter to Isaak von Sinclair, Sämtliche Werke VI/1:299–301. See also: David Constantine, Hölderlin [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 117). ‘Totum’, argues Kant, is a whole whose ‘parts are possible only in the whole, and not the whole through the parts’ (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 439/B 467). ‘The manifold in it […] rests merely on limitations’ of the previous totality (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 25/B 39). The definition applies to both space and time. A point in space and an instant in time are not properly speaking parts of space or time, but rather the result of the setting of limits. The totum ‘is essentially single; the manifold in it, thus also the general concept of space [and time] in general, rests merely on limitations’ (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 25/B39). The compositum, by contrast, is ‘a contingent unity of a manifold that, given as separated […] is posited in a reciprocal combination and thereby constitutes one entity’ (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 439/B 467). These parts are prior to and independent of the totality.

68 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:275–80; III:82.

69 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 67; Sämtliche Werke, 81–2.

70 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:275–80, and his 24 December 1798 letter to Isaak von Sinclair, Sämtliche Werke VI/1:299–301; Constantine, Hölderlin, 117.

71 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 234; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:278.

72 Ibid.

73 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:267–68, 278.

74 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:282.

75 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 236; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:276.

76 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 236–7; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:276–7.

77 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 234; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:278; see Dieter Jähnig, Dichtung und Geschichte: Beiträge Hölderlins zur Geschichtsphilosophie und zur Philosophie der Künste (Hildesheim, Olms, 2019), 256; Martin Endres, ‘Lektüre / Lesen am Beispiel von Hölderlins “Seyn … / Urtheil … Wirklichkeit … ”’, Textologie 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017), 100; Volker Rühle, ‘Geschichtserfahrung und poetische Geschichtsschreibung’, in Hölderlin–Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Johann Kreuzer (Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2011), 132; ‘Tragische Erfahrung und poetische Darstellung des Tragischen’, in Hölderlin–Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Johann Kreuzer (Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2011), 138–46.

78 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:275–80; Hühn, Mnemosyne, 72–91, 95; Jakob Helmut Deibl, Abschied und Offenbarung. Eine poetisch–theologische Kritik am Motiv der Totalität im Ausgang von Hölderlin (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2019), 114–9; Lönker, Welt in der Welt, 49–52. Hühn argues that this concerns ‘pre-reflexive experiences of lived life’, which are only later expressed through ‘representation’ (Hühn, Mnemosyne, 95). On Hölderlin’s notion of the sphere, see in addition: Lawrence Ryan, Friedrich Hölderlin (Stuttgart, Metzler, 1967), 7, 57; Gerhard Kurz, Mittelbarkeit und Vereinigung. Zum Verhältnis von Poesie, Reflexion und Revolution bei Hölderlin (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1975), 14, 55, 86; Ulrich Gaier, “So wäre alle Religion ihrem Wesen nach poetisch”. Ästhetik – Religion – Säkularisierung I. Von der Renaissance zur Romantik, ed. Herbert Uerlings and Silvio Vietta (München: Brill, 2008), 75–92; Helmut Bachmeier, ‘Der Mythos als Gesellschaftsvertrag. Zur Semantik von Erinnerung, Sphäre und Mythos in Hölderlins Religions–Fragment’, in Poetische Autonomie? — Zur Wechselwirkung von Dichtung und Philosophie in der Epoche Goethes und Hölderlins, ed. Helmut Bachmeier and Thomas Rentsch (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1987), 152–53; Bruno Liebrucks, “Und”. Die Sprache Hölderlins in der Spannweite von Mythos und Logos. Wirklichkeit und Realität (Bern, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1979), 296–312.

79 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:277–8; cf. Kurz, Mittelbarkeit und Vereinigung, 64–5.

80 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke IV/1:278.

81 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 66, 67; Sämtliche Werke III:81, 82; cf. IV/1:275–80; III:236–7.

82 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 235–6; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:275–6.

83 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 235, 238; Sämtliche Werke IV/1:275, 280.

84 E.g. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, III:237.

85 Hühn, Mnemosyne, 92; see Hartmann, Die Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus, 186.

Research for this paper was partly funded by Fondecyt-Project no. 1230072 from the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID, Chile). I would like to thank Rebecca West for her translation work and the two anonymous reviewers who commented the text in detail.