Hölderlin’s higher enlightenment

In Karl Axelsson, Camilla Flodin & Mattias Pirholt (eds.), Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. pp. 258-276 (2020)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze Hölderlin’s emphasis on the importance of aesthetic comportment for reconceiving the relationship between human beings and their surroundings, and for enabling what he calls a “higher enlightenment.” Hölderlin shares the romantic critique of the mechanistic conception of nature and life, and argues that human beings have to achieve a higher connection than the mechanical one between themselves and their surroundings. In order to establish this, the bond between human beings and their environment needs aesthetic representation. Poetry is able to particularize and concretize that which in discursive knowledge remains abstract and removed from life. A necessary feature of a higher enlightenment is, according to Hölderlin, the salutary remembrance that human creations, such as art and society, are not completely autonomous but, in a Shaftesburian fashion, ultimately dependent on nature. As this chapter shows, for Hölderlin, an authentic poem is not a closed autonomous work of art but rather an open unity that remembers its dependence on nature and thus can be said to reflect on its own aesthetic heteronomy.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Friedrich Holderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory.Thomas Pfau (ed.) - 1987 - State University of New York Press.
El canto de Diotima: Hölderlin y la música.Helena Cortés - 1996 - Anuario Filosófico 29 (54):41-52.
Semele’s Ashes: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Hölderlin’s “As when on a holiday . . .”.Beau Shaw - 2015 - Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (1):169-193.
Hölderlin's Hymn "the Ister".Martin Heidegger - 1996 - Indiana University Press.
Heidegger and the Poetics of Time.Rebecca A. Longtin - 2017 - Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 7:124 - 141.
Who is Heidegger’s Hölderlin?Charles Bambach - 2017 - Research in Phenomenology 47 (1):39-59.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-12-10

Downloads
17 (#742,076)

6 months
5 (#246,492)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Camilla Flodin
Uppsala University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology.Amanda Jo Goldstein - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):13.

Add more references