Abstract

We can see personhood as a philosophical and historical struggle between positive and negative forms of ‘being at one’, a struggle most succinctly described by Hölderlin, a central figure in Romanticism and in German idealism through his close friendship and collaboration with Schelling and Hegel. For Hölderlin, ‘Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania / Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way’. This paper is an exploration of a range of forms of aloneness, linked by the family resemblance of a number of such ‘solitude’ terms (loneliness, solitude, solitary, aloneness, lonesome, individual, atonement) to the idea of ‘oneness’. ‘Being at one’ was distinctively articulated in the Romantic period, in philosophy as well as in the arts. Based on this distinctiveness, this article presents an historical account of the developing philosophical anthropology of being at one, dividing the development of ‘being at one’ between the pre-Romantic, Romantic, and post-Romantic eras.