Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion

In a review of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in the Athenäum, Friedrich Schlegel refers to the pedagogical vision of the novel as follows: "Not this or that individual should be educated but nature and culture themselves should be represented [dargestellt ] in a multiplicity of examples and summarized in simple principles" (1958, 2: 143). This imperative coincides almost ideally with Hyperion's pursuit. The pursuit is realized not in any action but solely in reflection. The novel uses the epistolary form and is restricted, with the exception of a couple of letters by Hyperion's beloved Diotima, to a single letter writer, Hyperion. In a series of letters to his friend Bellarmin, Hyperion reconstructs through tem-

poral voyages of memory his attempts to live as a hermit and to embrace the lesson of freedom as exemplified by nature and ancient Athens, two terms that oppose an education regulated by the dictates of modern rationalism and political absolutism. Like Schiller's letters in Aesthetic Education, Hyperion's letters argue that no theory of knowledge nor its attendant progress can achieve legitimacy before undergoing an aesthetic re-vision. Philosophy is not born of "mere understanding," for it is more than "the limited knowledge of what is," writes Hyperion. Nor is it born of "mere reason," for it is more than a "blind demand for a never-ending progress in combination and differentiation of some practicable matter" (1969, 1: 369). However, once the ideal of beauty illuminates reason, then reason begins to see what it is striving for. In art, which is a testament to the ideal of beauty, knowledge can ultimately exercise autonomy and become an agent of freedom.

In another text, known as "Fragment von Hyperion," Hölderlin describes the itinerary from the confining dictates of reason to the autonomy of will as the "eccentric path" (exzentrische Bahn ; ibid., 1: 440). This path originates in the pure simplicity of nature and ends in the multiplicity of formation. This last stage is not a naïve unity with nature but an informed encounter with it. It is a conscious effort of the self to form (bilden ) itself in a dialogue with the other. The educated approximation to nature in art and myth, in other words, in beauty, signals an infinite progression. "Oh ye who seek the highest and the best, in the depths of knowledge, in the turmoil of action, in the darkness of the past, in the labyrinth of the future, in graves or above the stars! do ye know its name? the name of the one which is one and all?" (ibid., 1: 339). Not surprisingly, this rich diversity and union of knowledge and experience is named Beauty.

In his letters Hyperion retrospectively charts the course of this progression toward the ideal of beauty. In a nonlinear order governed only by the dictates of a selective memory, Hyperion recounts childhood dreams, his trip to Athens, his encounters with the teacher figures Adamas and Alabanda, his arrival at the ideal of beauty in Diotima, his participation in the Greek war of independence, his return to Germany, and his final search for a new mythology. The time of the letters is a reconstructed time, whose anachronism orders the accounts in accordance with the perceived progress of Bildung . Self-representation is intimately linked to the

representation of another time and place. However, neither the identity of the protagonist nor the time and space where he dwells refers to a fixed person, history, or geography. Hyperion is alternately a German and a Greek, simultaneously the narrator and the narratee. The time in which events are chronicled switches between antiquity and the eighteenth century, the setting of narrated action, between Germany, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and the Orient at large. The status of the topoi of history or the story is, in the final analysis, equivocal. Time and space are represented both as monument and ruin and homeland and foreign land, respectively.

The locality presented is always a memorial, the locus for recollection of what has been lost, forgotten, removed, or erased through time. "Oh, it is so sweet to drink from the cup of oblivion" (ibid., 1: 336), muses Hyperion. The Greeks of the eighteenth century are subjects of the Ottoman Empire and fighting against it for independence. However, the Greece of the narrative is not the "real" Greece of the eighteenth century inhabited by a modern Slavic people but an ideal representation of what ancient Greece was. At some point, for example, Hyperion goes to Smyrna in Asia Minor. Smyrna is the ancient name of the Ottoman city of Izmir and all reference to Smyrna is to the ancient city. If the action is taking place in the eighteenth century, it is unlikely that Hyperion would visit one of the major ports of the enemy. Hyperion's father advises him to go to Smyrna to learn "the speech of cultivated peoples and their political constitutions, their views, their manners and customs" (ibid., 1: 308). Clearly, this idealized picture simply glosses over the historical fact that ancient Smyrna is now occupied by what Hyperion sees as Oriental despots. Nevertheless, there are references to actual historical events. The second letter in the first book of the second volume contains a historically accurate reference to the Cheshme naval battle with the Ottoman sultan's fleet on July 4, 1770 (ibid., 1: 405). In this way, like the vision of Romantic poetry in fragment 116 of the Athenäum, the narrative floats between the real and the idea(l), the historical and the fictional. John Jay Baker, in a study on Hölderlin's elegy "Brod und Wein," has observed that one approach to the elegy is "to treat its historical dimension as a rhetorical overlay," that is, to understand Hölderlin's Greece not as "the Greece of history but instead the history and product of a trope." This trope, in turn, is "the inauguration of the aesthetic character by which the West has known itself" (1986, 471).

The picture of an idealized ancient Athens in Hyperion can be read tropologically as an allegory of nature and freedom. This allegory is the criterion by which the phases in the process of Bildung of the individual and of history are judged. The memory of Athens stands in sharp contrast to Hyperion's representation of Sparta, the Orient, and, later, the Germanic North.

More undisturbed in every way, freer from violent interference than any other people on earth, the Athenians grow into adulthood. No conqueror weakens them, no victory in war intoxicates them, no foreign religion stupefies them, no rash wisdom urges them to untimely maturity. (1969, 1: 363)

The Athenians "cannot tolerate arbitrariness, because their divine nature refuses to be upset, they cannot tolerate legality everywhere for they do not need it everywhere" (ibid., 1: 366). Hyperion draws a parallel between this picture of Athens and his happy childhood before knowledge had "ruined everything" for him. Indeed, "the child is a divine creature . . . The pressure of law and destiny does not touch it; only in the child is freedom" (ibid., 1: 298). Like Schiller, Hölderlin celebrates the inauguration of freedom in beauty. The child's freedom is one with beauty. "The first child of divine beauty is art. Thus it was among the Athenians" (ibid., 1: 365). In a sentence reminiscent of Schiller, Hyperion states that "the spiritual beauty of the Athenians produced the necessary sense for freedom" (ibid., 1: 365–366).

Sparta, in contrast, never enjoyed an unfragmented childhood situated in nature and beauty, and therefore moved into a problematic adulthood. Egyptians impassively bore "the despotism of arbitrary action" while the people of the North tolerated without resistance "the despotism of law, injustice in the form of codes of justice" (ibid., 1: 366). Here Hölderlin seems to adopt Hegel's view of the Oriental world and its submission to despotic will as a primitive stage in the history of the spirit:

Like a supreme despot, the Eastern climate in its power and splendor casts its inhabitants to the ground. Before humans learn to walk, they must kneel, before they learn to speak, they must beg; before the heart finds equilibrium, it must bend, before the spirit is strong enough to bear flowers and fruit, fate and nature drain all its strength through scorching heat. Egyptians are devoted before they are a whole so they know nothing of wholeness, of beauty, and what they call the most

sublime is a veiled power, an awful enigma; the dark, dumb Isis is their first and last, a hollow infinity and nothing reasonable has ever come out of it. Even the most sublime nothingness gives birth to nothingness. (ibid., 1: 367)

Nevertheless, the text maintains some trace of the Romantic notion of the Orient as a place of higher truth and learning. Alabanda, for example, leaves Hyperion to go to a mysterious unnamed place in the heart of Asia to benefit from its age-old wisdom. On the other hand, the North forces its pupils into introspection too soon. "If the spirit of the fiery Egyptian hurries forth to travel happily through the world, in the North, the spirit returns into itself even before it is ready to travel" (ibid., 1: 368). "Pure intellect, pure reason are always the kings of the North," adds the narrator.

Hyperion remains troubled by the contemporary dominance of the Nordic spirit. His imagination strives to refashion the German spirit on the image of the Hellenic ideal. But that spirit is too absorbed in the self, hence unable to divide itself to become different. The only way to freedom lies not in philosophical certainty or a belief in order but in the poetization of existence. And this starts at the point of positing and accepting difference. Hyperion observes that the great saying of Heraclitus about positing difference within oneself is an adage only a Greek could have found, "for it is the essence of beauty, and before that was found, there was no philosophy" (ibid., 1: 367). Without beauty there is no philosophy, and beauty only comes into being when the self separates from itself (posits itself) and recognizes this difference, this separation, as beauty. In art, the first child of divine beauty, divine humanity rejuvenates and renews itself. In order to present itself to its own consciousness, the self posits its beauty. "Thus human beings give themselves their gods. For in the beginning humans and their gods were one, when, unknown to itself, eternal beauty was " (ibid., 1: 365). This view is heavily indebted to Schelling's philosophy of art. As Schelling argues at the end of System of Transcendental Idealism, art is the only genuine agent and document of philosophy because it

continues to authenticate what philosophy cannot represent in external form, namely the unconscious element in action and production and its original identity with the conscious. . . . The view of nature which the philosopher appropriates artificially [künstlich ] is, for art [Kunst ], the original and natural one. (1979, 272)

Thus, artistic representation coincides with a primordial, natural reality or truth. This is what Hyperion seeks. His poetic language is cast in a mythological idiom that permanently recalls Greece as a preeminent topos of divine utterance.

Hyperion charts the course of Bildung as a move toward a new intimacy with the divinities of a mythologized past. The present makes a mockery of an aesthetic and moral education. In his letters to Diotima Hyperion records fragmented memories of a bloody war: "It is over, Diotima! Our people have plundered, murdered indiscriminately" (1969, 1: 399). With the triumph of barbarism and the defeat of primordial Greek sensibility, language loses its emancipatory force and becomes a tool of oppression. Hyperion therefore seeks silence: "I can scarcely speak. . . . Language is a great superfluity. The best is ever for itself, and rests in its own depth like the pearl at the bottom of the sea" (ibid., 1: 400). Silence is the language of the poetic, after the poetic is disappointed by language. When Hyperion receives no word of farewell from Diotima after a long wait, he writes to her, "but you remain silent. That, too, is a language of your beautiful soul, Diotima" (ibid., 1: 402).

After his profound disappointment in modern-day Greeks—"I have nothing more to do with the Greeks" (ibid., 1: 400)—Hyperion's rendezvous with contemporary Germany proves even more devastating:

So I arrived among the Germans. I did not demand much and was prepared to find even less. I came humbly, like the homeless, blind Oedipus to the gates of Athens. . . . Barbarians all along, they have grown more barbarous through industry and science and even religion, and are profoundly incapable of any divine emotion. . . . It is a hard saying, and yet I speak it because it is the truth: I can think of no people more torn apart than the Germans. You see artisans, but no human beings, thinkers, but no human beings, priests, but no human beings, masters and servants, but no human beings, youths and adults, but no human beings—is this not like a battlefield where hacked-off hands and arms and every other member lie pell-mell, while the life-blood drained from them vanishes in the sand? (ibid., 1: 433)

The only salvation from the memory of this bloodbath lies in recourse to the primordial unity of all beauty: "There will be but one beauty; and humanity and nature will be united in one all-embracing Divinity" (ibid., 1: 375). The locus of this transcendental re-

covery is poetry where a new poetic history or a new mythology is constituted in the encounter of the past with the future. This vision corroborates Schlegel's statement that only poetry serves as both model and remembrance (1958, 19: 5, no. 19). The model of Hölderlin's Greece is an allegory of the historical realization of an emancipatory and anticipatory vision. Thus, the projection of myth in Hölderlin re-calls the memory of this allegory.

The vision of a new mythology as the only feasible Bildung is borne out by the content of a short and incomplete text called "Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus" (The earliest systematic program of German idealism) and discovered by Franz Rosenzweig among a collection of Hegel's papers and published in 1917.^[2] This fragmentary document has been variously attributed to Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy read the "program" as a text that introduces a disruptive break "within the philosophical, . . . a distortion and a deviation, which inaugurates the genuinely modern position of the philosophical (which is still our own, in more ways than one)" (1988, 29). In "Hölderlin und der deutsche Idealismus" (Hölderlin and German Idealism) Ernst Cassirer concludes that the author of the "System" is in all probability Hölderlin (1971, 132–135). Cassirer claims that, after a meeting with Hölderlin in the summer of 1795, Schelling perhaps conceived of a new duty for philosophy inspired greatly by Hölderlin's vision of the role of art. Indeed, the decisive insight of the text that "the philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy" is the site where Idealism gives way to Romanticism. Like Schlegel's fragment 116 in the Athenäum, this text serves as a kind of manifesto of Romantic idealism. Its foremost item stipulates the representation of the self as absolutely free: "The first idea is, of course, the representation [Vorstellung ] of myself, as an absolutely free being. With the free, self-conscious being arises simultaneously a whole world —from nothingness—the only true and conceivable creation from nothingness " (1969, 2: 647).^[3] The world is created out of nothingness by the self-consciously free self. The subject's free self-presentation is the true form of the world. This reaffirms the Fichtean idea of the absolute self as self-consciousness.

The absolute freedom of consciousness is the possibility of the system: "Only that which is the object of freedom is called idea " (ibid., 2: 647). And the idea of beauty unites the ideas of consciousness, knowledge, and ethics. It is the ideal idea. It sublates all con-

tradiction and resolves the opposition between system and freedom or, to use Kantian terms, necessity and freedom. This resolution takes place, implies the text, in the act of poetic representation. Philosophy realizes itself, becomes conscious of itself, when it represents itself in art. "I am convinced," reads the text, "that the highest act of reason, which covers all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are related only in beauty " (ibid., 2: 648). Without a sense for the aesthetic, philosophy can only be a philosophy of the letter. Hyperion sees the work of all understanding devoid of the "beauty of spirit," as a labor of mere necessity (ibid., 1: 369). If "the philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy" (ibid., 2: 648), then poetry as Hyperion 's lesson shows is the teacher of humanity. Diotima assigns this pedagogical role to Hyperion who embarks on a symbolic search for the divine embodiment of beauty. In farewell Diotima says to Hyperion: "You will be the teacher of our people, you will be a great man, I hope" (ibid., 1: 375).

The "System Program" continues with a plea for a sensible religion, that is, a material form of art that engages the human senses: "We often hear that the masses need a sensible religion . Not only the great masses but also the philosopher needs this. Monotheism of the reason and of the heart, polytheism of the imagination and of art, that is what we need!" (ibid., 2: 648). This implies a new mythology of reason—a reconstituted mythology which stands to inherit the poetic configurations of a re-visioned idealism. And this mythology constitutes a religion of free will. "Do you know," Alabanda asks Hyperion, "why I have never given death any thought? I feel a life in me which no god created and no mortal begot. I believe that we exist through ourselves and that only through our own free desire are we so intimately bound to all." What meaning would life have if the world "were not a harmony of free beings?" (ibid., 1: 421). This freedom defines the priesthood of poetry. In Diotima's words Hyperion will be "the priest of divine nature" (ibid., 1: 429). At the height of the bankruptcy of reason, morality, and politics which informs the present age, the hope of healing lies in a new religion of the beautiful. And Hyperion heals as he writes, understands the state of affairs better as he recounts it, and understands the continuity and necessity of horror in history and the loss of Alabanda and Diotima. "We depart," he remembers Diotima saying, "only to be more intimately united, more divinely at peace with

all, with ourselves. We die in order to live" (ibid., 1: 428). In this sense time flows backward and death leads to youth and birth.

The focus on a new mythology as a means of recollecting the lost lessons of history and as a moral corrective to the idolatrous worship of reason in modernity marks the path of Romantic Bildung . In a certain sense, this path originates in a work that was unacknowledged at the time of its publication and forgotten soon afterward but recovered and much acclaimed in recent critical history. In 1725 a distinguished Italian jurist by the name of Giambattista Vico published a book called Scienza nuova (The new science). The key to this new science lay in Vico's perception that the so-called primitive peoples when properly understood reveal themselves as neither naïve nor savage but instinctively poetic in their response to the world. This response issues from their inherent "poetic wisdom" (sapienza poetica ) which governs their interaction with the world and reveals itself in forms of poetic representation such as myth and symbol. The mythical universe of the ancients is then not to be understood as a mode of ingenuous coping but as an attitude of a radically different order whose ultimate function is cognitive. The mythical accounts of creation are not supernatural visions of the primitive eye but means of encoding the world and coming to terms with its mysteries. All myths are rooted in the actual experience of the ancients and represent their attempts to impose a graspable, human shape on nature. Vico's theory of myth represents one of the earliest modern arguments to base the importance of art on the notion that abstract thought emerges from mythical imagination and iconic expression. Vico consequently reverses the rationalistic understanding of poetic tropes as forms of deviation from standard language. He regards them as both temporally and logically prior to abstract thought. In the final analysis, it is the faculty of poetic wisdom which displays a consistent ability to deploy myth and metaphor in the translation of the mysteries of nature into earthly vision. The conclusion inherent in Vico's argument is that how we articulate the world determines our way of arriving at what we call reality.

This poetic reality implicitly criticizes the idea of the Enlightenment that the world is a rationally ordered whole. Such criticism finds its forceful expression in Novalis's notion of Romantisieren (romanticizing) which "is nothing other than a qualitative potenti-

ation. . . . This operation is as yet quite unknown. By attibuting a higher meaning to the ordinary, a mysterious appearance to the commonplace, the worth of the unknown to the known, the appearance of infinity to finitude, I romanticize them" (1960, 2: 545, no. 105). In other words, knowledge is not limited to the sphere of the rationally and quantitatively accountable and verifiable. Through the transcendental vision of poetic wisdom, images, dreams, and memories expand and diversify the human capacity for understanding. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen poetic understanding shows itself capable of being realized both in the real world of representable time and space and in a world that is beyond a representable reality where time and space form a seamless continuum in memory and anticipation.