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Abstract

In the context of his reflections on aesthetic theory around 1800 Hölderlin suggests that humanity despite all their art and cognitive endeavour need to respect the “spirit of nature”, “for as much as they have accomplished, [they] cannot create living beings.” For Hölderlin life is the primordial matter of nature and human existence. The human intellect can embark on life’s trajectory, benefit of it as the driving force of all organic metamorphoses and transformative powers of nature, but it cannot appropriate life for its own self-centred purposes.

Hölderlin’s reflections on the relationship between nature and art unfold as the core structure in his critique of the contemporary philosophical discourse – known as the discourse of German enlightenment and idealism –, namely of Schiller’s theory of artistic “play”. Hölderlin builds most radically on Immanuel Kant’s transcendental Critique of Reason, which divides the world into two ontological spheres: that of being, or nature, and that of volition, or morality and human practice and art. An ontological abyss gapes, according to Kant, between the world of human practice and art, and the world of natural being. It was the philosophical ambition of idealist thought to bridge that Kantian abyss between nature and human autonomy. Hölderlin, however, aimed at establishing a third intellectual force supplementary to both. It was meant to attribute new significance to the aesthetic, thus trying to establish a third domain of ontological truth, one that would enable human awareness of life, supplementing the two Kantian domains of being and praxis, and reconciling humanity with nature in a new approach of poetic awareness.

In our presentation we will trace poetic perceptions of nature in Hölderlin’s unfolding discourse on aesthetic theory. They defy the categorical submission of natural life under human intellectual potencies as it prevails in contemporary discourses of Kant’s enlightenment and Schiller’s idealism.

Speaker Bio

Gert Hofmann teaches German Literature in UCC’s German Department. He previously held faculty positions as Assistant and Full Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Seoul and Leibniz University Hanover. He was invited as a guest scholar to the University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, and Université de Montréal. His research focus is on (eco)critical theory and the border areas of literature and philosophy. He just completed his third monograph entitled Poetik des Leibes (Poetics of the Body).

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