Epochal Discordance

Epochal Discordance

Download PDF (46.0 KB)
 

Contents

Download PDF (39.7 KB)
pp. vii-viii

Prefatory Note

Download PDF (31.6 KB)
pp. xi-

All translations from the German and French are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Translations from the Greek are based on the Greek texts cited and, where indicated, on other translations consulted, which have for the most part been modified. In citing Greek names, I have generally rendered the letter ...

Prologue

Download PDF (43.1 KB)
pp. 1-6

It is astonishing that this book—completed, as it happens, almost exactly two centuries after the publication (in April 1804) of Hölderlin's Sophocles translations—remains one of the first two efforts to study Hölderlin's thought on tragedy as a whole from the three fragmentary versions of his own tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, and the body of essays on the poetics and ...

1. The Tragic Turning and Tragic Paradigm in Philosophy

Download PDF (98.3 KB)
pp. 7-28

Toward the close of the eighteenth century, tragedy, which had been of scant interest to philosophers since Plato and Aristotle, began to move to the forefront of German thought. Not only was this tragic turning of philosophy sustained well into the nineteenth century, it also surfaced anew in the first half of the twentieth century in the work of Martin Heidegger. Whereas Plato and ...

2. Communing with the Pure Elements: The First Two Versions of The Death of Empedocles

Download PDF (66.8 KB)
pp. 29-40

Hölderlin wrote to Ludwig Neuffer from Homburg on 4 June 1799 that he had completed his tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, except for the last act, and that he expected to publish it in the literary periodical (Iduna, named for the ancient Germanic goddess of dawn) that he was seeking to found.^{1<./sup> To his half-brother Karl Gok, he wrote on the same day of the "slow love and effort" ...}

3. Singularity and Reconciliation: The Third Version of The Death of Empedocles

Download PDF (65.1 KB)
pp. 41-54

Having abandoned the Second Version of The Death of Empedocles in late 1799, Hölderlin sought to work out his philosophy of tragedy and to clarify issues as to the poetics of tragedy in the essay now titled "Concerning the Tragic," which is comprised of three parts: a reflection on the tragic ode, the "General Ground," and the "Ground for Empedocles."¹ In manuscript, the "Plan for the Third ...

4. Between Hölderlin's Empedocles and Empedocles of Akragas

Download PDF (73.0 KB)
pp. 55-64

Although Hölderlin relied mainly on Diogenes Laërtius's account of Empedocles' life and thought, without benefit of critical scholarship,¹ his dramatization is both erudite and philosophically insightful. Given his own strongly held democratic (or, in the terminology of his time, "republican") and egalitarian political ideals (notably as they inspired the French Revolution), he shows ...

5. The Faithless Turning: Hölderlin's Reading of Oedipus Tyrannos

Download PDF (63.8 KB)
pp. 65-74

Given the loss of the manuscripts of Hölderlin's translations of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone and the fact that his epistolary discussion or mention of the translations is limited to six letters, most of them addressed to his publisher Friedrich Wilmans and written between late September 1803 and April 1804,¹ it is not possible to date the inception of the work or ...

6. Dys-Limitation and the "Patriotic Turning": Sophocles' Antigone

Download PDF (83.9 KB)
pp. 75-90

If Antigone has retained a power to fascinate and haunt sensibility, thought, and imagination that is probably unrivalled by other tragic characters (only the epic figure of Odysseus seems, in this respect and within ancient Greek literature, her equal), Hölderlin himself indicates the fundamental conditions that empower a poetic work to present such a figure. He ...

7. From an Agonistic of Powers to a Homecoming: Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Sophocles

Download PDF (77.9 KB)
pp. 91-104

Greek tragedy is, for Heidegger, an initial and significant modality of thinking the being of beings in its essential interrelation with and differentiation from becoming (phainesthiai) and semblance (Schein), as well as thinking (Denken) and obligation (Sollen). In Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, Heidegger understands Oedipus Tyrannos as "a single strife between semblance ..,.

Epilogue

Download PDF (41.2 KB)
pp. 105-110

Hegel situates tragedy not only within ethicality, but also within the domain of law as the scene of nomic conflict or, in Schürmann's terms, of double prescriptions, and of the quest for a justice that brings these imperatives into balance. ¹ Hölderlin situates tragedy in the context of an epochal transition that exacerbates the conflict between the aorgic and the organic principles (or ...

Notes

Download PDF (101.3 KB)
pp. 111-132

Bibliography

Download PDF (44.2 KB)
pp. 133-138

Index of Persons and Topics

Download PDF (69.4 KB)
pp. 139-143