The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine

4 FIGURES OF PLANT VULNERABILITY Empedocles and the Tragic Christ

The genuine philosophical act is suicide; this is the real beginning of all philosophy, the direction in which all the needs of philosophical devotees go, and only this act corresponds to all the conditions and distinguishing marks of transcendental action. —Novalis, Fragment (1797) Initially, nothing seems more distant from the tragic insights of Hölderlin than the optimistic philosophy of Hegel’s dialectic. We will ultimately characterize Hegel’s method as a repudiation of the vegetative soul, a replacement of the unconscious vulnerability of the plant trope by the cognitive vigor and aggressive self-preservation of the animal. In early writings, however, Hegel surprisingly brings up many of the same themes that we have been discussing with reference to Hölderlin. In contrasting Hegel’s obsession with Christ with Hölderlin’s equal enthusiasm for the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles—both of whom are described by these thinkers as figures of plantlike vulnerability—one sees most clearly where the two thinkers began to take separate paths. These paths diverge in the nuances of the motif of self-sacrifice as opposed to that of suicide.1 Thus, although in some respects Hegel’s logic seems to follow the contours of the vegetative soul, ultimately, his work embraces animal individuation, albeit on the grandest of scales. 4 FIGURES OF PLANTVULNERABILITY Empedocles and the Tragic Christ 99 This chapter will serve to mark the contrast, arising from the closest of proximities, between the embrace and the rejection of the vegetative model of individuation and subjectivity. In his 1910 essay on Hölderlin, Wilhelm Dilthey was the first to show the connection between Hölderlin’s Empedocles and Hegel’s depiction of Jesus Christ in the early essay that has been posthumously entitled “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal.”2 Christoph Jamme’s study “Ein ungelehrtes Buch”: Die philosophische Gemeinschaft zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt 1797–1800 elaborates on this connection in the work of Hegel and Hölderlin.3 In 1797 and 1798, when both Hölderlin and Hegel were living in Frankfurt, Hegel composed the fragments later collected by Hermann Nohl under the title “The Spirit of Christianity and its Destiny” (1799)4 and Hölderlin wrote the first version of a tragedy entitled The Death of Empedocles, which was subsequently never completed. Hölderlin completed the second and third drafts in Homburg, near Frankfurt, and it has been argued that in particular the third draft shows the influence of Hegel on his work. Hölderlin arguably influenced Hegel’s conception of the historical Christ in an equally significant manner. Through a chiasmic transference, Hölderlin’s Empedocles takes on more and more of the characteristics of Hegel’s Christ, while Hegel’s Christ becomes a Greek, so that in the end neither figure resembles its historical counterpart so much as it testifies to the themes that lie at the heart of German Idealism. In 1797 Hölderlin had already been serving as a tutor to the Gontard family in Frankfurt for two years when through his connections he found Hegel a similar post with another family there. Letters exchanged between the two friends bear witness to the great joy they took in each other’s company. During the two years that Hegel and Hölderlin both lived in Frankfurt they spent most of their time together, and their thoughts recorded at the time are remarkably similar, although Hegel presented his ideas as a study of the historical Jesus and Christianity , Hölderlin as a tragedy about the philosopher Empedocles. According to Pöggeler, the philosophical encounter between the two friends culminated in a new thinking of the phenomenon of beauty as a tragic process.5 At this period in his life Hegel came to consider Jesus to be a tragic down-going figure in the same way that Hölderlin described Empedocles. The historical figures of Christ and Empedocles share many characteristics that Hegel and Hölderlin emphasized: both Jesus and Empedocles proclaimed themselves to be divine or intimate with the divine, both had a small loyal following but a greater antagonistic resistance in the form of the power of a positive, tradition- and law-governed religion, and both met untimely deaths, Jesus through a willing self-sac100 The Vegetative Soul rifice at the hands of the government, Empedocles as a (rumored) suicide . It is precisely the differences between these two figures, however, that will set...