Modal Revolutions: Friedrich Hölderlin and the Task of Poetry

I

One of the many pathways of modernity travels along an intellectual trajectory that is increasingly skeptical of and hostile toward the concept of necessity, a concept that once played a dominant role in metaphysical and ontological thought from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the narrator of Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften would have us believe that the human being is endowed with two fundamental modes of access to the world: the sense for reality (Wirklichkeitssinn) and the sense for possibility (Möglichkeitssinn).¹ There is no mention of a sense for necessity, or what would otherwise be called a Notwendigkeitssinn. The erosion of the force of necessity over the mind opens a space of counter-attraction, releasing a gravitational pull toward contingency, or the sense that there is nothing necessary as such about the world of the given: all that exists could just as well be otherwise.² Necessity can reappear from time to time as a second-order logical category, albeit channeled back into contingency, in which its central (and seemingly paradoxical) formula becomes: the necessity of contingency.³ Necessity as such, however, as an integral part of the thickness of experience itself, withdraws into the unthinkable. Musil’s text functions as a barometer of this shift. So absurd, irrelevant, archaic and patently metaphysical is the modality of necessity to this particular self-understanding of the modern subject that it cannot even be labeled a conspicuous absence. Necessity has simply vanished from the horizon of thought.

The death knell of necessity as a purely metaphysical category, as the ontological ground of a well-organized, divinely sanctioned cosmos, begins with Kant’s reinterpretation of modality in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. However, Kant does not dismiss the importance of necessity as much as transfer all forms of modality from the realm of metaphysical truth to forms of judgment related to the conditions of possibility of experience: ontological modality becomes transcendental modality. The functions of modality become translated into “moments of thinking in general,” construed as a movement from “problematic” possible judgments, to “assertoric” real judgments, and finally to a realm of necessity that is inextricably bound up with the transcendental scaffolding of the understanding:

Weil nun hier alles sich gradweise dem Verstande einverleibt, so daß man zuvor etwas problematisch urteilt, darauf auch wohl es assertorisch als wahr annimmt, endlich als unzertrennlich mit dem Verstande verbunden, d.i. als notwendig und apodiktisch behauptet, so kann man diese drei Funktionen der Modalität auch so viel Momente des Denkens überhaupt nennen.⁴

The modality of necessity therefore coincides with the universal validity of Kant’s own critical philosophy and represents the telos in the schema of movements comprising philosophical thought. As it was for pre-critical metaphysicians such as Leibniz and Wolff, the necessary is still linked to a form of truth, albeit only by reinterpreting modality from the perspective of transcendental philosophy and by considering its relationship to the conditions that make experience possible.

Writing in the wake of Kantian transcendental philosophy, Hegel also reinterprets necessity as a form of metadiscursivity, or the logic whereby logic itself unfolds. In the Hegelian dialectic, necessity appears not as the opposite of contingency, but rather, as a second-order characteristic of the self-organization of spirit that acknowledges, makes a space for, and affirms contingency as an integral part of its own unfolding.⁵ Hegel’s philosophy—in each of its various permutations, in the Phänomenologie as well as in the Enzyklopädie—nevertheless testifies to an abiding dissatisfaction with the formal and empty character of Kant’s displacement of necessity to the sphere of the universal a priori conceptuality of the understanding. Kant’s interpretation of necessity is bloodless, detaching itself from the validity of the lived practices and norms embodied by individuals who act within a socially and historically conditioned world. In contrast, Hegelian necessity describes the process through which one may give an account of one’s historical moment and, if this account proves successful, ultimately affirm the intelligibility of one...