Hölderlin's "Der Ister" and Ecology in Rochelle Tobias's "Untamed Earth"

A recurring theme in Rochelle Tobias's work is the relationship between poetry and the world, in particular nature. She draws on literary theorists and philosophers like Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe, or Husserl to explore what she understands as the epistemological and formative function of poetry in relation to nature ("Ecology" and "Mythology;" see Khan in this issue). At the same time, Tobias seeks to avoid taking idealist or constructivist positions that limit our concepts, perceptions, or sensations of the outside world to expressions of our own cognitive or physical makeup, and that reduce poetic images of nature to linguistic or social constructions. Instead, she is sympathetic to Schelling's natural philosophy, which maintains that consciousness is present in nature itself ("Introduction" 1), and, in particular, to Hölderlin's addendum that nature needs poetry to formulate its consciousness:

Poetry is necessary for nature not only to appear but also to be thought. This represents Hölderlin's contribution to the tradition of natural philosophy and to the theory and practice of the lyric.

("Introduction" 1)

Hölderlin's understanding of nature as consciousness and of poetry as the expression, or even realization of this consciousness, contributes, in Tobias's view, found in the introduction to her recent edited volume on Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature (2020), not only to the "tradition of natural philosophy" but also to "contemporary environmental thought in an age of crisis" (15). She argues that Hölderlin, like environmental theorists, insists on the inseparability of natural and human history and believes that both co-evolve, in a relationship that is characterized by conflicting, productive and destructive forces. On the one hand, nature performs a "cycle of appearing and disappearing," on the other hand, it has an "impulse toward formlessness," which Hölderlin calls "the aorgic" and which humans counter, in turn, with their formative power.¹ While Tobias does not explicitly relate nature's consciousness to its conflicting structure, it seems plausible that the latter is an expression of the former—of nature's self-reflection, which requires that it differentiates itself into contrasting elements. According to Tobias, Hölderlin shows that the ecological crisis has its roots in a philosophically necessary relationship of nature toward itself and toward humans.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth—Hölderlin was born in 1770 and died in 1843—his work speaks with renewed vigour in its emphasis on the cycle of appearing and disappearing that would seem to be tailor made for an age of ecological crisis. Long before the concept of the Anthropocene was introduced, Hölderlin was well aware that human history could not be extricated from natural history for complicated reasons including the impulses toward formlessness inherent in nature. One could say that he anticipated the idea of the human being as what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called a 'geological agent' in underscoring the droughts, floods and other disasters that humans at once trigger and endure—trigger as participants in a cosmic natural scheme, of which they are unaware, and endure as finite beings who must weather the elements.

("Introduction" 1–2)

Several questions arise in reflecting on these statements. First of all, is there is not a significant difference between conceiving of human beings as "participants in a cosmic natural scheme"—a thought that Tobias ascribes to Hölderlin—and the understanding of humans as "geological agents" that finds its expression in naming the current geological epoch the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer)? Secondly, the philosophical interpretation of the nature-human relationship as conflicting and self-reflective that Tobias discovers in Hölderlin's work gives this relationship a semblance of necessity, but is it necessary that humans destroy and threaten nature and, indeed, life on earth, in fundamental ways, as captured by the term Anthropocene? Thirdly, has the fact that nature is both a creative and a destructive force not been a topic in mythology, religion, philosophy, and literature for hundreds and thousands of years prior to Hölderlin? What does he contribute to these traditions? And...