Epochal Discordance: Holderlin's Philosophy of Tragedy

Epilogue

Who says law (das Gesetz) says posit (das Gesetzte), and who says posit says halt and the halted, thetic act and tragic denial. A knowledge that should keep us from being startled when (the lesson of the tragedians) the good reveals itself in double prescriptions. 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 between Nature and Art, as these are referred to in much of his Empedocles corpus). Although the situation of tragedy remains, for him, constant, how the tragic is understood within this situation does not. Whereas Hegel’s philosophy of tragedy develops, elaborates, and maintains a firm theoretical basis, Hölderlin, in an agonized labor of thought, calls into question and subverts aspects of the speculative matrix of tragedy that he had himself elaborated in texts such as “Concerning the Tragic,” “Ground for Empedocles,” and “The Fatherland in Decline.” The task this Epilogue sets itself will therefore be to mark out, in retrospect, the path, with its way-stations and turnings , of Hölderlin’s tragic thought. Hölderlin’s tragic protagonist, Empedocles, is a figure who has reached sublime heights of spiritual (as well as intellectual and artistic) self-development . The First and Second Versions stress that, to achieve this realization, and to be able to exercise the beneficent powers in which it found expression, he had to repudiate all human guidance and entrust himself solely and directly to the pure primordial elements of Nature. Although his situation within an epochal crisis and transition is not explicitly thematized in the first two versions , it bespeaks itself in his break with all the philosophical and religious 105 Epilogue thought-forms available to him and in his direct communion with the pure elemental energies (ultimately the sheer energy of light) from which flows the mature ethically and socially transformative or even revolutionary vision expressed in his final testament. Although Empedocles is a figure from antiquity, Hölderlin situates him on the threshold of modernity; and his hybristic transgression (encouraged by the very distance that separates him from his own people and from its religious functionaries) is the peculiarly modern one of the self-exaltation of subjectivity (which shatters the cosmic differential unity he had affirmed). In this spirit, Empedocles not only proclaims or accepts the divinization of his own person, but also desacralizes Nature by his quest for mastery; and he perverts the poetic word that should have been his offering to Nature into the supposed ground of Nature’s spiritual life. Although there are already indications, in the first two versions, that the protagonist’s fundamental hybris lies in his seeking to encompass, in his own singular indivduality, the differential whole of Nature (so as to accomplish a reconciliation of the warring aorgic and organic principles) and that his singular self must therefore be destroyed, this thought is not as yet clearly articulated . Empedocles’ self-immolation therefore constitutes an act of atonement , self-purification, and reunion with “all-transforming Nature,” more than a genuine sacrifice that would be called for by an imminent turning of the times. Moreover, Hölderlin puts into the mouth of his character Delia a challenge to the sacrificial or death-embracing enthusiasm of Empedocles and his intimates in the name of the inherent validity and beauty of mortal life in its finitude. There are thus from the outset two voices that contest each other in his dramatization of the self-sacrifice of an exceptional, transgressive individual caught up in an epochal transition. One can perhaps say that they enunciate a “double prescription.” In the Third Version and the body of essays connected with it, Empedocles is a tragic figure in that he, as a man of exceptional gifts, has been born into a time, culture, and place in which the aorgic and organic forces manifest their “highest antagonism,” and in that he feels called upon to reconcile them, so as to benefit his people. Hölderlin’s tragic thought here remains under the Hegelian aegis of reconciliation. Although Empedocles succeeds remarkably in reconciling the warring forces in his concrete and sensuous individuality, this reconciliation must necessarily and immediately disintegrate ; for “the sacred spirit of life...