An Ontological Study of Death: From Hegel to Heidegger

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79 2 Hölderlin Dialectical Death and Ontological Guilt [W]ithout death there is no life. —Hölderlin, Hyperion By the time the Phenomenology of Spirit appeared in the spring of 1807, Hegel’s erstwhile companion and collaborator had suffered a mental breakdown from which he would never recover. Hölderlin, who had lost contact with Hegel since the latter’s move to Jena in 1801, and had experienced his share of bouts with nervous disorders throughout the early 1800s, became permanently incapacitated in the fall of 1806. His life thus became split exactly into two halves. From 1770 to 1806 he functioned for the most part as a relatively normal—albeit highly gifted and somewhat temperamental—human being, producing some of the greatest poetry of the German language. The second half of his life, 1807–43, was spent back in Tübingen in the care of a family not his own. For these latter 36 years, a period during which his reputation as a poet was gradually spreading throughout Germany, he remained unaware of his past identity and previous literary production . The most critical phase of Hölderlin’s development with respect to the problem of death remains, however, his Frankfurt/ Homburg years, particularly the time he spent together with Hegel. During this stretch of creative partnership from early 1797 through 1800, he worked on the second volume of Hyperion as well as on his Empedocles project, both of which evince numerous parallels to the main ideas expressed in Hegel’s Frankfurt manuscripts. Generally speaking, a pronounced dialectical or at least synthetic mode of thought operates throughout Hölderlin’s writings, whether these be literary, epistolary , or theoretical in nature. As with Hegel, Hölderlin’s entire way of thinking revolves around the reconciliation of opposites and the overcoming of dualisms. More specifically, death pervades the pages of his texts. My discussion of Hölderlin will pursue this theme of death within the broader pattern of dialectics. I will mainly focus on his unfinished drama The Death of Empedocles, but will also consider a variety of other works, including the novel Hyperion as well as a selection of essays, letters, and poems. THE PROBLEM OF UNIFICATION AND DIALECTICS Even before his collaboration with Hegel in Frankfurt, Hölderlin was striving for a solution to the metaphysical dualisms that haunted the Enlightenment thinking of his day. Thus, while Hegel was still deeply entrenched in dualistic paradigms during his Kantian phase in Berne, Hölderlin had already been taking major steps toward developing a unification philosophy and aesthetic. He articulates this goal in a number of letters and essays and, more obliquely, in his poetic works. As a prelude to my analysis of death and its dialectical function in Hyperion and Empedocles, I will discuss Hölderlin’s general conception of dialectics, though it is important to note that he never uses this precise term, even in its adjectival form. Like the early Hegel, Hölderlin does not advocate a dialectical philosophy as such; his approach is far less methodical. He is simply—and, in the end, rather naively—trying to restore a sense of unity to a fragmented world that has become alienated from its classical roots. Like Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and many other Grecophiles of the time, Hölderlin yearned for the holistic life of the ancient Greek citizen, who was both autonomous individual and participant in the universal. The ideal of hen kai pan that Hölderlin and Hegel pursued well beyond their seminary days expresses 80 An Ontological Study of Death precisely this aim of finding an underlying unity in the midst of a chaotic plurality. The comparatively brief years of Hölderlin’s literary activity are filled with concerted attempts to overcome the subject-object divide and instill a sense of harmony in the torn existence of the modern individual. “Judgment and Being” (1795) In a theoretical sketch from 1795 that goes by the title “Urteil und Sein” (Judgment and Being), Hölderlin makes a tentative attempt to find a dialectical solution to the division between subject and object, a division that he believes inevitably arises through conscious acts of judgment or reflection. His point is more effectively made in the original German: Urteil ( judgment) corresponds etymologically or at least morphologically to Ur-teilung, an “original separation.”1 Consciousness is thus more than just intentional; it is literally divisive, for...