Review of Klassische deutsche Philosophie (7): Hölderlin,Wilhelm von Humboldt

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)

Part 7 of a review of Wolfgang Förster, Klassische deutsche Philosophie: Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung [Classical German Philosophy: The Basic Lines of Its Development] (2008)

Hölderlin, like Schiller and Goethe is best known as a poet. And Förster relies heavily on his literary works in describing his significance for German philosophy. Hölderlin studied theology at the Tübinger Stift (Seminary) and, like Schilling, his view of the world was heavily influenced by his engagement with Pietism. He took the vision of God’s kingdom (“Reich Gottes”) on earth and eventually developed it into a vision of a future earthly Utopia that was still religious but quite far from Protestant Pietism. He viewed ancient Greece as a time when people experienced the gods as an intimate part of daily life. He thought that it was necessary to go through a time when the divine was seen and experienced in Nature, to be followed by an eventual “return of the gods”. In this happy future condition, humanity would be freed from its current condition of Zerissenheit, of being torn apart.

Hölderlin’s central concern over humanity’S Zerrissenheit led him to criticize Fichte’s philosophy for not comprehending the true identity of Subject and Object. Like his friends Schelling and Hegel and their contemporaries, Hölderlin’s views were heavily shaped by the French Revolution. Though his vision of history always carried a heavy religious component, he interpreted it in a radical-democratic sense, with a heavy emphasis on equality. And, not surprisingly, his thinking gave a central place to aesthetics and the ideal of Beauty. Förster quotes from "Hyperion" to indicate Hölderlin’s attitude toward the established political order: “Immerhin hat das den Staat zur Hölle gemacht, daß ihn der Mensch zu seinem Himmel machen wollen. (The state has always made into Hell what man wanted to make into heaven).“

That statement would likely have been congenial to America’s Founders, who were cautious about the tendency of any state to encroach on individual liberty.

Wilhelm, Freiherr von Humboldt (1767-1835)

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is known for his early liberal theory of the state and in particular the kind of Enlightenment Absolutist monarch established in Prussia by Frederick the Great. After 1806, he served in the Prussian diplomatic service and was a moving force in founding Berlin University and of educational reforms in Prussia.

Förster focuses on Humboldt’s linguistic ideas and work; Humboldt argued that speech is the "bildende Organ" (constructing organ) of thought, that thinking and language and the laws of both were intimately connected. He also connected speech with the liberal-democratic concept of the national in the usual European sense of seeing nation as synonymous with a culture and a people:

Die Sprache ist tief in die geistige Entwicklung der Menschheit verschlungen, sie begleitet diesselbe auf jeder Stufe ihres localen Vor- un Rückschreitens, und der jedesmalige Culturzustand wird auch in ihr erkennbar.

[Language is deeply entwined in the spiritual development of humanity. It [speech] accompanies itself in every level of its [human development’s] local progress and regress. And the cultural situation will always also be recognizable in it.]

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