Abstract
In 1796, having just returned to Nürtingen from a yearlong sojourn in Jena under the auspices of his intellectual benefactor Schiller, Hölderlin reveals in a letter to his friend Immanuel Niethammer his plan of writing “Neue Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung” (“New Letters on the Aesthetic Education”). The title is an overtly impudent affront to Schiller, whose “Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen” (“Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”) dominate at the time the discourse on aesthetics and philosophical anthropology (published in Schiller’s own journal Horen in 1795). Staging his argument in radical opposition to Schiller, he emphasises that he wants to “make disappear” the antagonism between “our Self and the world” in a theoretical approach, i. e. as an immediate “intellectual intuition, without practical reason having to come to our aid.” Criticising Schiller’s Spieltheorie, Hölderlin aims to develop human “aesthetic sense” as an intellectual capacity in its own right, and as a genuine way to undercut the Kantian aporia between intelligible freedom and empirical necessity, without degrading the aesthetic sense of art and poetry to a playground of propaedeutic exercise for the advancement of practical reason. Even though Hölderlin never realised this project of “Neue Briefe,” in some of his latest writings before his final mental breakdown, he seems to have undertaken a radical attempt to formulate some of the principles of a post-idealist poetic which propagates a sovereign aesthetic sense of Zärtlichkeit (tenderness) and suggests an intellectual experience (rather than intuition) of the ultimately groundless shape of human life in an aesthetic of “tenderness” which appears to be subject to the corporeal conditions of human existence before being manifested in the transcendental realm of human consciousness.
