In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 125-142 [Access article in PDF] Hölderlin's Poetic Self-consciousness James H. Donelan Nur ihren Gesang sollt' ich vergessen, nur diese Seelentöne sollten nimmer wiederkehren in meinen unaufhörlichen Träumen. I should forget only her song, only these notes of the soul should never return in my unending dreams. Hölderlin, Hyperion I FOR MANY YEARS, Friedrich Hölderlin has occupied a crucial position in both literary and philosophical (...) history. Well-known literary theorists, such as Walter Benjamin, Peter Szondi, and Paul de Man, have described him as the poet who made the transition from German Classicism to Romanticism. Several major philosophers, including Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank, claim that Hölderlin's insights into Kantian and Fichtean metaphysics were vital to Schelling's and Hegel's far more famous accounts of subjectivity. Either contribution alone would make Hölderlin an important figure in intellectual history; it is almost miraculous that he managed both, especially when one considers the brevity of his career, a span of only ten or twelve productive years.What accounts for this remarkable dual achievement? Historical accident and tremendous talent give us only a partial answer. Hölderlin was fortunate to have Hegel and Schelling as close friends at the Tübinger Stift, and to move to Jena precisely when it had become a center for new thinking in both literary and philosophical circles. He had enormous ability both for ancient Greek and poetic meter, allowing him to benefit from his predecessors and his contemporaries [End Page 125] in remarkable ways. However, his parallel accomplishments in philosophy and poetry are linked by more than just happenstance and genius. In my view, they represent the continuous development of a solution to a single problem, that of self-consciousness, realized in poetic form through an idea of music. For Hölderlin, making the transition from philosopher to poet required him to establish a connection between Idealist theories of self-consciousness and the material world. To meet this challenge, he constituted himself as a self-conscious poet through both theoretical and actual poetic creations, and constituted a musical-poetic voice, or Gesang, within his poetry as a means of joining the abstractions of philosophy with the concrete voice of the poet.The background of this transformation lies in the complex history of the idea of self-consciousness, or subjectivity. In the early Idealist accounts of self-consciousness of Kant and Fichte, the subject recognizes its existence by juxtaposing itself with an object. However, the nature of this object, and the connection between the abstract, theoretical construction of the subject and the actual, practical experience of the conscious self posed a problem that neither philosopher solved definitively. For Kant, self-consciousness emerges from a pre-reflective sense of the self's existence as the subject of different experiences of phenomena over time; self-consciousness therefore arises from a deduction of empirical experience. However, this formulation contains a surprisingly belated and unmotivated version of the self, with no clear account of its origin.Fichte answered the question about the origin of the self by stating that the self posits itself through its opposition to a material object, a non-self he calls the Nicht-ich, and becomes self-conscious by differentiating the Ich from the Nicht-ich and declaring "I am I." Fichte's explanation of self-consciousness as an act rather than an entity nevertheless relies on a kind of solipsism and still does not sufficiently address the ultimate cause of the process. The Ich that declares its own existence must distinguish itself from the Nicht-ich somehow; the relation between the two terms presupposes a subject that already possesses sensory apprehension to create the distinction between Ich and Nicht-ich necessary for the initial positing of the self.Either explicitly or implicitly, both Kant's and Fichte's versions of subjectivity rely on the category of the aesthetic, defined as the experience of precognitive sensation in general, to mediate the encounter between subject and object. Kant later expanded his inquiry [End Page 126] into... (shrink)

James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher, and a composer - Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven - developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures - all born in 1770 - developed this idea in both metaphorical and actual musical (...) structures, thereby establishing both the theory and the practice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the image of the heroic composer today; this book describes how it originated in both his music and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how this development emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life taking place between 1795 and 1831. (shrink)