Spherical Experience and the Apprehension of Being in Friedrich Hölderlin

Abstract

The present paper examines Hölderlin’s engagement with Kant’s theory of knowledge. It argues that Hölderlin posits the necessity of a direct human access to what he calls “Being”, situated at the very ground of experience. On the basis of a careful analysis of Hölderlin’s texts and of the principal interpretative literature, the study addresses the spherical character that Hölderlin attributes to experience, as well as the thesis according to which only an access to the Being that grounds experience can prevent the judicative division—or the split between subject and object—from issuing in dispersion. Insofar as experience possesses a spherical structure, Hölderlin is thereby able to approximate Kant’s conception of the totality of human experience. Nevertheless, the theory of a direct access to Being must confront the objection, raised from a philosophical-critical perspective, that it affirms a form of knowledge which appears to exceed the limits of human cognition and the conditions of its possibility.