This collection of 15 essays by distinguished international scholars reconsiders what Friedrich Hölderlin's work reveals about the impulses toward form and formlessness in nature and the role that poetry plays in creating Holderlin's 'harmonious opposition'.

In our age of climate change, the work of the decidedly philosophical poet Friedrich Holderlin has gained renewed urgency with its emphasis on the forces of nature that produce life and at the same time threaten to devour it. At the heart of his work lies an understanding of nature and the role that consciousness plays within it. This responds to, but also revises, the concerns of 18th and 19th-century philosophy of nature.This collection of 15 essays by distinguished international scholars reconsiders what his work reveals about the impulses toward form and formlessness in nature and the role that poetry plays in creating Holderlin's 'harmonious opposition'. The collection shows that Hlderlin anticipates many of the concerns that motivate contemporary environmental thinking.

This book reconsiders the traditional correspondence theory of truth, which takes truth to be a matter of correctly representing objects. Drawing Heideggerian phenomenology into dialogue with American pragmatic naturalism, Christopher P. Long undertakes a rigorous reading of Aristotle that articulates the meaning of truth as a co-operative activity between human beings and the natural world that is rooted in our endeavours to do justice to the nature of things. By following a path of Aristotle's thinking that leads from our rudimentary encounters with things in perceiving through human communication to thinking, this book traces an itinerary that uncovers the nature of truth as ecological justice, and it finds the nature of justice in our attempts to articulate the truth of things.

Hölderlin's essays and letters constitute essential documents for an understanding of the transitional period from neo-classical poetics to what can only be characterized as a unique and, in its frequently experimental structure, essentially modernist poetics. This book contains virtually all of Hölderlin's theoretical writings translated for the first time. In spite of the great significance of Hölderlin''s ideas for contemporary critical thought, most of his highly important theoretical oeuvre has been unavailable to English readers until now. Here also are a number of letters which chart the development of Hölderlin's thought on issues that today remain fundamental to poetics and philosophy. The work's critical introduction discusses both the historical genesis of Hölderlin's theoretical writings out of the enlightenment as well as their systematic interaction with post-Kantian Idealism. Through interpretations of three short fragments, Pfau indicates that it would be insufficient to consider Hölderlin as the mere precursor of the great systematic philosophers of German Idealism--Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Instead, Hölderlin's earliest theoretical fragments already mark a turn away from the rigorous systematicity that underlies the philosophical discourse of his contemporaries. Hölderlin's theoretical writings may be the most seminal texts in the widely discussed interimplication of Idealistic philosophy and Romantic poetry and poetics.

“Translated with skill and precision, these lectures . . . present the most penetrating analysis of two of Hölderlin’s most significant hymns” (Choice). Martin Heidegger’s 1934–1935 lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine” are considered the most significant among Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin. Coming at a crucial time in his career, the text illustrates Heidegger’s turn toward language, art, and poetry while reflecting his despair at his failure to revolutionize the German university and his hope for a more profound revolution through the German language, guided by Hölderlin’s poetry. These lectures are important for understanding Heidegger’s changing relation to politics, his turn toward Nietzsche, his thinking about the German language, and his breakthrough to a new kind of poetic thinking. “[This translation], including a clear and concise introduction and useful glossaries, attains both accuracy and clarity, rarely faltering in its choice of words.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Martin Heidegger's 1942 lecture course interprets Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn "The Ister" within the context of Hölderlin's poetic and philosophical work, with particular emphasis on Hölderlin's dialogue with Greek tragedy. Delivered in summer 1942 at the University of Freiburg, this course was first published in German in 1984 as volume 53 of Heidegger's Collected Works. Revealing for Heidegger's thought of the period are his discussions of the meaning of "the political" and "the national," in which he emphasizes the difficulty and the necessity of finding "one's own" in and through a dialogue with "the foreign." In this context Heidegger reflects on the nature of translation and interpretation. A detailed reading of the famous chorus from Sophocles' Antigone, known as the "ode to man," is a key feature of the course.

The Vegetative Soul demonstrates that one significant resource for the postmodern critique of subjectivity can be found in German Idealism and Romanticism, specifically in the philosophy of nature. Miller demonstrates that the perception of German Idealism and Romanticism as the culmination of the philosophy of the subject overlooks the nineteenth-century critique of subjectivity with reference to the natural world. This book's contribution is its articulation of a plant-like subjectivity. The vision of the human being as plant combats the now familiar conception of the modern subject as atomistic, autonomous, and characterized primarily by its separability and freedom from nature. Reading Kant, Goethe, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Nietzsche, Miller juxtaposes two strands of nineteenth-century German thought, comparing the more familiar "animal" understanding of individuation and subjectivity to an alternative "plantlike" one that emphasizes interdependence, vulnerability, and metamorphosis. While providing the necessary historical context, the book also addresses a question that has been very important for recent feminist theory, especially French feminism, namely, the question of the possible configuration of a feminine subject. The idea of the "vegetative" subject takes the traditional alignment of the feminine with nature and the earth and subverts and transforms it into a positive possibility. Although the roots of this alternative conception of subjectivity can be found in Kant's third Critique and its legacy in nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie, the work of Luce Irigaray brings it to fruition.