Imprint Academic Ltd. History of Political Thought

Imprint Academic Ltd.
THE DEADLY GODDESS: FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN ON POLITICS AND FATE

Author(s): Loralea Michaelis
Source: History of Political Thought, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 225-249
Published by: Imprint Academic Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26217577
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THE DEADLY GODDESS:
FRIEDRICH HÔLDERLIN ON POLITICS AND FATE
Loralea Michaelis*
Abstract: This paper develops an account of the political theory of Friedrich Holderlin
through an analysis of the concept of fate in his epistolary novel, Hyperion, or the Hermit
in Greece. Contrary to a longstanding interpretive tradition which understands Hyperion
as the culmination of an intellectual development over the 1790s in which Holderlin,
disillusioned with the French Revolution, rejects politics in favour of poetic union with
nature, the paper concludes that the political vision of Hyperion is inspired by the
possibility of overcoming this very conflict between nature and politics. Such a possi
bility arises unexpectedly in the encounter with fate at precisely that moment when all
hope for the fulfilment of Hyperion's political ambitions has been lost.
I
Introduction
This paper seeks to advance a reading of Friedrich Hôlderlin's epistolary novel,

Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece (1797, 1799), as a political novel in the
genuine sense of a novel that offers a teaching for politics rather than merely a
teaching about politics. This reading brushes against the grain of a longstanding
interpretive tradition which understands Hyperion as the culmination of an
intellectual development over the course of the 1790s in which Holderlin, in
the words of one commentator, 'comes to realize the ineffectiveness of action
and turn[s] to seek the unity with nature which the isolated individual can
achieve in the absence of a united community founded on a close relationship
with nature'.1 Holderlin initially shared in the enthusiasm for the French
Revolution which had captured his generation of German thinkers and writers,
Schelling and Hegel notable among them, but, the argument goes, faced with
its calamitous progress, his enthusiasm turned to disillusionment.2 This disil
* Mount Allison University, Political Science Dept., Sackville, New Brunswick,

EOA 3C0, Canada. Email: lmichael@mta.ca
1 R.B. Harrison, Hôlderlin and Greek Literature (London, 1975), p. 37.
2 See, for example, Georg Lukâcs' interpretation of Holderlin in his 1934 essay,
'Hôlderlin's Hyperion', Goethe and His Age, trans. Robert Anchor (London, 1968),
pp. 136-56, as a thinker whose dismay over the progress of the revolution drove him
into nature mysticism and poetic lament. See Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolu
tion, and Romanticism: the Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800
(Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 222^44, for an excellent overview of the political context
of German romanticism which challenges the conventional view. For a good general
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XX. No. 2. Summer 1999
226 L. MICHAELIS
lusionment is thought to be most d

that charts the stormy fortunes o
armed insurrection to liberate Greec
the Turks; with the failure of the in
troops, and the deaths of his belov
Alabanda, the novel concludes, app
politics, and revolutionary politics
the means by which human being
community with others, Hôlderlin
it is the principal means by which
hence into misery, strife and indisc
on this account, is a profoundly an
draw from the turbulent and divid
mitment to bringing a better, mor
in place of this commitment a recep
in the world of nature.
The anti-political interpretation o
support in the bare events of the no
to address the rich conceptual uni
political undertaking in which his
universe, I suggest, is the concept
to 'all-powerful Fate',4 to 'the dead
call Fate',5 abound throughout the
appears no less than forty-two tim
single term in a text that is only on
concept of fate operates in Hyperio
writings of other political theorist
account of Holderlin's relationship to

biography, Hôlderlin (Oxford, 1988),
3 Friedrich Hôlderlin, Hyperion, or th
R. Trask, adapted by David Schwarz, in
(New York, 1990), p. 22.
4 Ibid., p. 43.
5 Ibid., p. 87.
6 The term das Schicksal most frequently occurs about every two or three pages and
is separated by no more than eight pages. Although the Trask/Schwarz translation of
Hyperion does not consistently render das Schicksal as 'fate', using, on some occasions,
'destiny' in its stead, the terms 'fate' and 'destiny' are not easily substituted for one
another. The term 'destiny' has prophetic overtones, as in the German die Vorsehung,
literally 'foresight', often translated as 'Providence', suggesting a fixed order or ultimate
plan, even a divine intelligence. Its connotations are more Christian than ancient Greek.
As we will see, Holderlin's use of the term das Schicksal is very much in the tradition of
the ancient Greeks: it suggests a far more random power than is suggested by 'destiny',
a power that is more related to human action and its consequences than to the fulfilment
of some divine prophecy or pre-ordained plan.
FRIEDRICH HÔLDERLIN ON POLITICS AND FATE 227
gateway through which the reader must pass in order to understand the political
vision that animates the whole. For Hôlderlin, as for Machiavelli, the concept
of fate refers to the chaotic and unpredictable universe in which human beings
must strive to bring their plans to fulfilment. Although it is imperative for both
thinkers that human beings attempt to master this universe in order to secure a
worthwhile way of life for themselves and for their posterity, Hôlderlin, far
more than Machiavelli, is unsettled by the ambition of mastery which lies at
the heart of politics; references to mastering fate that we encounter in Hyperion
are much more restrained than those we encounter in Machiavelli's writings.7
Nevertheless, the differences between Hôlderlin and Machiavelli on the ques
tion of fate are not as dramatic as we might initially be tempted to think. Both
are attempting to carve out a place for human endeavour in what they under
stand to be an indifferent or hostile universe. Hôlderlin gives as great a place
of honour as does Machiavelli to the creative powers of human beings, to be
sure, perhaps even greater, considering his idealist philosophical commitments.
The fact that Hôlderlin is unable to celebrate even the dangerous and destructive
aspects of these powers, as Machiavelli does, can be attributed more to the
different points at which they find themselves in the unfolding of the modern
age than to some fundamental difference in the structure of their thinking.8
Machiavelli, writing in the shadow of the Church and the backward, deterio
rated state in which it had kept the creative powers of human beings, is
committed to winning back as much ground for these powers as he possibly
7 See Machiavelli's famous description in Chapter XXV of The Prince, trans, with
an introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago, 1985), p. 101, of Fortuna as a woman
and his exhortation that 'it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and
strike her down'. See also Hanna Fenichel Pitkin's Fortune is a Woman: Gender and
Politics in the Thought ofNiccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley, 1984), esp. Ch. 6.
8 Holderlin's own view of Machiavelli, expressed in a letter written to his half-brother
in 1793, is unclear. He suggests that his brother read Machiavelli, but he describes him
as a 'terrible teacher of despots' whose 'whole writing is concerned with the problem of
how easily a people can be subjugated'. He concludes, strangely, since he is the one who
suggested reading Machiavelli in the first place, by expressing the hope that 'his
terrifying platform won't corrupt you'. Friedrich Hblderlin, 'Briefe 62. An den Bruder',
in Holderlin: Sdmtliche Werke, Band 6, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart, 1959), p. 98.
We have reason to question the seriousness of this stark characterization of Machiavelli
as a teacher of despots, however, especially considering Holderlin's devotion to Rous
seau, who of course praises Machiavelli in Chapter IV of Book III of On the Social
Contract as a great republican. The possibility that Holderlin had the same Rousseauean
reading of Machiavelli as a crafty republican, enlightening the people on the true
character of their governors, would be consistent with the ambiguous phrasing of his
second remark, describing Machiavelli as concerned with "the problem of how easily a
people can be subjugated' (emphasis mine). If Machiavelli, according to Holderlin, is in
fact no Machiavellian, it would be difficult indeed to construe Holderlin's political vision,
and the account of fate through which he develops this vision, as self-consciously directed
against Machiavelli.
228 L. MICHAELIS
can. Holderlin, writing in the age

dawning Machiavelli's own work w
uneasy second thoughts that have sin
Hôlderlin's uneasiness with the mo
of the French Revolution and the T
destructive dialectic of freedom in a
the authority of god or nature in an
modernity. The revolution in Fran
principles of reason were to be ena
mere levelling slogans in the stru
intellectual climate that was at one a
and distrustful of enlightenment, H
Germany who followed Kant's arg
that reason could and should becom
those such as Goethe and Schiller
formalism of Kant's political thin
bearings from an ideal of the an
between reason and nature, it was
into fundamental law; it also had to
entrusted with its care in their polit
able to transform without destroyi
which this ambitious undertaking
sought to meet in his Letters on th
aesthetic education as a necessary p
As an education that addressed th
intellect together, aesthetic educatio
between theory and practice, it als
modern age: no longer would the f
at the cost of estrangement from na
Although profoundly influential,
not quite radical enough for Holder
as the moral and spiritual preparati
so far as to suggest that 'we must re
... as long as the split within man
conception upholds the very separ
sibly seeks to dispel: politics is sim
republican ideal of unity in diversity
9 See Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolu

Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 19
10 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution
'1 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aestheti
Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Lond
down to the people by a self-appointed élite of artist-philosophers.12 For

Holderlin and his generation, the aesthetic insight into the underlying unity of
subject and object, matter and spirit, individual and community, signalled the
end of these old ideas about politics and education: under the new aesthetic
dispensation, in the words of Hegel's Oldest System-Program of German
Idealism', 'the enlightened and the unenlightened finally have to shake hands
... no longer the contemptuous look, no longer the blind trembling of the
populace before its sages and priests'.13 It is in Hyperion that Holderlin explores
the possibility that the aesthetic insight into the unity of all things might not be
the exclusive preserve of the poet as one who holds himself aloft from the
turbulence of politics, that it might, indeed, be prefigured in the very conscious
ness of the political actor as he struggles, successfully or not, to embody it in
the world around him.
Like the approach Hegel would eventually develop in the Phenomenology,

Holderlin's approach in Hyperion reveals the consciousness of the political
actor as a potentially tragic consciousness which unfolds through its failure to
encompass the world around it. Unlike Hegel, however, this negative dialectic
remains for Hôlderlin the inescapable dialectic of human experience; the unity
of reason and nature to which his thinking aspires is in the end a unity that can
be experienced only negatively, in longing, in the sense of its absence and, even
more significantly, in its transgression.14 It is in this context that ancient
concepts of fate assume their central importance in Holderlin's thinking. While
Holderlin had been educated in the classical tradition established by Winckel
mann and fostered by Schiller and Goethe,15 his account of fate in Hyperion
12 Holderlin raises the problem in a 1799 letter written to his half-brother in which
he distances himself from Schiller's idea of aesthetic education and the idea of civic unity
to which it gives rise. Friedrich Holderlin, 'No. 172. To his Brother', in Friedrich
Holderlin: Essays and Letters in Theory, ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau (New York, 1988),
pp. 137^10. George Armstrong Kelly, Hegel's Retreat from Eleusis: Studies in Political
Thought (Princeton, 1978), p. 76, draws attention to the same difficulty in his discussion
of Hegel's reception of Schiller.
13 The so-called 'Das âlteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus' is the
surviving fragment of an essay apparently written by Hegel in 1796 or 1797, but clearly
bearing the mark of his close association with Holderlin and Schelling in this period. See
H.S. Harris, Hegel's Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770-1801 (London, 1972),
pp. 510-12; for a translation of the fragment and an interpretive analysis that claims sole
authorship for Hegel, see ibid., pp. 249-57.
14 As Constantine has emphasized so well in his discussion of Hôlderlin's later
poetics in his Holderlin, p. 127, the nature of this unity is such that it 'cannot be
encompassed, it cannot be forced to be and remain present' (emphasis in original). For
a more detailed account of the similarities and differences between Hegel and Holderlin,
see Dieter Henrich, 'Hegel and Holderlin', in The Course of Remembrance and Other
Essays on Holderlin, ed. Eckart Fôrster (Stanford, 1997).
15 See Josef Chytry's vivid account of this tradition in The Aesthetic State: A Quest
in Modern German Thought (Berkeley, 1989), esp. pp. 38-68.
230 L. MICHAELIS
suggests that he is already approa

ancient Greek culture on which
harmony between reason and natur
tragedies that became for him, as fo
expression of the Greek spirit.16 Ac
and modem, Holderlin's relocation
the tragic encounter with fate draw
the frame of the modem than any
ultimately, is not to transplant ancie
to remedy the ailments of modern
the ancients — but rather to assist
December 1801 letter written to his
tragedy'.17 The challenge of the trag
not the same as it was for the anci
reconcile ourselves with the gods b
ourselves to our own mortality. 'F
continues in his letter to Bohlendo
depart very quietly from the real
flames, we atone for the flames th
to ancient concepts of fate, Holderl
back into the reassuring comforts
themselves, back to the challenge o
that befall them, indeed to the terri
to the stormy and unfathomable pa
At the timeless heart of politics, fo
the paradox of being creatures in w
other in an uneasy and fragile accor
strive to realize their freedom as cr
more than what they have received
those 'great undertakings, in which
wings of wax, are the means'.19 At
on which human beings must conf
16 George Steiner has suggested in

ancient Athenian tragedy, and Sophoc
eration of poets and thinkers were amo
Homeric epic. G. Steiner, Antigones (O
17 Friedrich Hdlderlin, 'No 236. To
Hôlderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory
its significance for our understanding
see Peter Szondi, 'Hôlderlin's Overcom
parative Criticism, 5 (1983), pp. 251-7
18 Hôlderlin, 'No. 236. To Casimir Ul
19 Hôlderlin, Hyperion, p. 88.
in bodies, in time and space, and who are subject, as a consequence, to the
constraints of nature. It is precisely because these two aspects of human nature
are in tension with each other that politics is not without its hazards. For
Holderlin, every serious political undertaking, every undertaking, that is, that
seeks to transform the raw material of human nature in accord with the ideal of
freedom, is shadowed by a tendency to excess — to forget, in the moment of
striving to overcome or reshape the limitations of nature, the inescapable
subjection to nature in which all life is caught. This forgetfulness of nature
entails a forgetfulness of one's own as well as others' vulnerability to suffering
and to death. When this forgetfulness is unchecked, it gives rise to a politics of
tyranny and violence carried out in the name of freedom. Holderlin develops a
critique of this kind of politics, most notably through the character of Alabanda,
but this kind of politics is not the only politics that he can imagine. The concept
of fate is invoked to illuminate the transgressive moment towards which all
serious political action tends to build, but it is also invoked to explore the
possibility that there can be a turning back from this moment of transgression.
The encounter with fate, as an encounter with the limits of human striving, is
endowed with the potentially transformative power of awakening the memory
of nature in the mind of the political actor. It points to the possibility of a politics
that is genuinely mindful of nature and genuinely mindful, as a result, of the
harmony of spirit and matter on which the freedom of mortal creatures must
ultimatelv be based.
II
The Concept of Fate in Hyperion
The sense in which Hôlderlin understands fate in Hyperion is as varied and as

contradictory as the sense in which it was understood by the ancient Greeks: at
times indifferent to human purposes,20 at others actively hostile,21 and at still
others playfully benign;22 supplicated in vain23 yet sometimes moved to pity
the miserable human lot;24 'ever-changing'25 yet 'iron-like'26 and 'changeless'
in its decrees.27 Indeed, there are clear elements in Hôlderlin's own under
standing of fate that self-consciously reach back to the ancient Greek under
standing. As B.C. Dietrich has described it in Death, Fate and the Gods, in the
earliest records of the ancient Greeks, in cult notices and inscriptions on
monumental remains dating long before Homer, fate is understood as an
impersonal power that presides over the cycle of human life and, in particular,
20 Ibid., p. 32. 24 Ibid., p. 102.

21 Ibid., p. 98. 25 Ibid., p. 22.
22 Ibid., p. 37. 26 Ibid., p. 4.
23 Ibid., p. 49. 27 Ibid., p. 131.
232 L. MICHAELIS
as meting out the death that awai

'μοίρα', transliterated as 'Moira', c
'lot' as well as 'fate' or 'doom'.29 Fa
isnothing more than the measure or
of birth and fulfilled or completed
on this early ancient Greek associa
restricting the dominion of fate t
inescapable power over mortals, th
Fate', are 'outside of Fate'; they
there is yet another dimension to t
Hyperion. Just as the early ancien
impersonal force which dispenses
beings was superseded, according to
of fate as a personal force connect
certain moral order or equilibrium
moral dimension in Hôlderlin's con
associated with the death to which
fundamentally, with the complex a
action sets in motion. As we will see
dimension, concerning actions and
assume their position of prominenc
Although Hôlderlin presents the p
concept of fate does not, significant
birth to death: neither 'the sleepin
touched by fate. It is for this reas
state that comes closest to the gods
'so long as it has not been dipped
pressure of Law and Fate touches
under the jurisdiction of fate at the
of law, at the same time, that is,
culture, from the order of life that h
of life that we have created for our
allure of culture, as Hyperion has
beyond the reach of fate, to retur
'Like a child, I lived under the stil
28 B.C. Dietrich, Death, Fate and the

Greek Popular Belief and in Homer (L
29 Ibid., p. 11.
30 Ibid., p. 75.
31 Hôlderlin, Hyperion, p. 119. Amen
32 B.C. Dietrich, Death, Fate and th
33 Holderlin, Hyperion, p. 119.
34 Ibid., p. 5.
at one point in his narrative, 'oblivious to mankind's fate and striving.'35 The
realm of politics and culture, the realm in which we design our own patterns of
life and strive to bring them to fulfilment, is therefore also the realm of fate.
That we find ourselves under the jurisdiction of fate as soon as we exchange
the innocent state of nature for the state of culture is no accident. Indeed, it is
precisely because we have exited from the state of nature that we are subject
to fate. Fate has dominion in the realm of culture for no other reason than that
culture rests on a transgression of the natural order. It is in the realm of culture
that human beings claim as their own the generative powers once reserved
entirely to nature, giving laws to themselves where previously they had received
laws only from nature. It is only by breaking away from the generative proc
esses of nature that human beings can begin to assert the self-creative and
self-governing powers that are unique to them as a species; without this
transgression there could be no virtue, no reason and no art. Nevertheless, the
original unity of nature has been disturbed; division and change have been
introduced into the world, and it is over this divided world that fate exercises
its dominion. The fate that Hyperion describes on one occasion as the force that
'lays hold of me and casts me from abyss to abyss and drowns all powers in
me and all thoughts'36 can be understood as a kind of medium through which
nature reasserts its power over human beings, rendering its terrible levelling
judgments against all that human effort and virtue have brought into being. As
Hyperion remarks to Diotima as they walk among the ruins of ancient Athens:
Fate makes brave sport here, throwing down temples and giving their shat
tered stones to children to play with, turning disfigured gods into benches
before peasants' huts, and tombs into resting places for pasturing cattle; such
prodigality is more royal than Cleopatra's whim of drinking dissolved pearl
— but alas for all that beauty and greatness!37
Insofar as the human encounter with fate is the result of a falling away from
the unchanging and unified life of nature, we can escape the dominion of fate
35 Ibid., p. 84. The voice here is Hyperion's present narrating self in the days before
he began the painful task of relating the period of his life with Diotima. We should be
aware, however, that this account of his time on Salamis as a time of respite from striving
is deceptive. Not only is Hyperion aware of Salamis as 'Ajax's island', and thereby
reminded of the shameful end to which an excess of pride drove one of the great military
heroes of ancient Greece, he is also aware of Salamis as the site from which the ancient
Greeks, led by Themistocles, defeated the Persians. Recalling 'the magnificent sea fight
that once blazed up at Salamis in wild but skilfully controlled confusion', he writes: Ί
rejoice in the mind that could guide and master the fierce chaos of friends and foes as a
rider does his horse, and I feel deeply ashamed of my own career as a soldier.' Ibid.,
pp. 36-7. As always, the peace that Hyperion seeks in contemplation of nature is
disturbed by his inability to forget his thwarted ambitions in the world of men.
36 Ibid., p. 41.
37 Ibid., p. 71.
234 L. MICHAELIS
only if we surrender our separat

that lives, to return', as he chara
the All of Nature'.38 As he contin
To be one with all that lives! At t

armor, the mind of man lays its sc
the image of the world in its eterna
vanish before his Urania, and iron
vanishes from the confederacy of
bless and beautify the world.39
The transformation that Diotima

victory over the divisive powers o
her death has its origins in the di
exposure to the formidable fate t
In death Diotima finds release fro
from its susceptibility to change in
the reach of fate. As for Hyperion
the soul that is outside of Fate',40
of striving to allow him either to
of nature or to follow her into t
escape from fate and the return int
narrative and at many other tim
plished. To the extent that each o
sign of a fate that is uniquely
characters that it cannot be exch
they remain alive, and so long as
all that this entails, can elude fate
that follows them as a result of h
be said that the recognition by ea
her fate constitutes an importan
Diotima can only attain the most
having followed Hyperion into d
discordant world to which she wa
also must Hyperion follow his own
the death that Diotima has chosen
of striving. Even, therefore, as H
as his ideal, as the highest and mo
to follow far in her footsteps beca
path. The love that Hyperion bear
of beauty, and indeed, the unity of
overcoming the divisive power o
38 Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 101.
39 Ibid., pp. 3^4.
FRIEDRICH HOLDERLIN ON POLITICS AND FATE 235
affairs. As Hyperion writes of his deepening love for Diotima in the fi

days after their first meeting: 'Never before had my spirit strained so fe
so implacably, against the chains that Fate wrought for it, against th
inexorable law that kept it separate, that would not let it be one soul w
adorable other half.'41 But it is inevitable that fate — or, more precisely
case, Hyperion's fate — soon intervenes and makes them separate onc
In much the same way, as Alabanda himself suggests when he remar
Hyperion just before their final parting, Ί took you to me, sought to d
into my fate by force, lost you, found you again' ,42 Hyperion's path runs
to Alabanda's for a time, but the two do not share the same fate. What
friendship join together, therefore, fate must inevitably divide. It is o
might say, a matter of time.
In this regard the power of dethroned nature reasserted in the realm of
is expressed first and foremost as temporal necessity, in the inescapable
of time and in the laws that govern cause and effect. As in Aeschylu
Libation Bearers, human action itself calls down the power of fate in t
of events that it sets in motion: 'Who acts, shall endure', proclaims the
of serving women before the tomb of Agamemnon. 'So speaks the voice
age-old wisdom.'43 Neither gods nor children are exposed to fate in th
because neither experience a gulf between themselves and the world
them and, as a consequence, neither are in need of the mediating and b
properties of action. Of course, the laws of cause and effect apply to ch
who, as mortals, and unlike the gods, cannot escape from temporalit
children are like the gods in the sense that they do not yet have any aw
of time passing and no stable awareness of the relationship between ca
effect; their existential condition, from Hyperion's perspective, is esse
the same. Both are beyond the reach of fate because they are either, l
gods, beyond action or, like children, have not yet become aware of th
for it, still enjoying, as they do, the protection that nature affords th
know nothing outside her embrace. Hyperion begins to have his first inti
of the dominion of fate when, in the course of his youthful educati
Adamas, he becomes aware of the irretrievability of the past and the defi
of the times into which he was bom; and although he experiences some
of its divisive power when his teacher Adamas finally leaves him, it is
his union with Alabanda that he begins to feel himself positioned direct
path. It is with Alabanda that Hyperion undertakes to mediate, through
the gulf between himself and the world around him. It is with Alabanda t
will attempt to realize the promise of the creative powers that he felt aw
within him as a young boy, breaking free from nature's embrace so that h
41 Ibid., p. 57. Emphasis in original.

42 Ibid., p. 113. Amended translation.
43 Aeschylus, 'The Libation Bearers', trans. Richmond Lattimore, in Greek
dies, Vol. 2, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1960), p. 16.
236 L. MICHAELIS
assume the powers of nature for h

ried play, travel on through forest
forward in colossal projects',44 as h
during their first jubilant days to
own creative powers, in passing, f
condition in which he was left aft
himself to the direct operation of f
proximity to Alabanda, who, as we
his darkly brooding manner, this
Alabanda comes on the scene that f
as a power that can act directly
reference to fate of this kind conc
Hyperion introduces his story thu
from his own home to wander amo
Having exempted gods and childre
restricted, in this way, the jurisdic
Holderlin connects the operation o
mortal creatures subject to the law
consequences of our actions. It goe
But in Hôlderlin's Hyperion this la
dinary moral significance: effect
As Alabanda declares to Hyperion
human act finds its punishment at
by Nemesis.'46 The relation of caus
to the relation of crime and punish
we can say that the consequence of a
insofar as a consequence, like a pu
nullifies or at least limits the agenc
action has had an effect; the world
insofar as we have acted, insofar a
not another, we have limited ourse
the future and not another; we cann
all at once. Our plans, once realized
they bear witness to our subjection
rality. Moreover, our inability to c
susceptibility to failure, to things
serves as a further limitation on ou
for Holderlin, is the paradox of our
of our freedom as mortal creatures
claim as a consequence of emancipa
44 Hôlderlin, Hyperion, p. 120.

45 Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 115.
FRIEDRICH HOLDERLIN ON POLITICS AND FATE 237
exchange for our freedom, we must suffer the limitations of mortal

limitations that accompany action. Insofar as we experience these lim
as painful, we experience them as a kind of punishment. As Hôlderlin
in an unpublished fragment entitled On Punishment', written sometim
1794 or 1795: 'All suffering is punishment.'47
But the concept of punishment has an explicitly moral foundation. In
the consequences of actions to punishment, Holderlin directs us to con
only the mortality of our actions but also their morality. We enter
universe when we act: through our actions we are brought into relat
good and evil. As we have already seen, in Holderlin's Hyperion the m
that we have acted at all implicates us in a transgression against the
nature; in this regard, the crime for which we are punished in the cons
of our actions is the crime that underlies the whole of human existence
every action that we take renews this original culpability, every resis
we encounter refers us back to this original transgression. It is for t
that the pain that we feel upon confronting the ordinary limitations
comes to be experienced as the pain of punishment. To a certain ex
unavoidable nature of this transgression removes it altogether from the
of morality; guilt can be meaningful as a moral concept only if it is acc
by a corresponding concept of innocence, if it were also possible, that
innocent of the wrong. But if one can only be guilty, and indeed, if
without exception can only be guilty, then guilt ceases to be an extr
condition into which one is thrown as a result of particular actions, a
that is, of particular volitions, and becomes instead an ordinary conditio
that is shared in common with all other human beings. In the wake o
totalizing idea as a primal transgression, or, for that matter, an origina
idea of guilt loses its sharp edges. The moral differences among ind
would amount to little more than the degree to which each is aware
her inescapable guilt. There is certainly something in the idea o
punishment that resists these most basic distinctions of moral disc
tween innocence and guilt, between good and evil, as well as the vo
element on which these distinctions critically depend. It is for this re
Walter Benjamin, in a brief and densely written essay entitled 'Fate
acter' — which, incidentally, invokes Holderlin's characterization of t
as 'fateless' (Schicksallos) — argues that the ancient concept of fate sh
disentangled from the ethical-religious context in which it is often
While fate is sometimes understood as 'the response of God or the
religious offense',48 fate in the genuine, pagan tragic sense, he maintain
47 Friedrich Hôlderlin, On Punishment', in Friedrich Hôlderlin: Essays and

on Theory, p. 36.
48 Walter Benjamin, 'Fate and Character', in Reflections: Essays, Aphorism
biographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New Yo
p. 306.
238 L. MICHAELIS
to a sphere in which 'misfortune

which bliss and innocence are foun
of fate, on this account, is the sph
gods for no reason other than that
the endless pagan chain of guilt an
characterizes it: 'Fate is the guilt co
It is certainly the case that the con
is comprehensive and far-reaching
as the mere fact of being human pl
of life in nature. But it is significa
does not really come into play, at
this sense. Indeed, it is when fate
human beings in general, without di
that it tends to be represented in
universe that exists alongside and i
simply and inescapably there, like th
the realm of human affairs, clearly
but not in any deliberate or purpo
narrative: 'But everything is now u
his gigantic powers, holds on to no
catch the moonlight; but the light w
to hold back ever-changing Fate
against the Germans, Hyperion de
independent of the designs of hum
'that you may escape Fate, and cann
unavailing; and meanwhile the sta
portrait of fate as an impersonal pow
even when it is implicated in the
complete without some mention of
Fate':
But to us it is given
Nowhere to rest
Suffering men
Falter and fall
Blindly from one
Hour to the next,
Like water flung down
From cliff to cliff,
Yearlong into uncertainty.54
49 Ibid., p. 307. 52 Holderlin, Hyperion, p. 22.

50 Ibid. 53 Ibid., p. 129.
31 Ibid., p. 308. 54 Ibid., p. 119.
How can we reconcile this indifferent, impersonal fate with the wantonly
destructive fate, the deadly personal fate that, as Hyperion says, 'lays hold of
me and casts me from abyss to abyss and drowns all powers in me and all
thoughts',55 the fate that 'decrees',56 that 'makes brave sport',57 the 'deadly
Goddess'58 against which he rants in his letters? We might consider the possi
bility that the deadly seriousness of fate, the frightfully violent and turbulent
aspect of fate, is not really a property of fate at all but rather a property of the
human beings who challenge and oppose it with their plans; more precisely, it
is a characteristic of fate that is only summoned forth by human beings in their
struggle against it. 'There,' Hyperion says darkly, writing to Diotima of the site
near the ruins of Sparta where his troops gave in to their most violent and
rapacious impulses, turning their arms on their own countrymen, 'there did Fate
mow down my harvest' .59 The power of fate, considered on its own, in isolation
from the purposes of human beings, is neutral; it is as meaningful 'in itself as
the orbit of the stars or the cycles of the moon or the design of the universe.
Whether it turns a benign or malevolent face towards human beings depends
on the relationship that they establish with it. Consider, for example, the
peacefully calm mood in which Hyperion is able to experience fate in its benign,
even playful aspect: 'Undisturbed in mind and soul, strong and joyous and
smilingly serious, I play with Fate and the Three Sisters, the holy Parcae. Full
of divine youth, my whole being rejoices over itself, over all things. Like the
starry sky, I am calm and moved.'60 But these moments of sublime contentment,
these moments in which Hyperion requires nothing from himself or the world
around him, in which he revels in the mere fact of life itself, these moments are
rare in the novel, as they are for human beings generally. So Hyperion only
rarely encounters fate in this benign aspect. Fate moves along above us as
'innocently' as the stars, he says, but, as he quickly adds: 'Oh, that it were
possible but to watch it as peacefully and meditatively as we do the circling
stars!'61 Human beings, insofar as they are conscious of themselves as creatures
separate from nature, insofar as they are active, are necessarily at odds with
fate. It is precisely this self-conscious activity that rouses fate from its slumber.
Just as we become aware of the world that lies beyond us only because we have
attempted to extend the reach of our powers, we become aware of fate only
when we attempt to surmount the obstacles that it places in our paths; and it is
inevitable that we make this attempt. The powerful impulse to freedom at work
within us requires that we attempt to determine the shape and course of our
lives for ourselves rather than be determined by forces external to us; it requires
that we resist rather than accept fate, indeed, that we master fate. But the more
55 Ibid., p. 41.
56 Ibid., p. 80. 59 Ibid., p. 98.
57 Ibid., p. 71. 60 Ibid., p. 37.
58 Ibid., p. 87. 61 Ibid., p. 22.
240 L. MICHAELIS
vigorously we resist fate, and the

own order on the world around us
turn — the more chaotic and haza
does the world appear.
Ill
Fate and Politics in Hyperion
It is in this context that fate makes its appearance as a punitive or retributive

force in Hôlderlin's Hyperion·, it is here that we find its operation becomes more
specific, more personal, more connected with particular individuals, those who
are more transgressive, more activist, more directly challenging in their basic
disposition, than with human beings in general. Such is the case, clearly, with
Alabanda, the most darkly transgressive character in the novel, and such is the
case with Hyperion once he has joined forces with him. The theme of mastering
fate runs like a red thread throughout their friendship; their vision for the future
of modern Greece, and especially their participation in the insurrection against
the Turks, is described in exactly these terms. As Hyperion describes himself
in council with his troops, clearing the way, in thought, for the great deeds that
are to come: 'It is a joy thus in quiet thought to determine our great future. We
strip chance [Zufalls] of its power; we master fate.'62 Hyperion and Alabanda
seek to recover the spirit of ancient Greece in the modem age; through the
transformative powers that political action makes available to them, they seek
to undo the destructive work of fate; they seek to reverse the work of time itself.
In this regard they seek to master fate not by subjugating or humiliating it, as
Machiavelli recommends, but rather by attempting to become one with fate, by
assuming its powers of change and transformation as their own. The transfor
mative powers of political action are not just creative, however. Political action,
like fate, is also destructive, often profoundly so. Hyperion and Alabanda are
well aware that the spirit of ancient Greece cannot be refounded in the modem
age until what has grown up in its place has been cleared away, just as 'the
withered, decaying tree', as Hyperion puts it, must be cut down because 'it
steals light and air from the young life that is ripening for a new world!'63 This
clearing away is attempted most dramatically when they join in the uprising
against the Turks, but it is also in evidence in the earliest days of their friendship,
when they make common cause with each other in the destructive practice of
total critique, 'denouncing', as Hyperion says, 'the sins of this century'.64 He
continues: 'How the thundering words of implacable justice rolled on my
62
Ibid., p. 93. Amended translation.
63 Ibid., p. 21.
64 Ibid., p. 19.
tongue! Like messengers of Nemesis, our thoughts journeyed over the earth,
purifying it until no trace of a curse remained.'65
The critical and moral sensibility in which political action originates posi
tions the actors in the precarious situation of having seized, for human purposes,
the powers of retribution that fate wields as the arbiter of the moral balance in
the universe, as the dispenser of natural justice. Politics confounds the natural
order of things; it confounds the order of things that separates the mortal from
the divine, the powers of nature from the powers of human beings. Through
political action human beings seek to approximate the divine, to overcome the
natural limitations of their mortality. Through political action they attempt to
control the passage of time and the relationship between cause and effect, to
minimize their vulnerability to things that are outside their control by attempt
ing to expand, as far as possible, the range of things that are within their control.
The attempt to achieve mastery over fate through politics is first and foremost
an attempt to master the universe of action. But the universe of action is not
just a universe of 'things'; more importantly, it is a universe of other human
beings; and it is this universe that politics ultimately aims to control. Human
beings turn to political action not just because they wish to protect themselves
from chance, not just because they wish to create institutions and habits of life
that are strong enough to endure the haphazard vagaries of natural justice, only
dimly visible, if at all, in the accidental misfortunes and disasters and reversals
that attend the progress of the living. Rather, it is also that they wish to harness
this power of dealing misfortune for themselves, to make it rational, precise
and orderly, to enact their own standards of justice, and to bring these standards
down unon themselves, and UDon others.
The kind of politics to which Hyperion and Alabanda are committed is a
politics of this kind. It is a politics of justice, and it is subject to all the
ambiguities, risks and temptations to excess that are entailed by such a politics.
On the one hand, Alabanda and Hyperion are committed to a universalist
politics of solidarity aimed at granting freedom and equal respect to all indi
viduals without exception. On the other hand, they are committed to a nation
alist politics of indignation aimed at rectifying the wrong that the native Greeks
have suffered at the hands of foreigners, namely the Turks. Not only this, the
regeneration of the civic culture of Greece requires that the Greeks themselves
undergo a radical transformation in their characters, giving them in place of
their old slavish habits the habits of thought and action appropriate to free
citizens. Rather than resisting their colonizers, the Greeks have taken flight into
the trivial satisfactions of private life, consoling themselves, as Diotima says,
'with a merry dance and a pious tale for the infamous oppression that weighs
upon them'.66 It is this ignominious exchange of national self-determination for
65 Ibid., pp. 19-20. Emphasis added.

66 Ibid., p. 72.
242 L. MICHAELIS
individual happiness which so distu

to wonder th at times whether or not
plans that they have conceived for
is an empty farce, sheer superstitio
as if a Roman heart beat in them.'
quarrel with his countrymen in term
honour and the insipid ethic of pri
in the language of slaves. Happines
in my mouth when they talk to me
is all for which you slaves give up
Hyperion and Alabanda therefore s
indeed, even the past itself has no
justice'.68 There is a real tension be
task is not only to tear down, but a
also to expose and to strip bare; not
clear away the old. With the unreli
this kind of politics — the burden of
the impure, the worthy from the u
of course, the risk of judging wron
the risk of slipping too far over to
neglect and detriment of the creat
manner of proceeding will violate th
solidarity for which the work was
minded the purpose, we might say,
it appear.
It is here, ot course, that Hyperion and Alabanda encounter the greatest
difficulties in their friendship. Soon after their first days together it becomes
clear that each has a very different understanding of politics; each has a very
different understanding, as a result, of what the destructive side of their project
requires. The self-originating philosophy of life to which Alabanda subscribes
— Ί feel a life in me which no god created and no mortal begot' ,70 as he declares
to Hyperion in one of his last speeches — is expressed in his understanding of
politics as a struggle waged by titan spirits against the intractability and
67 Ibid., p. 21.
68 Ibid., p. 20.
69 As Hannah Arendt has observed in her discussion of action in The Human
Condition (Chicago, 1958), p. 191: 'The boundlessness of action is only the other side
of its tremendous capacity for establishing relationships, that is, its specific productivity;
this is why the old virtue of moderation, of keeping within bounds, is indeed one of the
political virtues par excellence, just as the political temptation par excellence is indeed
hubris (as the Greeks, fully experienced in the potentialities of action, knew so well) and
not the will to power, as we are inclined to believe.'
70 Holderlin, Hyperion, p. 117.
small-mindedness of ordinary mortals. As he fulminates in one of his early

speeches:
What! shall the god be dependent upon the worm? The god in us, for whose
road infinity lies open — shall he stand and wait until the worm crawls out
of his way? No! no! We do not ask if you are willing, you slaves and
barbarians! You are never willing! Nor will we try to make you better, for
that is useless! We will but make certain that you get out of the way of
humanity's victorious career! Oh! let someone light a torch for me, that I may
bum the weeds from the field, let someone lay with me the mine with which
I can blow the dull clods from the face of the earth!71
Alabanda understands politics as a form of war; he seeks to impose his vision

of the future on an unwilling and unconscious and unprepared people for whom
he has nothing but contempt. In one of their early arguments, Hyperion charges
him with 'according] the state far too much power',72 insisting, for his part,
that the spiritual regeneration of the Greeks can only be accomplished through
a programme of civic education in which the harmonizing powers of art, and
poetry in particular, play a central role. It cannot be emphasized enough that
what is ultimately at issue between Hyperion and Alabanda is not the difference
between art on the one hand and politics on the other, but rather a conflict
between two different political visions. Hyperion is not rejecting the state as
such but rather the deployment of the powers of the state as a means of
achieving the ideal political community. 'The state has always been made a
hell', he says, 'by man's wanting to make it his heaven.'73 Here he only
reiterates the classic liberal injunction that the coercive force of law can do
nothing more than prevent men from becoming devils; it cannot compel them
to become saints. Hyperion, of course, wants to do much more politically than
meet the minimal liberal requirements of the preservation of life and property;
he wants, as we know, to establish a genuine community. The use of force,
legitimate or otherwise, he is insisting, cannot create or maintain such a com
munity; neither law nor the force that gives the law its power can transform
human nature.74 Deploying the powers of the state to establish a political
71 Ibid., p. 21.
72 Ibid., p. 23.
73 Ibid., p. 24.
74 Hôlderlin's rejection of force is limited to its use in revolutionary contexts against
the people themselves: he would appear to condone the use of force to resist tyranny, in
wars of national liberation, as he did in the case of the Greeks, and as he did, even more
interestingly, in the case of the French invasion of the Rhineland in 1792. As Hôlderlin
wrote in late November, reassuring his mother over the prospect of a French invasion of
southern Germany: 'Whatever may happen it is not so bad as you perhaps fear. True,
there may well be changes even where we are. But happily we are not among those who
have usurped rights and may now lose them, or who have committed acts of violence
and oppression and may now be punished. Wherever the war has come to in Germany
244 L. MICHAELIS
community involves little more th

powers of the collectivity at the ex
community requires, in Hyperion's v
of individuality but rather a synthe
are enhanced and indeed only fully re
This synthesis cannot be brought ab
in which the community merely ove
a process of civic education in whic
ality are met in equal measure. Thi
education devoted to cultivating the
other reason than that the ideal of
regulated is an ideal of the harmony
they have been brought together in
any other. As Hyperion says, sittin
Athens, 'the great saying, the ev δ
itself) of Heraclitus ... is the very b
in a people is not only to instill i
importantly, it is to instill in them a
genuine civic unity rests. As Hyper
loves Beauty, where it honors the
spirit is astir like the breath of life,
away, and all hearts are reverent and
adding, so that there can be no mista
his commitment to civic unity ultim
such a people and gladly can the st
such a people could offer to the str
which the principle of individuality
people in such a way that the diver
preserved rather than destroyed.
The conflict between Hyperion's vi
Alabanda's vision of politics as w
discovers Alabanda's membership in
decent citizens have lost little or noth

Holderlin, 'Brief 55. An die Mutter', in
translated in Constantine, Holderlin, p.
75 This idea of civic unity is develope
writes to his half-brother. See above, no
76 Holderlin, Hyperion, p. 67. The phr
Heraclitus, Fragments, ed. and trans, w
1987), Fragment 51, p. 37: 'They do not u
at variance], (it) is in agreement with it
(that) of a bow or lyre.'
77 Holderlin, Hyperion, p. 130. Emph
named 'Society of Nemesis'. What Hyperion finds from the speeches of the
three mysterious individuals who have come to visit Alabanda is that the
Society of Nemesis is devoted not to the transformation of society through laws,
but to actions of a purely destructive nature. In language reminiscent of Ala
banda's own self-description, one of the three announces: 'We would tell you
that we are here to purge the earth, that we clear the stones from the field and
break up the hard clods with the mattock and draw furrows with the plow, that
we grasp the rank growth by the roots, cut it through at the roots, and tear it up
by the roots, so that it shall wither in the burning sun.'78 These individuals reside
at the outermost edges of human existence, where the connection between
action and transgression, between action and the domination of nature, becomes
unambiguous and explicit. Hyperion's impression of the physical presence of
Alabanda's comrades emphasizes that they have wielded the destructive powers
of politics in a manner that places them well beyond the realm of mere mortals:
'it was as if', he says, 'one were standing in the presence of omniscience; one
would have doubted that this was the outward form of creatures subject to
needs, if here and there slain emotion had not left its traces'.79 So completely
have Alabanda's friends in the Society of Nemesis placed themselves in the
path of fate as a result of their openly transgressive way of life, they appear to
have achieved a kind of demonic reconciliation with fate. As their very name
suggests, they see themselves as one with fate, as part of the inscrutable power
of fate, as instruments of fate. 'We played with fate, and fate with us. It tossed
us high and low, from beggar's staff to crown. It swung us as one swings a
glowing censer, and we glowed until the coals turned to ashes. We have ceased
to speak of good and evil fortune.'80 In this regard they exemplify an approach
to politics that lies just a few radical steps beyond Alabanda's. Alabanda is
preoccupied with control. He has given birth to himself, he declares, and has
need of no one; his thinking about politics is designed to maintain this illusion
of absolute self-sufficiency by making all that lies beyond his immediate control
into raw material for his will, to be dominated or cast aside or destroyed. Such
is his attitude towards the Greek people's unpreparedness and unwillingness to
embody his vision of the future; they are obstacles to be cleared out of the way.
But his friends in the Society of Nemesis have different preoccupations. They
claim that they 'need neither [the] hearts nor [thej wills' of the people because
'everything' is tending in their direction anyway. 'For men are in no case against
us, since everything is for us', one explains, 'and the fools and the cunning, the
simple and the wise, and all the vices and virtues of incivility and good breeding
are at our service without hire and blindly help us on toward our goal.'81
Because they consider their own subjective wills to be identical with the
objective forces that drive the course of history, they are well beyond any need
78 Ibid., p. 25. 80 Ibid., p. 25.

79 Ibid., p. 24. 81 Ibid., p. 26.
246 L. MICHAELIS
to attempt to control the environmen

to abandon themselves to the sponta
feel no personal responsibility for t
each and every consequence equally
the same man concludes: 'If no one
blame us for that? Who upbraids th
have often said to myself, "You ar
my day's work.'82
In a sense, individuals such as thes
retributive power of fate because th
the forces at play in the world of a
such an extreme on the spectrum th
its exact opposite, the attitude of b
describes himself feeling during the
Like Hyperion during these phases,
able to 'play' with fate because they
they have nothing personally at stak
reaches them. They are tossed about
human being who strives after some
more violently than most — but th
effects. It is in this sense that we c
reach of fate. What immediately st
nance is its coldness and its hardnes
'The stillness of his features was the stillness of a battlefield. Wrath and love
had raged in this man, and understanding shone over the wreckage of feeling
like the eye of a hawk perched upon ruined palaces.'83 There is no remedy, no
corrective, no palliative even, for a spiritual malaise such as this; individuals
who fall prey to it are irretrievably lost to themselves and to their fellow men,
as these individuals clearly are. For Hyperion and Alabanda, however, for those
who are passionately and personally caught up in their undertakings in the
world of action, the punitive, retributive power of fate is experienced as
profoundly painful. They feel the full force of its impact in the disorder of their
lives, in the upsetting of their most carefully laid plans, in the squandering of
their talents, in the disruption of their friendships, in short, in the disappoint
ment of their ambition to give themselves more than they have received from
nature. 'What is to follow I know not', as Hyperion remarks after the disaster
with their troops at Mistra. 'Fate casts me adrift in uncertainty, and I have
deserved it.'84
As long as Hyperion is not beyond the reach of disappointment, we might
say, he is not beyond the reach of fate. When the retributive aspect of fate
touches him directly, as it inevitably does once he involves himself in the
6/ Ibid.
83 Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 97. Emphasis added.
extremes of political life — through his participation in the uprising against the
Turks and, indirectly, through the terror that his troops carry out against their
own countrymen — he undergoes a collapse of self that is virtually total. Indeed,
on this particular occasion, he decides to seek death in service to the Russian
fleet which is still waging its naval campaign against the Turks, failing, it would
seem, only because 'Fate seemed to feel consideration for me in my despair'.85
But the destruction that he visits on himself in these moments, resolving never
again to challenge the creative authority of nature, never again to attempt to
distinguish himself from the rest of nature's creation, has another aspect. It
serves as a counterpoint to the amnesic tendencies of action. The transgression
against nature in which the creative activity of human beings is implicated
consists not only in the fact that we seek to create our own order in place of the
order handed down to us by nature but also in that we tend to become forgetful
of our origins in nature. We find it difficult, at the height of our creative powers,
to acknowledge any limit outside ourselves, not even the limit of our own
mortality, not even, for that matter, the mortality of others; we act with impunity
in the deepest sense of the word, as if we will not have to face the consequences
of our actions, none, at least, that we would not be able to reverse or control.
The destructive encounter with fate shatters the illusion of self-sufficiency and
control towards which all action is inclined; we are reminded of our limitations
as mortal creatures who are subject to the uncertainty of the future and to the
consequences of our actions, to physical suffering and to death. We are re
minded of our origins in nature; we are reminded that we, too, for all of our
ambitions, are part of the dominion of nature. In suffering we are brought
together in solidarity with every other sensuous being in nature, human and
nonhuman alike; in suffering we know ourselves to be equal subjects in the
kingdom of necessity.
IV
Conclusion
The drama of fate that Holderlin winds through the political drama of Hyperion
thus concludes with Hyperion's return, in disappointment, to the unity of nature
with which he had broken in assuming the political undertaking with Alabanda.
We need only consider, in this context, Diotima's beautiful faith in the natural
solidarity of everything that lives, the 'divine spirit that is each man's own and
is common to all' by virtue of the life that is given to them by nature.86 Hyperion
decides to return to Diotima following his failed suicide attempt, not simply
because she is his beloved but because her earth-bound way of being is entirely
consistent with his feeling of having fallen, broken and humbled, from heaven
to earth. Nevertheless, the truth of Diotima's way of being — the truth that
85 Ibid., p. 102.
86 Ibid., p. 123.
248 L. MICHAELIS
human beings are among nature's cr

with this truth alone would be to liv
mean passive submission to nature,
mission nevertheless; it would mean
compels us to act, to shatter the ca
freedom. Accordingly, while Hype
time, this way of being is unable to
with relief in a letter written to his
due haste towards his reunion with
work. My soul has only itself to be
some living action. Noble maiden! h
could you possibly love a being so em
truth of Alabanda's way of being, the
human beings create themselves, ind
as the truth of Diotima's way of bein
would be to live in denial of one's own sensuous human nature as well as that
of others; it would mean indifference to the capacity for suffering in oneself
and in others. The encounter with fate serves as a kind of switch-point between
these two ways of being and the truths that they embody. In the experience of
losing himself in that very undertaking in which he sought most to affirm
himself, Hyperion is brought face to face with his condition as a mortal creature
who is neither entirely subject to nature nor entirely independent of nature.
1 he political teaching ot Holderhn s Hyperion lies beyond Alabanda, beyond
Diotima, beyond their respective idealizations as dependency through immer
sion in nature, on the one hand, or, on the other, freedom through mastery of
nature. The only effective antidote to the tyrannical impulse that blooms so
colourfully at the heart of every transformative political project consists in the
recognition of the one-sidedness of these poles of human life; it consists, more
particularly, in the acceptance of the inescapable ambiguity of mortal existence,
the ambiguity of being creatures who are drawn equally to heaven and to earth,
the ambiguity of being subject to nature even as we affirm our independence
from nature through action. To the extent that it has the capacity to restore this
awareness of the ambiguity of mortality in the mind of the political actor, the
encounter with fate serves as the experiential corollary to Hyperion's concep
tion of politics as aesthetic education, as an education, that is, in beauty. In
beauty we have an intimation of the essential unity of matter and spirit in which
the one can only be made meaningful and indeed can only be fully realized
through the other. An education in the nature of beauty as incarnate spirit, as
the accomplished union of heaven and earth, is at one and the same time an
education in the nature of our own mortality. Insofar as we are spirit we strive
to become more than we are, to strain against the limitations of earthly life: 'we
Ibid., p. 86.
are like fire that sleeps in the dry branch or in the coal', Hyperion says, 'and
ever we struggle and seek for an end to our cramped confinement'.88 We live
for those moments, when, in love, in friendship, or in great deeds, 'we are set
free, when the divine shatters the prison, when the flame bursts from the wood
and flies up over the ashes, ah! when it is with us as if, its sorrows and its
servitude forgotten, the unshackled spirit were returning in triumph to the halls
of the Sun'.89 But insofar as we are also matter we are unable to sustain these
moments of unity, at least not indefinitely. Such is the way with mortal crea
tures: 'even the beautiful . . . ripens to its doom', as Hyperion remarks to
Bellarmin, having just recalled for him a tender scene with Diotima, 'even the
divine must humble itself and share mortality with all that is mortal!'90 And
although, as Hyperion says in this passage, rare is the man who would 'dare to
say that he stands fast' when faced with the inevitable passing away of beauty,
the challenge of mortal existence is precisely to weather the transformations of
earthly life without giving way to the temptation to surrender one's earthly
commitments altogether.9' It is to his original conception of politics as aesthetic
education, and to his vision of civic life as a differentiated unity which brings
citizens as well as strangers together under its compass, therefore, to which
Hyperion will return, even, and indeed most especially, in the midst of his
terrible grief over all that he has lost through striving.
Loralea Michaelis MOUNT ALLISON UNIVERSITY
88 Ibid., p. 41.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., p. 76.
91 This imperative to remain firmly within the mortal frame of existence extends even
to the narrative act in which Hyperion is engaged. As he once asks Bellarmin: 'Why do
I recount my grief to you, renew it, and stir up my restless youth in me again? Is it not
enough to have travelled once through mortality? Why do I not remain still in the peace
of my spirit? It is, my Bellarmin! because every living breath that we draw remains dear
to our heart, because all the transformations of pure Nature are part of her beauty too.
Our soul, when it puts off mortal experiences and lives only in blessed quietness — is it
not like a leafless tree? Like a head without hair?' (Ibid., p. 84, emphasis in original).

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THE DEADLY GODDESS: FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN ON POLITICS AND FATE

This paper seeks to advance a reading of Friedrich Hôlderlin's epistolary novel,

* Mount Allison University, Political Science Dept., Sackville, New Brunswick,

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XX. No. 2. Summer 1999

lusionment is thought to be most d

account of Holderlin's relationship to

can. Holderlin, writing in the age

9 See Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolu

down to the people by a self-appointed élite of artist-philosophers.12 For

Like the approach Hegel would eventually develop in the Phenomenology,

suggests that he is already approa

16 George Steiner has suggested in

The sense in which Hôlderlin understands fate in Hyperion is as varied and as

20 Ibid., p. 32. 24 Ibid., p. 102.

as meting out the death that awai

28 B.C. Dietrich, Death, Fate and the

only if we surrender our separat

To be one with all that lives! At t

The transformation that Diotima

affairs. As Hyperion writes of his deepening love for Diotima in the fi

41 Ibid., p. 57. Emphasis in original.

assume the powers of nature for h

44 Hôlderlin, Hyperion, p. 120.

exchange for our freedom, we must suffer the limitations of mortal

47 Friedrich Hôlderlin, On Punishment', in Friedrich Hôlderlin: Essays and

to a sphere in which 'misfortune

49 Ibid., p. 307. 52 Holderlin, Hyperion, p. 22.

vigorously we resist fate, and the

It is in this context that fate makes its appearance as a punitive or retributive

65 Ibid., pp. 19-20. Emphasis added.

individual happiness which so distu

small-mindedness of ordinary mortals. As he fulminates in one of his early

Alabanda understands politics as a form of war; he seeks to impose his vision

community involves little more th

decent citizens have lost little or noth

78 Ibid., p. 25. 80 Ibid., p. 25.

to attempt to control the environmen

human beings are among nature's cr

Loralea Michaelis MOUNT ALLISON UNIVERSITY

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