After the absolute: Friedrich Hölderlin and the synechia of truth

In the preface to his only published novel, Hyperion, Friedrich Hölderlin provided counsel to his readers, warning against the dual impulse to derive from his work either an absolute system of meaning, or a singular display of aesthetic sensibility: ‘those who merely sniff my flower mistake its nature, and so do those who pluck it merely for instruction’. And yet, following a century in which Hölderlin’s work fell into near-obscurity, commentators have habitually re-engaged with his thought along precisely these trajectories: as stand-alone literary works which reflect the strands of his research into ancient Greek culture and the nascent literary foundations of German Romanticism, or as part of a holistic philosophical programme which, along with his contemporaries F. W. J. Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, goes some way towards synthesising the various strands of post-Kantian Idealism into a systematic hierarchy of universal meaning. This thesis seeks to redress this trend, illustrating the manner in which Hölderlin’s project, insofar as it can be labelled a “project”, uniquely converges around a constellation of otherwise incompatible discourses and practices which, in the selfsame preface, Hölderlin himself described as ‘the dissolution of dissonances in a particular character’.

This study argues that Hölderlin's ‟particular” character sustains and suspends irreconcilable positions upon a horizon of shared presentation in which neither of these activities is of itself suspended or lost, but rather held-together. The Greek word synechia, to which this thesis owes a part of its title, represents such a ‟holding-together”. Following the researches of Reiner Schürmann, who made much of the critical function of the ‟synechia of contraries” in the thought of Parmenides, this thesis pursues the practice of ‟synechic” thinking and the innovative possibilities it opens for those striving for a form of thinking unrestricted by the commonplace assumptions and limitations of Western metaphysics. The dialogue with Hölderlin presented in this thesis attempts to contribute to such apprenticeship, precisely because Hölderlin is receptive to the incompatible ‟otherness” of the Greek beginning from which synechia develops, and because his rendering of a language which ‟holds” provides the potential for resistance in the face of discourses which otherwise subsume all dialogues beneath their own maximal norms.