After the absolute: Friedrich Hölderlin and the synechia of truth

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.