One with Everything: Hölderlin on Acrocorinth

Abstract

Friedrich Hölderlin's epistolary novel, Hyperion, opens with contradictory fantasies of the protagonist's unification with, and alienation from, nature. These visions of oneness and division find a corollary in the novel's setting within an idealized version of Greece and the landscape of the Corinthian Isthmus. The essay argues that we can best understand the significance of Hyperion's desire to be “one with everything” if we take into account the context of Hölderlin's and Friedrich Schelling's attempt in the 1790s to find a way to incorporate a dynamic view of nature into German Idealist philosophy. Taking up the philosophical concept of “intellectual intuition” (used in distinctive ways by both Kant and Fichte before them) the young poet/philosophers attempted to grant a new range of meaning to the term. For them an intellectual form of intuition opens possibilities of non-material connections with a world of things that must themselves be viewed as dynamically alive. Reading the novel Hyperion as an attempt to poeticize this version of Idealism also allows us to see how the novel functions as a move from intellectual to aesthetic intuition, as an attempt to represent the human capacity for aesthetic creativity as our means of becoming one.