Hölderlin’s project for Jena

Aesthetic Ideas beyond Kant and Schiller

Abstract

Hölderlin’s philosophical conception structures itself upon two insights: the indivisibility between sensibility and reason, such as potentially thought in the Platonic idea of beauty, and the Spinozistic inspired view of a unity differentiated in itself. The aim of this article is to address the former. Towards the end of 1794, Hölderlin left his job as a preceptor, at von Kalb’s, and moves to Jena, where he works on his Hyperion and attends to Fichte’s lectures. Nevertheless, he does not come to town empty-handed: before arriving, Hölderlin writes to Christian Neuffer and expresses the wish to draw up an essay on Kant’s aesthetic ideas, which would both comment upon Plato’s Phaedrus and take a step far beyond Kant by means of a simplification of his theory of beauty. In this matter, Hölderlin considered that Schiller had failed to trespass on the Kantian boundary, but states that he should have dared to. Once the essay has never been written, I will present the elements wherein the writing was conceived, and thus restore its general guidelines.