Hölderlin and the Divine

Friedrich Hölderlin was a German poet and philosopher whom Martin Heidegger referred to as ‘the poet of poetry’. But while he was well-known for his work, he is perhaps best-known for his insanity — what he would call his divine madness — which consumed the second half of his life.

Silke-Maria Weineck, in The Abyss Above, pairs Nietzsche and Hölderlin as the ‘two of the most distinguished madmen in history’, and argues that their later lives ‘continue to fuel the critical imagination of Western culture [which] has always associated madness and genius’. Weineck, like Wolfgang Lange before her, suggests that Hölderlin’s poetic genius cannot be dissociated from his madness. Unlike Heidegger, who thought that madness was the ‘aftermath of Hölderlin’s intense poetic project’, they claim that madness was the project itself, a ‘calculated madness’ that Giorgio Agamben calls, for Hölderlin, ‘a necessity’, something that could not be avoided:

Hölderlin did not seek madness, he had to accept it; but, as Bertaux notes, his conception of madness had nothing to do with our notions of mental illness. It was, rather, something that could or should be inhabited. That is why, when he translates Sophocles’ Ajax, he renders the phrase theiai maniai xynaulos, literally ‘dwelling with divine madness’, as sein Haus ist göttliche Wahnsinn, ‘his house is divine madness’