ABSTRACT
The poetry and philosophy of Friedrich Holderlin remains shrouded in Romantic association. Adorno once wrote about Holderlin that he breaks out of the idealist sphere of influence and towers above it. Holderlin poses a new conception of thought and the idea that the whole must be experienced before it can be known. Holderlin's critique of modernity is not a regressive, Romantic movement to the past, as Lukács and others have seen it. Indeed, it can be said that Holderlin's problematic was a similar one to that explored by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. To understand Holderlin's project, we have to grasp why he thinks that aesthetics grants us access to a higher sense of our unity with nature, and how this is conceived as a pathway to an emancipated form of being. Holderlin's radical proposition is that we synthesize these two poles of philosophy.
