Abstract

This essay first surveys Hölderlin’s mature philosophical sense of the human subject as caught ineluctably between abstract reflection and concrete receptivity, and it contrasts that sense briefly with the stances of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. It then traces the consequences of this sense for Hölderlin’s poetology, and it concludes by showing how both this philosophical sense and this poetology are enacted in Hölderlin’s late, major fragment “Rousseau.”