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Benjamin as a Reader of H61derlin:
The Origins of Benjamin's
Theory of Literary Criticism
MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
544
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Benjamin and HOlderlin 545
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546 MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
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Benjamin and Holderlin 547
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548 MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
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Benjamin and Holderlin 549
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550 MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
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Benjamin and Holderlin 551
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552 MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
II
To this point, the positive side of Benjamin's reading has been empha-
sized. As will often be the case in his later essays, though, the HOlderlin
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Benjamin and HOlderlin 553
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554 MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
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Benjamin and HOlderlin 555
Holderlin essay, had one other important result: it shaped his under-
standing of the relationship which obtains between language and knowl-
edge. In "Grund zum Empedokles" Holderlin describes a necessarily
reciprocal relationship which can be established between man and
nature. Man becomes "unterscheidender, denkender, vergleichender,
bildender, organisirender, und organisirter . . . wenn er weniger bei sich
selber ist, und in so fern er sich weniger bewuBt ist, daB bei ihm und ftir
ihn das sprachlose Sprache ... gewinnt" (SA IV, 1, 154-55). Language,
then, is a means through which to achieve the transcendence of self-
consciousness discussed above. More than that, though, it is here de-
scribed as the mode wherein man can come to develop his potential
to its fullest. And this development is in turn only possible when man
exercises his function as the one who lends language to nature, which
is without language. This idea finds expression in the following passage
from the drama itself:
Inspired by nature, the poet translates its sounds and sights into images
and in so doing names it. The act of naming grants to the speaker a
power which opens to him a realm beyond the bounds of his subjectivity
and makes him privy to a special knowledge.
The importance of this idea for Benjamin is apparent in his inter-
pretation of "Blodigkeit" in the Holderlin essay, in which the poet's
song melds the worldly and the ideal. But Benjamin was to use this
problem complex more explicitly in an essay written in 1916. The essay
"Uber Sprache tiberhaupt und tiber die Sprache des Menschen" is often
described as the keystone of Benjamin's thought. Its opening pages
read like an amplification of the dialogical function of language in
Empedokles. In a pre-Adamitic, perfect language, man entered into a
dialogue with nature, translating for it its silent speech and finally
naming it. This act of naming spoke as a performative act the final
unity of man and nature; and, as was the case in the Holderlinian
model, this act of naming established man's relationship to the abso-
lute. In naming, man is granted a power and knowledge analogous to
God's own creativity. "Das absolute Verhiltnis des Namens zur Er-
kenntnis besteht allein in Gott, nur dort ist der Name, weil er im inner-
sten mit dem schaffenden Wort identisch ist, das reine Medium der
Erkenntnis" (I, 1, 148). Here, as in Empedokles, language is the lynchpin
of the larger constellation man-nature-God(s); the language essay
supplies for Benjamin the crucial connection between HOlderlin's idea
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556 MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
that the poem itself establishes a unity with something larger than man
and his own later assertion of the presence of truth in the work of art.
He comes increasingly to identify the name with the presence of truth
in the world. In the Goethe essay, Benjamin intimates that access to
truth is attainable only through the "Anschauung des gottlichen Na-
mens" (I, 1, 128), and in the preface to Trauerspiel, he defines truth
itself as the "Gewalt" which gives form to matter and proceeds to
identify this "Gewalt" with the name: "Das aller Phenomenalitit
entruickte Sein, dem allein diese Gewalt eignet, ist das des Namens"
(I, 1, 216). In these and other references throughout his works, Benjamin
allows the word "name" to stand metonymically for the idea complex
of his early theory of language. This theory, which combines ideas de-
rived from HOlderlin, Hamann and Jewish mysticism, stands behind
Benjamin's final attribution of a special significance to the work of liter-
ary art: its use of language sets it above all other art forms as the resi-
dence and final refuge of truth in the phenomenal world.
III
The references not only to the function of poetry as the mediator be-
tween larger whole and discrete part, but also to the idea of "Trennung"
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Benjamin and Holderlin 557
discussed above are, I think, clear enough here. But Holderlin adds in
this letter the implication that the whole has a role in the organization
and relationships inherent in the poem. The essay "Ober die Verfahrens-
weise des poetischen Geistes," another of the Homburg essay fragments,
discusses this relationship of the roles played by the whole and by the
individual in some detail.26 According to HOlderlin, the poem is able to
accomplish so much due to the existence of something which lies beyond
the poem, a heuristic principle of organization with Kantian features
which HOlderlin calls the "Grund."
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558 MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
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Benjamin and Holderlin 559
Princeton University
' Walter Benjamin, Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 505 (in French
in the original).
2 Adorno's publication of a selection of Benjamin's essays, Walter Benjamin, Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955), served as the basis for Benjamin scholar-
ship until the critical edition edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppen-
hauser began to appear in 1971.
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560 MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
? The attack on Benjamin began in a paradoxical fashion. Bernd Witte's Walter Ben-
jamin: Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1976) is in many
ways the best single book on Benjamin, yet Witte consistently undermines his own
work by dismissing Benjamin's interpretations as overly personal and subjective.
This criticism has been taken up more recently by Michael Rumpf, who extends
it so as to call Benjamin's stature into question: "Es zeigt sich, daI3 Benjamins Funktion
als Leitfigur neuerer Forschung bedenklich ist." Rumpf, "Walter Benjamins Nachle-
ben," DVjS, 52 (1978), 137.
' Liselotte Wiesenthal's generally reliable overview of Benjamin criticism divides the
critics into "fronts" roughly parallel to those sketched here; Rumpf offers an overview
of newer material, although his evaluations are colored by his animus against Ben-
jamin. Wiesenthal, Zur Wissenschaftstheorie Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt am Main:
Athenaum Verlag, 1973), pp. 179-206; Rumpf, pp. 137-53.
? Benjamin, Briefe, p. 513.
6 Adorno, introduction to Benjamin, Schriften, p. xv.
7Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhauser
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971ff.), Vol. IV, Part 1, p. 507. All references
to Benjamin's works will be cited in the text by volume, part and page number.
8 I shall try to show that Benjamin developed much of his thought not only on the basis
of his reading of "Dichtermut" and "BlOdigkeit," the poems analyzed in the
essay on HOlderlin, but also of Der Tod des Empedokles and of the philosophical
essay fragments written in Homburg between 1798 and 1800, texts not specifically
mentioned in "Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich HOlderlin." My argument for the im-
portance of these texts relies upon an analysis of strikingly similar concepts, rela-
tionships and denotative terminology between them and Benjamin's thought. I
cannot prove that Benjamin knew these works, but they were available to him, and
I argue from Benjamin's habits of reading and thinking. First, "Zwei Gedichte
von Friedrich HOlderlin" was written in the winter of 1914-1915. I list below the first
complete edition of the texts discussed in my essay. "Grund zum Empedokles," in
HOlderlin, Samtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Franz Zinkernagel, 1914; "Ober die
Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes," in HOlderlin, Gesammelte Werke, ed.
Wilhelm BOhm, 1911; "Ober den Unterschied der Dichtarten," in BOhm, 1911;
"Uber Religion," in BOhm, 1911. Secondly, Benjamin was a voracious reader, with a
predilection for the arcane and obscure. He was given to reading everything avail-
able to him on a subject about which he has writing and routinely integrated con-
cepts from "obvious" and "arcane" sources in his work without mention of their
origin. It was not until late in his life, for example, that he mentioned the importance
of Goethe's morphological writings not only for the composition of the essay
"Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" of 1921, but also for the development of his
concept of the Ursprung in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels of 1924.
9 For a history of the essay's composition, see the critical apparatus to volume II
of the Gesammelte Schriften (II, 3, 921-22).
o0 Walter Laqueur's Young Germany: A History of the Youth Movement (New York:
Basic Books, 1962) remains the best study of the Jugendbewegung. It contains valu-
able insights into Wyneken's influence.
" Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland in
Sakularausgabe der Werke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1972), VIII, 194.
2 Friedrich HOlderlin, Samtliche Werke, Grof/e Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Friedrich
Beil3ner and Adolf Beck (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1943ff.), VI, Part 1,
p. 304. All references to HOlderlin's works and letters will be cited in the text by
volume, part and page number.
" HOlderlin's relationship to German Idealism in general and to Kant in particular has
been a topic of recurrent debate. See esp. Ernst Cassirer, Idee und Gestalt (Berlin:
Bruno Cassirer, 1921), pp. 109-52; Johannes Hoffmeister, Holderlin und die Philo-
sophie (Leipzig: Meiner Verlag, 1944); Ernst Muiller, Holderlin: Studien zur Geschichte
seines Geistes (Berlin: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1944), pp. 1-173; Wolfgang Binder,
"HOlderlins Dichtung im Zeitalter des Idealismus," Holderlin Jahrbuch, 14,
(1965-66), 57-72.
"14 See esp. Jochen Schmidt, Holderlins spater Widerruf in den Oden "Chiron,"
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Benjamin and Holderlin 561
"Blodigkeit und "Ganymed" (Ttibingen: Max Niemayer Verlag, 1978), esp. pp.
1-15, 113-45.
" Paul BOckmann, "Sprache und Mythos in HOlderlins Dichten" in Hans Steffen,
ed., Die deutsche Romantik (GOttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1967), pp. 10-11;
Lawrence Ryan, Friedrich Holderlin (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuch-
handlung, 1962), p. 21.
16 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin-Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), p. 45.
7 BOckmann, p. 10.
, Ryan, "HOlderlins Dichtungsbegriff," in Holderlin Jahrbuch, 12 (1961-62), 20-41
offers the best account of this difficult problem.
'9 HOlderlin is of course not the only author of the Goethezeit who saw in poetry the
dynamic capacity to work decisive changes on the world. The conception of the
work of art as a manifestation of transcendental forces was at the time a nearly
universal one. Benjamin recognized, for example, that Classicism offered a model
for the reintegration of the worldly and the ideal: the notion that the world is itself
a metaphor for a higher order, that "alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis," finds
its characteristic trope in the classical "Kunstsymbol." As early as 1912 and again,
emphatically, in Trauerspiel, Benjamin rejected the symbol as a "Reaktionser-
scheinung" (I, 1, 32), a claim for an organic totality which no longer exists. And
Benjamin's rejection of the ideas of the Romantics on this specific point is even
better documented. Despite the appreciation expressed in Der Begriff der Kunst-
kritik in der deutschen Romantik for Schlegel's and Novalis' contributions in other
areas, Benjamin's statements on their various definitions of the work of art are
marked by ambivalence. It is no accident that Benjamin's objections to the Romantic
position are closely related to Holderlin's reservations regarding Fichte. Holderlin
described his objections to the Fichtean philosophy in a letter to Hegel of 1795:
Sein absolutes Ich . . . enthalt alle Realitat; es ist alles und
au3er ihm ist nichts, es giebt also ftir dieses absolute Ich
kein Object, denn sonst ware nicht alle Realitat in ihm,
ein Bewul3tsein ohne Object ist aber nicht denkbar ...
(SA VI, 1, 155)
The thrust of HOlderlin's argument is that consciousness can never become wholly
identical with its object, that is, the absolute subject cannot come to subsume all
of reality. The division of subject and object cannot be mended, according to
HOlderlin, through the mere expansion of consciousness. Benjamin takes up a similar
argument in his book on Romantic art criticism when he points out that the poetics
of the Schlegel circle represents a development of Fichtean philosophy, especially
as the work of art is defined in analogy to consciousness. Benjamin rejects this
identification in the afterword to his study and even more decidedly in the Ursprung
des deutschen Trauerspiels: the criticism of works is "nicht also--romantisch-
Erweckung des Bewul3tseins in den lebendigen [Werken]" (I, 1, 357). The refusal to
rely upon an expanded conception of the role of consciousness as the solution to
the problem of separation is common, then, to both Benjamin and HOlderlin. The
arguments contained in the letter to Hegel are representative of HOlderlin's more
general attitude toward the problem of consciousness and subjectivity, and they
are reflected in his poetic production. HOlderlin depicts his attempt to overcome
and transcend, rather than expand, consciousness most explicitly in Der Tod des
Empedokles. Benjamin's knowledge of the drama, and not necessarily of HOlderlin's
philosophical formulations, had far-reaching consequences for his own attitudes
toward consciousness and subjectivity.
20 Scholem, "Walter Benjamin," in Uber Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 143.
21 See esp. Scholem, "Walter Benjamin und sein Engel" in Zur Aktualitdt Walter
Benjamins, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972),
pp. 87-138 and Wiesenthal, pp. 116-23.
22 Ryan's Holderlins Lehre vom Wechsel der Tone (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag,
1960) represents the most thorough interpretation of this aspect of Holderlin's poetics.
On the tragic tone see especially pp. 22-25.
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562 MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
HOFSTRA
UNIVERSITY
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