‘Was nemlich mehr sei, das Ganze oder das Einzelne’: Hölderlin’s Hyperion as an Unresolved Crisis

Hyperion enacts Hölderlin’s philosophical crisis of the late 1790s over how to constitute a differentiated unity, a totality which simultaneously allows for particularity. The final version of the novel manifests Hölderlin’s struggle to discover whether the particular or the whole is more significant in this endeavour; it does not represent the completed development and accompanying attainment of wholeness by the narrator‐poet intimated in earlier versions, but instead demonstrates the pursuit of this philosophical question to its painfully negative conclusion. In the course of the novel the narrator tests several resolutions to this problem but rejects each in turn. He leaves the reader in a crisis similar to Hölderlin’s, facing only negative options — neither particular, nor whole — without a positive alternative. Hyperion ultimately represents a failed effort to establish the primacy of the particular in relation to the whole, a failure that forces Hölderlin to choose between the whole and the particular. Hölderlin neither makes this choice nor resolves this crisis in the novel. He fails to provide the reader with a sense of closure to this crisis, and in so doing he anticipates the similarly unsettling philosophical and poetic ventures into particularity that characterise his later career.