Nature Writing in Transcendental Perspective: Friedrich Hölderlin and Henry David Thoreau

Proceeding from the common roots of Friedrich Hölderlin and Henry David Thoreau in the philosophical ideas of (German) idealism, this essay explores concepts of nature writing in the work of both authors. Their philosophical and literary reflections show that Hölderlin critically distances himself from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s systematic philosophy of pure and subjective idealism as Thoreau critically dissociates his concept from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendental idealism. Based on Lawrence Buell’s criteria defining nature writing, Thoreau’s Walden: or, Life in the Woods and Hölderlin’s hymn “The Rhine” are examined as literary examples that share the common aim of acknowledging nature in the sense of an entity having its own agency and power of understanding, as opposed to the “I” or the “spirit.” Special attention is paid to four areas: first, to Hölderlin’s and Thoreau’s redefinition of the quality “pure” that had largely been associated with the term “understanding” in Kantian philosophy for natural phenomena, for example, as water; to a receptive orientation with respect to humans and nature as well as the overlapping of this polarization by a concept of processuality; and, finally, to a discussion of the “unconditioned” as the reason for being.