Panel: HÖLDERLIN AND THE QUESTION OF GOD: POETRY, PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY IN DIALOGUE



961.1 - GOD AND NATURE IN HÖLDERLIN'S DIE TITANEN: AN ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

AUTHORS:
Fiorletta M. (University of Vienna ~ Vienna ~ Austria)
Text:
The aim of this paper is to rethink the philosophical role that the question of God can play in current ecological debates, by offering a philosophical reading of Friedrich Hölderlin's poem Die Titanen. This paper argues that the question of God can play a productive role in reconfiguring the relationship between religion, nature and humanity under conditions of the ecological crisis. I propose to rethink the relation between God and nature as an open constellation that cannot be reduced to a simplistic pantheistic (or panentheistic) horizon. Such a conception allows for a non-anthropocentric understanding of religion that preserves nature's and humanity's freedom and resists their reduction to a unified or instrumentalized whole. To develop this claim, the paper offers a philosophical reading of Friedrich Hölderlin's poem Die Titanen, where the divine is closely linked to an anarchic - or more precisely, aorgic - dimension of nature. (1) the tension between the divine and the titanic, expressed in the unbound forces of nature ("Noch sind sie / unangebunden" HF 28, 14.16); (2) the relation between subject and community ("Ich aber bin allein" HF 28, 25), which opens a space for the creative and mediating role of language; and (3) the problem of theodicy ("Des Rohen brauchet es auch / Damit das Reine sich kenne" HF 31, 5-6), rethought in light of the historical and formative force of the chaotic dimension of nature. Hölderlin's open, fragmentary and unfinished poetic form plays a decisive philosophical role in this reconfiguration. By avoiding conceptual closure, the poem allows nature to "breathe" (Geist) and remain irreducible to human mastery or divine totalization. Read through the lens of the Anthropocene, Die Titanen thus offers conceptual resources for rethinking God, nature, humanity and the problem of evil in a time of ecological crisis.