I The poetry and philosophy of Friedrich Hölderlin remains shrouded in Romantic association. His ideas strike many as exemplary of an age that reacted to the Enlightenment ideas of reason as an organism in shock. Folded into the delusions of Romantic Idealism, his ideas have too often been passed over. Adorno once wrote about Hölderlin that he breaks out of the idealist sphere of influence and towers above it. His poetry expresses, better than any maxims could and to an extent that Hegel would not approved, that life is not an idea, that the quintessence of existing entities is not essence. (NL2, 123) I think Adorno’s insight is a prescient one. That Hölderlin is not an abstruse idealist, but a thinker who wanted to penetrate into the nucleus of human reason itself—human reason as a creative process akin to that of nature itself. Aesthetic would therefore serve not as a replacement—or displacement—of reason, rather it would be the true expression of reason itself. A modernity that was rooted in the narrow conception of reason and the individual that sprang from the Enlightenment would therefore miss the broader, richer essence of reason and humanism. In the end, what Hölderlin asks us to con- sider is the extent to which modernity confronts us with a choice: between a life of one-dimensionality, of domination and unrealized potential and what he sees as a “new world” or “new age”: as a way of living, thinking, feeling that will be able to encompass the full potentialities contained within nature. Hölderlin poses a new conception of thought and the idea that the whole must be experienced before it can be known. He seems to be concerned to defend a human experience against the mechanistic, the subjectivistic, and the dualistic. His conception of an aesthetic is one that senses the reified stale reality that pervaded his time. Of the rise of instrumental reason, of the division of labor, of the rise of the market mentality and the increasingly shallow culture of bourgeois life. He sees the seeds of what will become an Hölderlin’s Aesthetic Critique of Modernity Michael J. Thompson 10 15032-1175-010.indd 181 15032-1175-010.indd 181 5/7/2018 10:47:23 AM 5/7/2018 10:47:23 AM