Psychopathology and the modern age
Karl Jaspers reads Hölderlin
pp. 3-17
in: Thomas Fuchs, Thiemo Breyer, Christoph Mundt (eds), Karl Jaspers' philosophy and psychopathology, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
The nexus of psychopathology and modernity is the key to Jaspers' study of Hölderlin. It also informs his entire pathographical oeuvre on van Gogh, Nietzsche, and Max Weber. Remarkably, this view also surfaces in his Notes on Martin Heidegger when Jaspers compares Heidegger's famous interpretation of Hölderlin with the edition published by Hellingrath two decades earlier. Jaspers did not read the elegy "Bread and Wine" in prophetic terms as Heidegger did. Instead he saw it as an outstanding example of Hölderin's late poetry and an unconventional demonstration of the awareness of the limits of language. The poet and his pathographer are both linked in their epistemological reservations about Kant's critical philosophy.
