Perceiving Nature(s): Epistemic, Artistic and Political Practices as Contested Fields
At our last meeting, we welcomed Claudia Luchetti and Benjaming Gleede from Tübingen.
Claudia Luchetti began with a talk on the topic: “To Be One with Everything, that is the Life of the Divine, that is the Heaven of Man.”
Visions of Nature between Poetology and Philosophy in Friedrich Hölderlin.
In *Hyperion*, Hölderlin conceives of nature as an ancient and divine unity. A nature, as in ancient Greece, populated by heroes and demigods who can live in perfect harmony with it. On a deeper level, nature embodies that primordial unity which was violated by the purely logical and formal reflection of the thinking subject – to which Hölderlin refers in the fragment *Judgement and Being* – and which catapulted the ‘I’ out of its world.
Even if the ‘restoration of dissonances’, which human consciousness constantly repeats, is an asymptotic process, nature itself shows us the way to restoring the lost unity by manifesting within itself the very same tension of diverging forces, which are nevertheless harmonised in beauty.
The poet’s task is to interpret the full, unified and absolute life of nature through aesthetic intuition. The challenge he faces is twofold: On a political level, it is a matter of realising the unity of philosophy, religion and art in the service of a constitution governed by the idea of beauty—a vision that Hölderlin, together with his friends Schelling and Hegel, developed in *The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism*. On a linguistic level, the challenge lies in creating a unifying, inspiring language in which reflection and emotion converge and find expression in a single voice that is at once natural and human.
Lecture by Benjamin Gleede from Tübingen: ‘And, behold, it was very good’. Perfection and perfectibility of creation in ancient Christian exegesis of Genesis 1
One of the most striking features of the Genesis creation narrative is surely the insistently repeated formula of approval ‘and behold, it was good’. Why does the Creator feel the need to praise himself in this way, and this in the face of the most humble creations such as animals or plants, which, moreover, are obviously by no means consistently ‘good’, but rather fall into categories of both useful and harmful?
In view of this, ancient Christian authors asked themselves not only what the precise meaning of ‘good’ was in this context, but also what the purpose was of the constant repetition of the phrase. For Basil of Caesarea, ‘good’ could mean nothing other than ‘useful’, a claim that could only be fulfilled for the whole of creation in the form of its ethical and pedagogical interpretation for humankind. For John Chrysostom, the text of Genesis itself is already structured pedagogically and by no means reflects any divine self-affirmations, but rather aims to convey the divine perspective on the work of creation to the reader step by step.
For Augustine, such pedagogical considerations of utility and appropriateness fall short overall: for him, the structure of the text introduces the metaphysical structure of being that is present everywhere and underlies all benefit and harm.
