Grund/Abgrund On Kant and Hölderlin

German Idealism started, surprisingly, not with the search for ideas. Rather, it began with the search for ground. Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781/87), while announcing the program of establishing a philosophy based on “the secure course of a science,” was literally entangled in a metaphorical field around “well-groundedness” on which such course would have to be established. Kant himself, notably a philosopher of “Grundlegung,” “Grundsätze,” and “Anfangsgründe” and other derivatives of “ground” (Grund), found it necessary to mark the use of a philosophical terminology built around “ground” explicitly as “symbolic” (Kritik der Urteilskraft), but did not entirely resolve the remaining problems around such a “ground” established through a metaphorical operation.
The rhetoric of “groundedness” however will take new forms in Kant’s aftermath. Most notably, in Hölderlin’s poetry, the language of “ground” silently retreats, even though particularly Hölderlin’s late poetry often revolves around aspects that could be brought together with what Kant called “the secure course”: wandering, moving, or—in Hölderlin’s language—dwelling (“wandeln”). The following article, apart from offering a reading of Hölderlin’s elegy Menons Klagen um Diotima (1802/03), examines Hölderlin’s poetic version of breaking a fundamental promise of German Idealism, the establishment of a fundament itself, by turning from a language of “ground” (Grund) towards a language of abyss and “chasm” (Abgrund).