Discussion On Walter Benjamin’s Criticism Of H(?)lderlin

Walter Benjamin is one of the representatives of Frankfurt school and a unique thinker and critic in the history of modern criticism.His doctrinal critical terms and allegorical style have been regarded as having unexplainable mysterious meanings by researchers since they entered the academic field of vision,and have been labeled as literature,religion,and mysticism.In fact,Benjamin’s criticism has a dual thinking dimension of artistic creation and philosophical cultivation.However,relevant studies often fail to recognize the potential of Benjamin’s artistic skills to develop into philosophical criticism,which is also the critical dilemma faced by modern aesthetics when it leaves the Christian spiritual world and breaks away from the connection between art and spiritual education.H(?)lderlin was a bard in the 18 th century.His river poems had a profound impact on Heidegger’s ideological turn.Benjamin was also deeply influenced by H(?)lderlin’s poems.He not only wrote an entry for H(?)lderlin,but also dedicated his first criticism to him.In Two Poems by Friedrich H(?)lderlin,Benjamin shows the interaction between artistic skills and poetic spirit by paying attention to the verbs connecting different images in the poem.At the same time,he highlights a poetic existence corresponding to Greek mythology by The Poet’s Courage and Timidity.Benjamin’s critical approach of H(?)lderlin lies in crossing the boundary between the pursuit of God by ode and secular life,taking " das Gesdichtete " as the contemporary bridge between poetry and life,and replacing the status of God as the original and task of poetry.Benjamin revealed the process of the poet’s transformation to nature with his concept of space-time significance:(1)the absence of God,(2)the poet’s mythical narration and subject surrender,(3)the universal feeling and self-reversal of the poet’s life.In Benjamin’s view,what the poems express is not the pursuit of the Greek spirit,nor the grasp of their own survival by the descendants of the absence of God,but the common sense of mind and matter triggered by the restoration of the poet’s feeling to life.The poet no longer has God’s protection and eternal things.He only has useless skills to face the constant consumption of life.The concern about the relationship between survival cultivation and artistic skills also made Benjamin form the feature of criticism facing the emptiness.A close examination of Benjamin’s critical works,whether it is fragmented,doctrinal critical language,hybrid concepts,or paradoxical expressions,points to Greece,the original place that cannot be returned in H(?)lderlin’s poems.But Greece is not returnable,so all Benjamin’s efforts point to a virtual being,a "nothing" existence,and form an internal transcendence of natural similarity and technical game based on the doctrine of "nothing".The main reason promotes Benjamin’s criticism of H(?)lderlin’s lies in Benjamin’s awareness of the lack of cultural resources in the modern social culture that link artistic skills and philosophical cultivation,and that modern life has no time to cultivate itself in the technological dizziness and alienation after the retreat of the gods.Therefore,modern life must make a leap between contemporary and history,echoing the mythical power of ancient Greece.The historical fracture opened by H(?)lderlin’s poetry,and his painful experience of the times just responds to the current modern survival problem.In Benjamin’s H(?)lderlin’s criticism,the connection between aesthetics and spiritual cultivation produces contemporary meaning.Through poetic skills,we can restore the body to nature and awaken the unconscious memory that the body originally has but has been forgotten by people.Benjamin’s criticism of H(?)lderlin provides a poetic form of existence for modern life,a kind of infinite vitality revealed in the completely impossible hopelessness by relying on the continuous return of useless time.