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It is known that the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin was a passionate reader of Kant. There is evidence of his parallel interest on poetry and philosophy in his personal correspondence, where references to his own poetical production intertwine with references to his main intellectual interests: the study of Kant and the Greeks. Hölderlin, however, was a colleague of Hegel and Schelling during the years in Tübingen, and he attained personally Fichte’s lessons. His peculiar position on the philosophical debate between Kant and Idealism is thoroughly expressed in the manuscript Urtheil und Seyn from 1795. A careful reading of the text provides an account of the tension between Kant’s philosophy and Fichte’s idealistic approach. Hölderlin displays a critical argument against Fichte’s denial of the original unity expressed in the Kantian formula of an “unknown common root”. Such a pre-reflexive unity is discarded by Fichte as being unable to bear fruit, and in its place he posits an absolute principle, the identity of the self, the absolute I. Hölderlin indicates the incoherence of stating as “absolute” something which is reflexive, and therefore a result of a division, thus casting a straightforward attack to the nuclear ground of the idealistic project. Such an attack can ultimately be interpreted either as a sound critique to idealism main principle, but still engaged with the idealistic privileged search of an absolute ground or as a sheer opposition to Idealism -in as much as Hölderlin’s critique seems to emerge out of respect for the Kantian position. However, Hölderlin’s further development of this issue in literary form does not provide an argument to identify his approach to the absolute with that of the romantics.

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