Buddhist Romanticism

This is why the Romantic view denigrated any attempt to judge
another’s actions against any kind of moral law. Instead, the duty of the
sensitive soul, also in tune with the unity of the cosmos, was to empathize
with the psychological motivations for all kinds of behavior, regardless of
what the consequences of those actions might be. In this way, the
perspective for judging actions changed from that of moral philosophy to
that of the novel. And the ideal novel, in this case, tried to present an
infinite point of view in which even mistaken actions have their place in the
glowing vitality of the whole.
Hölderlin’s Hyperion is a case in point. The novel is a sad one, centering
on the emotional upheavals of the narrator’s life. A young Greek of the late
18th century, Hyperion finds an excellent friend, Alabanda, and falls in love
with an even more excellent woman—Diotima, named after Socrates’
teacher. Hyperion’s main problem—much like the author’s—is a tendency
toward extravagant and impulsive swings of mood. Learning of an
attempted revolution against the Turks, he leaves Diotima, much against
her better advice, to join—and eventually, together with Alabanda, to lead
—a group of revolutionary forces. The barbaric behavior of his forces on
capturing a port town, however, leaves him disillusioned with the
revolution, and so he decides to return to his love. But it is too late. She has
learned false reports of his death and, heart-stricken, has taken ill and will
soon die. Learning that he is alive, she writes to him, telling him not to
return home, as her family will seek vengeance for her death.
In a similar vein, Alabanda—again, in a series of events initiated by
Hyperion’s actions—dies at the hands of a secret criminal brotherhood.
Hyperion is thus forced into exile, but after many years returns home.
There he adopts the life of a hermit and finally finds peace, assured that he
never really has been separated from Diotima, and never will be. Toward
the end of the novel he concludes, “All the dissonances of the world are like
lovers’ strife. In the midst of the quarrel is reconciliation, and all that is
separated comes together again. The arteries part and return in the heart,
and all is one eternal, glowing life.”
As Hölderlin states in his preface to the novel, Hyperion’s story is not to
be read for the sake of the moral—which would obviously be not to trust
one’s impulses—but to appreciate the “resolution of dissonances in a
particular character.” From the infinite perspective that Hyperion develops
at the end of the story, even his grave mistakes are nothing more than
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