The Death of Empedocles (Masterplots, Revised Second Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Friedrich Hölderlin
- First Published: 1826
- Type of Work: Drama
- Type of Plot: Tragedy
- Time of Work: Fifth century
- Setting: Agrigentum and Mount Etna
- Principal Characters: Empedocles, Kritias, Manes, Mecades, Hemocrates, Pausanias, Panthea, Delia
- Genres: Drama, Tragedy
- Subjects: Philosophy or philosophers, Death or dying, Gods or goddesses, Drama or dramatists, Life, philosophy of, Life and death, Greek or Roman times, Romanticism, Greece or Greek people
- Locales: Mount Etna, Agrigentum
The Death of Empedocles is a verse drama of Friedrich Hölderlin’s middle period (1793-1799), when his worldview of idealistic pantheism—that the human being is part of a cosmos in which all things express the nature of divinity—was called into question by issues raised in his intense study of the philosophical works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte asserts in his philosophy that it is the individual consciousness alone that gives meaning to the world. Such a view challenges the holistic aspect of pantheism. While in many respects The Death of Empedocles has been...
[The entire page is 2946 words long]
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