Saurabh Pal

Before moving to Yale in 2018, Saurabh studied German Literature and Philosophy at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and the Freie Universität in Berlin. His dissertation “Hölderlin’s Naturalism” deals with the relation between human agency and nature in the theoretical and literary works of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Taking into account Kant and Fichte reception in recent theories of human agency and morality in terms of the first and second personal standpoints, this project shows how Hölderlin draws attention to the separation from nature inherent in these practical attitudes: as a self-conscious agent one conceives of oneself in terms of one’s opposition to all non-human nature. Hölderlin, the project hopes to show, is cognisant of both the necessity of such an autonomous self-conception for human action as well as its fundamental limitation from a higher, apersonal standpoint that views human self-consciousness as a unified part of nature. The adoption of such a standpoint is possible through poetry, since truly unified poetic works are composed and understood by transcending an engaged first or second personal perspective. Yet, the poet’s role as an agent and political actor in bringing about a revolution in human life and thinking poses a real challenge to the ideal of living in “unity with nature” from the practical point of view. Saurabh is more generally interested in how post-Kantian poets and thinkers such as Karoline von Günderrode, Heinrich von Kleist and Schleiermacher respond to the opposition between nature and normativity through innovations in poetry and a rethinking of the “human vocation”. In addition to literature and philosophy around 1800, his other interests include discourses of modernity and classical reception (“Greeks vs. Moderns”), ecocriticism, German Modernism, literary pragmatics, and the intersection of philosophy and literature.