"Philosophy is born when certain individuals realize that they can no longer feel part of a people, that a people like the one poets believed they were addressing does not exist, or that it has become something foreign or hostile. Philosophy is, above all, this exile of a human being among other human beings, the predicament of being a stranger in the city in which the philosopher lives and in which he nevertheless continues to dwell, obstinately addressing an absent people…
From a certain moment onwards, at the threshold of modernity, even poets become aware they can no longer address their own people — even the poet understands he is speaking to a people that no longer exists or, if it does, it cannot and does not want to listen to him. Hölderlin himself is the point at which these contradictions explode, and the poet is forced to recognize himself as a philosopher or as he put it in a letter to Christian Ludwig Neuffer — take refuge in the hospital of philosophy.
— Giorgio Agamben, Hölderlin, Holed Up