Ach (Ah, Alas)

Studia Gilsoniana 9:2, 2020

Goethe’s philosophical writings all ultimately stem from his efforts to understand the creative act, which he experienced as essentially the same in all the various forms of activity he engaged in, the writing of his poems, novels and plays, his scientific investigations, his service to the Weimar state and participation in the life of its court. In contemplating his creative experience, he developed a unique conception of the soul, which this article seeks to analyze.

3 July 2019, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Talk: "Signatura rerum: The Parallel Epiphanies of Goethe and Jacob Böhme". 3 July 2019, at the 7th International ESSWE Conference: Western Esotericism and Consciousness: Visions, Voices, Altered States, July 2-4 2019. Location: History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Location: Oudemanhuispoort 4-6, 1012 CN Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Abstract: Goethe’s autobiographical text, Italian Journey, draws a direct parallel between his own revelatory experience of life and the world of art in Venice and a mystical vision recounted in Jacob Böhme’s biography. In the latter, it is said that Böhme came to be enlightened about the “secret nature” of the universe after looking at a polished pewter bowl. This passage in The Italian Journey is the only time Jacob Böhme’s name is explicitly mentioned in Goethe’s entire oeuvre. There are diametrically opposed interpretations as to its significance. Scholars like Ronald Douglas Gray prefer to suppose Goethe extensively reading Böhme’s mystical writings and related authors in 1769 as a 20-year-old. While for more recent researchers like Paola Meyer, any deeper Böhmean impact on Goethe’s writings should be rejected: “Although it is possible that Goethe did read Böhme, there is absolutely no evidence to this effect.” In this paper I argue that evidence for a threefold impact of Böhme’s writings and visionary experience can be immanently found in Goethe’s works. Firstly, Goethe presents a Böhmean conception and instances of a polysemic Adamic language in his Farbenlehre (Theory of Colour). Secondly, the idea of Great Chain of Being, implicit in Böhme’s vision of the polished bowl, is artistically reflected in several examples in Goethe’s poetic writings that are strikingly interrelated with Böhme’s theosophical writings. Thirdly, Goethe consciously interlinked and textually placed his own scientific and artistic epiphanies as forms of initiatory experience into the same tradition of mystical enlightenment recounted in Jacob Böhme’s biography. All this can be summed up by saying: Goethe adopted and modified in a scientific, poetic and biographical manner Böhme’s philosophical doctrine of signatures.

Monatshefte, 2016

Man erfährt wieder bei dieser Gelegenheit, daß eine vollständige Erfahrung die Theorie in sich enthalten muß. Um desto sichrer sind wir, daß wir uns in einer Mitte begegnen, da wir von so vielen Seiten auf die Sache losgehen.

L. A. Willoughby's article entitled "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry" in Etudes Germanques in 1951 remains even after 65 years the only study ofa cental phenomenon not only regarding Goethe's poetry but the entir age in which Goehe and Romantic poets, bot German and British, lived and worked. The essentially logocentic method employed by Willoughby together with his proposition that the collective unconscious influences the choice and arrangement of words in poetry, suppy the basis for exploring beyond the aegis of Goethe's poetic works and perhaps undestanding them even better as a result.

"Wanderers Sturmlied" claims our attention for more than one reason. On inspection it reveals a high measure of complexity and poetic achievement despite Goethe's dismissive reference to the work as the babbling of a wayfarer when contending with a powerful storm. It is characterized by self-deprecatory humor that serves to shield the poet from potential critics, a conclusion reinforced by consideration of the fact that Goethe managed to delay its publication by forty years. The poem presents us with a very early example of Goethe's 'Wanderer' poems, the most celebrated of which is 'Wandrers Nachtlied.' The keyword 'Wanderer" had made its first significant appearance in Goethe's 'Rede zum Sharespeare Tag,' in which Shakespeare, or rather his dramatic imagination, is likened to a giant in the act of bestriding the globe in seven-league boots, though the figure also betrays attributes of Prometheus the rebel demi-god who stole fire from heaven and created mankind in his own image. In this manifesto in the form of a 'speech' we encounter the culmination of the intellectual ferment that allowed Goethe to absorb and synthesize current trends in literature in the wake of Herder's discovery of the force and spontaneity of Shakespearean drama, and Goethe's own avid enjoyment of works by Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Young, and James Macpherson. Goethe's personal conversion to the principles of originality and liberation from hidebound conventions was totally in keeping of the Zeitgeist of his own time, which offers an explanation as why all that could be encapsulated by one word, 'Wanderer., sparked a literary revolution throughout Europe. However, this revolution produced traumatic side effects. I return to the giant that poses the central metaphor of the Speech honoring Shakespeare's Day. Reeling from pole to pole, the giant lacks purposeful direction or any stabilizing counterpoint. Not that the giant complains of his lacking orientation, so exhilarating is his enjoyment of his frenzied motions. Only later will the Wanderer experience the withdrawal symptoms that are the price demanded by his wild exertions. In “Wandrers Sturmlied” we find ample evidence of the early outbreak of these very symptoms but also a sign of the recognition that the wanderer needs a goal and the prospect of finding a resting-place. As L. A. Willoughby demonstrated in his article 'The Image of the "'Wanderer" and the "Hut" in Goethe's Poetry,' the images or the words, 'Wanderer' and 'Hut,' the distinction never being made quite clear, occur in close mutual proximity so frequently that the resultant phenomenon must be attributable to the operation of co-ordinating power of the Jungian collective unconscious, in terms of which the 'Wanderer' represents the quest of the libido to find rest and the 'Hut' poses the anima, the feminine principle in the human psyche, which is the object of that quest. 'The Hut' motif appears strikingly in "Wandrers Sturmlied" as the place of shelter and solace towards which the storm-tossed and bedraggled Wanderer wades through a muddy stream as described in the poem's closing lines. Nor need we confine the ambit of our quest solely to the body of Goethe's writings when seeking meaningful comparisons, Indeed, we are bound to look beyond the scope of any one author's works to trace the effects of the 'collective' unconscious. An association of 'wandering' and the elemental forces of nature, air, fire, earth and water, comes to the fore in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Wilhelm Mueller's 'Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust.'. I go further to I draw a parallel between the juncture in the poem's narrative at which the wanderer stalls in flight and plunges into a muddy stream with Milton's expression of anxiety at the prospect that he will 'wander' forlorn as though thrown from the back of Pegasus in flight (Paradise Lost, VII). What I term 'the acute crisis in the history of poetic self-consciousness' is a far cry from the unbounded collective unconscious but for some reason a consideration of the one involves a consideration of the other. Willoughby, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom with their diverse lines of argument emphasized the severity of the crisis of self-consciousness that befell Goethe and the Romantic poets. Despite his belief in the literal reality of the 'Heavenly Muse, Milton seems to have intimated the approach of the modern poet's existential anguish. Goethe laid the foundation of all schools of psychology that discern an underlying undercurrent of the mind in the quest of the libido to achieve union with the anima so clearly identified in the closing lines of Faust Part 2. It is interesting to note that the discovery of the unconscious owes much to Goethe's pioneering efforts to contend with the burdens of acute self-consciousness.

German Studies Review, 1999

Though usually thought of as an atheist or agnostic, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his answer to Peacock's pronouncement on the death of poetry (one of the first of many), averred the sanctity and prophetic nature of the art in A Defence of Poetry. The declining prestige of poetry and a commensurate and related decline in regard to religious and biblical authority amounted to a dethronement of "the Word." In this connection it is surely significant that, when pondering how to translate logos into the language of his day, Goethe's Faust rejected the "Word" ("das Wort") in favour of "the Deed" ("die Tat") as an adequate rendition of "Logos" in the first chapter of St. John's Gospel. This change of word reflected the zeitgeist of Goethe's, not Faust's, epoch. "The Word" seems to have absorbed the mustiness of libraries and the aridity of a recluse's study, and lost its sense of an originating power; "the Deed" implies action and motion, which in Goethe's age were being treated as virtues in themselves (Faust set the condition for the forfeiture of his soul in his becoming resigned to a bed of idleness).

This article sketches the Kantian philosophical bases of Goethe's archetypal plant and its further development in the philosophy of Hegel and Wittgenstein

2021

Beginning with the Age of Goethe, the history of the question of the origin of language follows from the general questions, “What is man?” “What is culture?” and “What is language?”(1) The Berlin Academy of Sciences conjectured in its Preisfrage of 1769 whether human beings, “abandoned to their natural faculties,” are capable of inventing language. In response, the first sentence of Johann Gottfried Herder’s winning “Essay on the Origin of Language” gives the starting point for new anthropological thinking in the eighteenth century, changing the history of this question: “Already as an animal the human being has language.”(2) As Helmut Mueller-Sievers, the author of Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800, points out, Herder’s rhetorical procedure is an attempt to deny both empirical and divine origins of language while unifying his philosophical project within the domain of language: