Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory (S U N Y Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

cover

title : author publisher isbn10 | asin print isbn13 ebook isbn13 language subject

: : : : : :

publication date lcc ddc subject

: : : :

next page >

Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue : Essays in German Literary Theory SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy Gadamer, Hans Georg. State University of New York Press 0791417360 9780791417362 9780585067483 English German literature--History and criticism, Authors, German-Philosophy, Criticism--Germany--History. 1994 PT75.G3 1994eb 830.9 German literature--History and criticism, Authors, German-Philosophy, Criticism--Germany--History.

cover If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

cover-0

next page >

Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue

< previous page

cover-0 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_ii

next page > Page ii

SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy Dennis J. Schmidt, editor

< previous page

page_ii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_iii

next page > Page iii

Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue Essays in German Literary Theory by Hans-Georg Gadamer Translated with an Introduction by Robert H. Paslick State University of New York Press

< previous page

page_iii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_iv

next page > Page iv

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 1994 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246 Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Dana E. Yanulavich Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1900Literature and philosophy in dialogue : essays in German literary theory / by Hans-Georg Gadamer : translated with an introduction by Robert H. Paslick. p. cm. (SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy) Includes index. ISBN 0-7914-1735-2 (acid-free paper). ISBN 0-7914-1736-0 (pbk. :acid-free paper) 1. German literatureHistory and criticism. 2. Authors, GermanPhilosophy. 3. CriticismGermanyHistory. I. Title. II. Series. PT75.G3 1993 830.9dc20 93-18448 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

< previous page

page_iv If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_v

next page > Page v

Contents

Translator's Introduction

vii

Goethe and Philosophy

1

Goethe and the Moral World

21

On the Course of Human Spiritual Development: Studies of Goethe's Unfinished Writings

31

Hölderlin and Antiquity

67

Hölderlin and the Future

87

Bach and Weimar

109

The God of Most Intimate Feeling

119

Poetry and Punctuation

131

Rainer Maria Rilke's Interpretation of Existence: On the Book by Romano Guardini

139

Mythopoietic Reversal in Rilke's Duino Elegies

153

Notes

173

Index

179

< previous page

page_v If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_vii

next page > Page vii

Translator's Introduction Introducing Gadamer to the American public is no longer the pioneering task it once was. We now take for granted that there is a considerable readership in a number of academic fields acquainted with the main outlines of what we have come to call philosophical hermeneutics. The proliferation of translated texts and the rising interest in the problems and strategies of interpretation far beyond the original realm of biblical and classical studies have attracted ever increasing numbers of both friends and critics dissatisfied with the conventional fare of the academic table. We live in a culturally unsettling world where even for Americans life has undergone frightening changes over the last fifty years. We are surrounded by questions for which we suddenly have no answers. The Pepsodent smile and shallow optimism of our conventional image is giving way to rising fear, insecurity, and even moments of pessimism. We no longer feel like the darlings of progress and are no longer confident that a scientific utopia lies just around the corner. Neither the comfortable, flattering myths of nationalist rhetoric nor the soporific glitter of Madison Avenue's reality machine is able to sustain a coherent and meaningful life. It is against this background that American interest has been increasingly attracted by what has always been considered the "pessimism" of continental philosophy, particularly the Extentialist and

< previous page

page_vii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_viii

next page > Page viii

Phenomenological movements. Gadamer's work has been particularly influential in breaking down the characteristic resistance of Anglo-American thinkers to what is perceived as the "irrationalism" of the continental tradition. Such views, on both sides of the Atlantic, often rest on simple ignorance and prejudice and are frequently overcome in the free give and take of serious exchange. The voices engaging in dialogue with Gadamer have, over the years, become more and more numerous. I think particularly of Rorty's interest in hermeneutics and the discovery that the distance between post-Kantian continental philosophy and American pragmatism is much closer than ever suspected. Dialogueno other word captures quite as well the content, the method, and the envisioned ideal of Gadamer's hermeneutics. Once we begin to take dialogue seriously in Gadamer's sense, once we enter into its openness, and truly participate in its guiding spirit, we become subject to an uncontrolled encounter with what Caputo, in his discussion of Heidegger's radical hermeneutics, calls the mystery. But what we encounter in Gadamer is a transduction of Heidegger's mystery. It is precisely the tempered quality of Gadamer's own approach to the mystery, his insistence on the continuity of education and tradition where the forces of unreason and irrationality are contained by the refined culture of human dialogue, that make his work accessible to a nation whose continuing stability still depends on its link with the European cultural tradition. It has been saidby Caputo among othersthat this is precisely Gadamer's weakness, that he recoils before the final leap into the "second beginning." I have elsewhere expressed the opinion 1 that Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy, although focusing in the main on the assimilation and understanding of tradition, rests ultimately on a radically postmetaphysical ontology and that the fusion of horizons is possible only because human experience is radically finite and decentered. However this question may be ultimately resolved. I think most will agree that the mission of Gadamer's life has been quite different from Heidegger's, and in a darkening world, he continues to be a voice of humane reason against a rising tide of barbarism. It is certainly no accident that Gadamer begins his treatise on interpretation in Wahrheit und Methode with a discussion of "Bildung." Normally we translate this word as "education," but in the concept as Gadamer is using it here lies a whole philosophy of human cul-

< previous page

page_viii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_ix

next page > Page ix

ture. The practice of intellectual and moral virtues over a long period of time creates in a people a context where human judgment, almost miraculously, can bring into balance the apparent contradictions of polar opposition, thus creating a world where suffering is of course not eliminated, but where it has a chance of becoming meaningful. Wherever the superfluity of meaning is inaccessible to analysis, as it is in the poem or the prescientific experience of daily life, it must be approached with the discrimination of an educated sensibility. Otherwise, the truth, which becomes knowable only in such moments of balance, withdraws from human awareness, and life becomes more and more subject to the unreasonable demands of unresolved polarity. Does such a world still exist where a free mind can respond creatively to the social, political, and economic realities? Can openness to the mystery be preserved where a rigid method often restricts the flight of the imagination, where sensibilities are dulled, minds lie fallow, and hearts have never learned the "knowledge" of love? There are those at any rate who are convinced that human sensibility as well as the Western tradition have become unreliable elements in the search for peace and justice. Perhaps in such a darkening world, a different approach to the realization of truth and justice is necessary, one that no longer counts on the context of a living tradition, but must rely, as Habermas for example has suggested, on a more "objective" approach to realizing a just and humane world. Whether or not we are persuaded that scientific method can take the place of a tuned sensibility or that in the final analysis Gadamer is a closet essentialist, this is but one of the pressing questions opened up in recent discussions on Gadamer's work. Indeed Gadamer's openness to dialogue, his willingness, even in his later years, to engage his interlocutors in open conversation, is a characteristic indication of his unflagging vitality. We need but recall the extensive encounters with Habermas, Apel, and Derrida, to name but a few, to realize the deep commitment to his principal vocation as teacher-listener. This, however, is not the occasion to rehearse these fascinating dialogues nor to attempt any further analysis of the very important questions that form the substance of these encounters. I said at the beginning that introducing Gadamer's work to the American reader is no longer a pioneering task. This is only partly true. An important aspect of Gadamer's work is barely known to the English-speaking reader. For Gadamer is not only a "philoso-

< previous page

page_ix If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_x

next page > Page x

pher," he is also a reader and "critic" of German literature. I use quotation marks here to designate these "professions" because of the distinct difference between Gadamer and the majority of his academic colleagues. The essays included in this book were, with few exceptions, done by Gadamer prior to 1960, when Wahrheit und Methode was published. The final formulation of philosophical hermeneutics in this book was preceded by a steady flow of creative encounters not only with the works of philosophers like Plato and Hegel but also with some of the major poets in the German literary tradition, among them Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Rilke. Gadamer, though a university professor, is neither a philosopher nor a literary critic in the usual academic sense of the words. What distinguishes him from many of his more traditional colleagues is precisely his insistence that these two disciplines must be in continual dialogue with one another. Both disciplines in separation have a strong tendency to become the game fields of objective, ''scientific" research, where the living context of human existential concerns is eliminated in favor of a "safe," impersonal analysis of literary and philosophical "problems." As a matter of fact, what is initially surprising about the present group of essays is the creative interplay among the three disciplines most "existentially" concerned with the mystery of human destiny: philosophy, literature, and religion. This last category, religion, requires careful discrimination to avoid almost inevitable misunderstanding in a context where religion tends to be theological, organizational, and sectarian, often divorced from a vital concern with basic issues of actual human experience. The use of the word religion here is already to invite misunderstanding. What is the appropriate word to designate finite being's relation to the ground of his own ultimate reality? What word captures, if always inadequately, that anxious but trusting gesture of ultimate concern about his being? In the limited context of this introduction such a question can be only rhetorical. But because I have ventured to introduce the idea of a "religious" dimension into the discussion, a few words need to be said on the subject. The most explicitly "religious" of the following essays is that on the Amphitryon of Heinrich von Kleist (17771811), whose narratives and dramas were rejected by Goethe, but have nevertheless continued to be greatly admired by successive generations of readers and have exercised considerable influence on subsequent periods of

< previous page

page_x If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xi

next page > Page xi

German literature. Gadamer's reinterpretation of Kleist's drama Amphitryon springs from his dissatisfaction with traditional views of the drama. For him, Jupiter is not simply a typical figure of the humanist tradition, as in Molière. On the contrary, the figure can be understood only as representing a genuine experience of religious transcendence. The full dimensions of his person flow into the realm of cosmic being, transcending the contours of his own person to encompass all existing things, without, in Gadamer's view, falling into the heresy of pantheism. In Molière, the comic effect of the drama is based on the confusion of Alcmène in distinguishing her husband, Amphitryon, from the god Jupiter, who attempts to prove to Alcmène that all great passion she experiences with her husband comes actually from the sovereign of the gods himself, thus showing her that there is a distinction between her husband and the god. For Kleist, on the other hand, it is in the soul of Alcmène herself where the false distinction between husband and god must be overcome. In the final reconciliation scene between Alcmène and Amphitryon/Jupiter, it becomes clear that Molière's comic motif of competition between the human husband and the divine lover is transformed into a mystical experience where the transcendence of the divine realm is affirmed, but where at the same time this transcendence in no way destroys the genuine reality of finite being. Rather than bringing the god down to the human plane, as in Molière, Gadamer sees Kleist's importance in the fact that he "leads man up to the divine, a witness of genuine mystical experience." The other essays in this book are concerned with the "religious" dimension of human existence in a much more general way. The darkness and uncertainty that Alcmene experiences prior to the healing of her consciousness, confronts human life as a constant threat and continually provokes the question whether human life can have any meaning at all given the impenetrable darkness in which it has to be lived. But it is precisely this uncertainty, this essentially "religious" questioning, that provides the context in which a reader-listener can be "struck" by a literary work. In one of the essays on Rilke included in this book, Gadamer takes the well-known book on Rilke by the Roman Catholic theologian, Romano Guardini, as a good example of a critic's failure to allow himself to be "struck" by a literary work. What does Gadamer mean by being struck? As is well known, Gadamer reintroduced into

< previous page

page_xi If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xii

next page > Page xii

the process of hermeneutic understanding the final stage of the process traditionally called application (modus applicandi). Among other things, it means that we can never fully comprehend a text of any kind unless it is related to the con-text of our own life as a possible answer to an existential question. We say existential, because the kind of question we are talking about is one rooted deeply in the fears and desires of our own fundamental uncertainty. Only as an answer to such a question can a literary text of the past open up its deepest "personal" dimension. When we speak of fears, desires, and uncertainty, we are, of course, not referring to any kind of psychological situation that could be "solved" by a few visits to the psychiatrist. We are speaking rather of a universal anxiety that is a direct result of our mortality. Immortalitythe undying dream of human beings subject to the darkness of uncertainty and the fear of death. Endless are the methods devised to keep this enemy at bay, not least among them the "objectivity" of science and the religious certainties of the metaphysical tradition. But, suppose being "struck" by a sudden flash of wisdomwhich, as Aeschylus tells us, comes through sufferingdepends precisely on our being finite, mortal? The lesson can be learned from the first text of our literary tradition: those beautiful and pathetic Olympian gods darting in and out of Homer's warring armies, seeking a life that by nature they do not have. As immortals they are not vulnerable to being struck by the sting of necessity. They have no questions; so consequently they have no answers. Who is more helpless in the face of her son's inevitable death than Thetis, the mother of Achilles? They live in the borrowed rags of human tragedy, pretending that the vicarious sharing of human darkness can give meaning to their emptiness. In contrast, the tragic destinies of Achilles, Patroclos, and Zeus's son, Sarpedon, strike the reader with lasting significance, a significance to which we can respond precisely because we are mortal and confront the same darkness. In contrast, the gods are, in the final analysis, often simply funny. At such a moment of reception, the reader-listener of Homer's text no longer responds as if it were an historical document containing perhaps anthropological, historical, or philosophical and religious information. Such facts are no doubt interesting and have genuine importance for an understanding of early Greek life. But at the moment of our being "struck," the text is now no longer a "thing"

< previous page

page_xii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xiii

next page > Page xiii

(Heidegger would say ein Vorhandenes) that dumbly submits to a "contemplative" examination as trace and artifact. Through this sudden fusion of horizons, this text opens out into a "personal" dimension that allows it to speak to us within the realm of a mystery encompassing both the reader and the text. This mystery is that of our own mortality. The essays in this book are examples of Gadamer's response to being "struck" by the living witnesses of a still vital tradition. In each case the "fusion" results from a mediation achieved through the encounter of the work with a mortal's experience in a world perpetually dark and perpetually striving toward the light. I I know nothing more poverty-stricken than you, you Gods! from Goethe's "Prometheus" Encompassed and encompassing, let me rise up to your bosom, all-loving Father. from Goethe's "Ganymed" Goethe (17491832), as a phenomenon of the Western literary tradition, needs no introduction to the American reader.Even though his works may not be widely read, his reputation as a "personality," a "genius" is widespread among us. His reception by such American writers as Emerson assures him his fame among American readers. Gadamer's approach to Goethe, however, is not motivated simply by the fact of his greatness. As with all the writers he deals with, Goethe's importance lies in the fact that he speaks to us as a contemporary. In fact, as Gadamer remarks elsewhere about Hölderlin, Goethe is actually ahead of us. Gadamer clarifies this remarkable assertion by examining the relationship of the poet to philosophy. A genuine poet fears nothing more than the pitfall of abstraction. Goethe was no doubt particularly sensitive to this danger because of the havoc wreaked on the development of German literature by the rationalist poetics and philosophy of Gottsched and Wolf in the early

< previous page

page_xiii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xiv

next page > Page xiv

eighteenth century. In any case, Goethe never abandoned his skeptical antagonism toward metaphysics, even though the influence of Schiller's Kantianism, as Gadamer shows, was at certain moments of his development surprisingly strong. Goethe's rejection of the rationalist position, his refusal to share the faith of his contemporaries in the autonomy of human reason, sprang, Gadamer believes, from his acceptance of human finite limitations; human mortality. We hear the young Faust railing against the constant necessity of renunciation, struggling in vain against the barrenness that seemed to prevent him from attaining that ultimate ecstacy of fulfillment, a barrenness that finally drives him into the arms of magic by which the limitations of mortality might be overcome. At the end of the work we hear the old Faust, grown wise from experience, rejecting the wiles of magic and praising the naive openness of a simple and pure humanity. But Goethe is wiser than Faust. Even at the very last moment, Faust does not realize to what extent his blindness, his espousal of magic, and his inevitable failures are an integral part of the development of his humanity. "The world is actually present only for one who experiences it, and in turn experiences its reaction on oneself. Truth rests on living relationships and is therefore inevitably linked to error." It is this dialecticGadamer calls it Socraticthat lies at the heart of those unfinished dramatic fragments on Prometheus and the Magic Flute, which were so attractive to Gadamer's interpretive skill. He sees in both of them Goethe's constant concern for an ideal development of human spiritual potential. Goethe, the singularly productive artist, saw in Prometheus a symbol of his own unceasingly creative activity, not only as an artist, but simply as a productive human being. The figure of Faust, of course, remains the most obvious bearer of this Promethean élan. But Gadamer's interest in the Prometheus figure of the dramatic fragment lies rather in the problematic nature of this mythical creator. What is man's relationship, as creator and producer, with those higher powers, the gods, who apparently seek to limit the very creative power that is, for Goethe, the most distinguishing human characteristic? Again, it is the dialectical movement that fascinates Gadamer, as Goethe seeks to express the truth of this relationship between obedient servitude and defiant rejection. Are there any limits to the power of the titans? Can humans and gods ever be reconciled so that a joyous creativity is joined to awe before its mystery?

< previous page

page_xiv If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xv

next page > Page xv

Goethe's early fascination with this problem is witnessed by two, apparently contradictory, hymns, two of Goethe's most celebrated poems: "Prometheus" and "Ganymed." On the one hand, the rebel's defiant rejection of any limiting power, divine or human: on the other, the equally powerful desire to melt into ecstatic union with the gods. The reconciliation of two such opposed attitudes presents a vital and fascinating problem for both the poet and the philosopher. Although the power of the titans seems to have no limits, it is ultimately the double mystery of death and love before which humans and titans both are helpless. In what is for Gadamer an unforgetable passage, Prometheus describes the apparent contradiction at the moment of erotic ecstasy, where self-possession reaches its highest peak of consciousness at the moment of death. But precisely this highest moment of self-possession, experienced when love and death reach their greatest intensity, reveals the weakness of Promethean "activity." In the case of death, we are still left with the dark mystery of what comes after. In the case of love, we miss the union with the Thou and the birth of the "We." This leads Gadamer to question whether these critical situations in human experience do not finally point to the necessity of overcoming the barriers erected by Promethean stubborness and demand that the limitations imposed on our experience be broken through, by lifting our world into the much larger context of the divine order. Only in the next generation, as Goethe depicts it in his poem, can Phileros, son of Prometheus, in his union with Epimeleia, daughter of Epimetheus, achieve what the opposition between Prometheus and Epimetheus has prevented: the full development of what is genuinely human, a perfect union of human action and divine gift, without which civilization is impossible. What is desirable is felt by you here below; What should be given is known by those up above. The Titans initial act is tremendous; but its fulfillment in what is eternally good, eternally beautiful is the work of the Gods. Let them hold sway. Goethe's fascination with Mozart's Magic Flute and his decision to write a sequel to the opera stem, as Gadamer sees it, from the same interest in a proper understanding of the dialectical formation

< previous page

page_xv If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xvi

next page > Page xvi

of genuine humanity. Although Gadamer shares the general view that Schikaneder's libretto cannot be taken seriously as a literary creation, the fact remains that Goethe was fascinated by the "higher meaning" he saw in the events of the opera. For a number of reasons. Gadamer rejects the idea of seeing in the text either a kind of political pamphlet against Hapsburgian tyranny or a defense of Freemasonry. What really interested Goethe, in Gadamer's view, the so-called higher meaning of the events, was the path of human development from the darkness of the elemental forces of nature, represented by the Queen of the Night, to the realm of pure spiritual light, represented by Sarastro and the sacerdotal confederacy. By enduring the ordeals of initiation into the Holy Order, Tamino and Pamina overcome the "feminine" threat of chaos and lawlessness and enter into the "male" world of stability and spiritual order. Thus, Schikaneder's libretto celebrates the triumph of the characteristic features of Western patriarchal society. But this conception of a "male" social order, where all matriarchal influences have been rooted out, has, as its theoretical counterpart, and perhaps basis, a neo-Platonic, particularly Plotinian, conception of man's path to spiritual salvation. Having fallen into the world of nature, and being dominated by its forces of darkness, man's salvation is thought to be achieved only by leaving this world completely behind and becoming united with the higher world of unadulterated spiritual light. The libretto simply identifies, in quite a summary fashion, the darkness of nature with the woman and the spiritual light with the man. Gadamer's interest in Goethe's sequel rests in large part on his conviction that the Goethean work represents a rejection of this extreme patriarchal position and, along with it, its Plotinian basis. By placing the events of the plot into the next generation, Goethe again is able to shift the focus from the conflict of male and female worlds to a central concern with the child of Tamino and Pamina. This means that now the forces of both nature and spirit are seen in a totally different light. The forces of elemental nature, all those negative aspects of human existence, including death, are still militantly active, but their function in the development of human life has been completely reinterpreted. Just as night always alternates with day, establishing a rhythmic framework for the proper articulation of human activity, so also Destiny articulates human development by the constant alternation of life and death, joy and pain, word and silence. There is no such thing as perpetual day, just as

< previous page

page_xvi If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xvii

next page > Page xvii

there is no such thing as unalloyed happiness, for the simple reason that "we are on trial." Goethe is ahead of us because he once again renews a tradition deeply rooted in the philosophical and literary past of German culture, but that has often been obscurred by resurgent movements of rationalism. The rejection of neoPlatonist optimism, the basis of the modern Enlightenment and modern technology, links him with the intellectual and spiritual thought of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, a tradition that in our own time again emerges in Martin Heidegger and Gadamer himself. This is the tradition that in the twentieth century has been most instrumental in overcoming the very metaphysics to which Goethe was consistently opposed. II The future that he proclaims is not at all one sent by the Gods; Rather, this future is the return of the Gods themselves; and this occurs only in this cry of the poet (and its echo in the heart of the people). Gadamer on Hölderlin When we turn to Hölderlin (17701843), the situation of the American reader is entirely different. This is not surprising for, as Gadamer points out, the German reception itself of this enigmatic poet was 100 years late. Not until the early twentieth century did this poetry take fire in the hearts of an idealistic German youth, a situation that provokes Gadamer's remark that Hölderlin is actually a contemporary of our future. An American reception of Hölderlin beyond the confines of the academy, if indeed it ever occurs, will test some of the most stubborn attitudes in our assessment of the German past. One of the most fateful consequences of the Nazi period is the almost inevitable tendency, even among the younger Germans themselves, to see many of the characteristic aspects of German Romanticism through the distorting eyes of National Socialist propaganda. Such words as fatherland (Vaterland), soil (Boden), people (Volk), and the gods (Götter) are frequently found in the vocabulary of the German Romantic tradition. But it is often forgotten that these words were first used at a

< previous page

page_xvii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xviii

next page > Page xviii

time (around 17901830) when Germany was but a collection of larger or smaller principalities having no political unity in the sense of the modern nation-state, certainly not in the sense imposed by Hitler on the extremely varied ethnic groups in the German-speaking territories of Europe. This is not to be misunderstood as an indiscriminate defense of all aspects of German Romanticism. The serious grappling with the causes and consequences of World War II, particularly with respect to the Romantic tradition, has even now near the end of the century hardly begun. At least the next century will certainly be required to sort out the intricate puzzles of an obscure web of circumstances that plunged the world into such darkness. To this end, a conversation with Hölderlin's work can be of enormous benefit, but will entail in Gadamer's sense, a real testing of prejudice, both as a context for an initial approach and as a barrier to actual comprehension. Certainly Gadamer does not see Hölderlin's poetry as having significance only for Germans. His remark that this poet will speak to the educated élite of all nations could possibly be prophetic, but will certainly be provocative among people, many of whom have espoused a rather extreme capitalist-based form of democratic liberalism. Although Gadamer's democratic credentials are impeccable (unlike the muddy controversies still raging over Heidegger's relationship to the Third Reich), his general attitude toward the necessity of discrimination for genuine understanding will require some soul-searching on the part of those whose democratic sensibilities as well as scientific and technical training have convinced them that truth, as a product of correct methodology, is accessible to everyone without discrimination. But for Gadamer, Hölderlin's importance is not primarily political, even though a continuing clarification of this century's ills is of utmost importance for an understanding of the destiny of the Western world. Hölderlin's importance lies, at least to a major extent, in the fact that we all, to one degree or another, are bound by unalterable tradition to a dual heritage: Greece and the Christian religion. Even if we do not espouse Christianity as believers, we are nevertheless, just as Hölderlin and Goethe were, inextricably linked to a cultural tradition deeply rooted in Christian assumptions, even though these assumptions may often be unconscious or highly secularized. At the same time we live in a world of advancing technology that is

< previous page

page_xviii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xix

next page > Page xix

largely a product of a theoretical science based on the unique contribution of Greek philosophy, particularly the development of the Platonic-Artistotelian tradition. Hölderlin's world was beginning to feel the effects of these traditions in their increasingly negative form. In contrast to the, perhaps somewhat idealized, vision of the early Greek world, where gods and men shared together the sacred precinct of the natural world, Christianity's absent God and the destruction of myth by the advance of science and technology, seemed to have turned the Western world into a barren, godless desert, the Hesperian night, where love and the bonds of genuine community could not but disappear. When Hölderlin speaks of the fatherland, the soil, the rivers and mountains of his homeland, the people and the gods, he is not referring in any sense to a political unit as most of us now understand it. He is rather talking about a community of people, bonded together by a common language, rooted in a shared landscape, whose plains, rivers, and mountains are alive with the presence of divinity, a people grateful for the nourishment of bread and wine, the sustaining gifts of the sun and the earth. Is it possible for us as Americans, as members of the multicultural democratic societies of the Western world, to enter into a conversation with a work that so fundamentally questions many of the values of an almost diametrically opposed world? But this is precisely the point of Gadamer's hermeneutic approach to textual interpretation. In a confrontation with Hölderlin, whatever the outcome, we are putting our very selves at risk! But Hölderlin's suffering in Hesperian darkness is not without issue. It is here in this night, as Gadamer interprets the poetry, that Hölderlin discovered his role as poet. Like Goethe, Hölderlin seeks an understanding of his time in the myth of the titans, the monstrous savages who have reversed the order of reality by placing the spirit into the service of selfish power and greed. But Hölderlin's interest in the myth, also like Goethe's, is not "historical"; for him the myth is the symbol of an everpresent temptation to "overthrow the Gods," manifest in his own time as the refusal to let nature be what it is, the home (Heimat) of the spirit, the source of blessing for the community where the truth of genuine humanity is manifest in the proper relationship of human beings and the divinities, where the virtues of love and gratitude, holy resignation and vital creativity will revive the "Fatherland" and prepare for the return of the gods.

< previous page

page_xix If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xx

next page > Page xx

In this process, the function of the poet is vital, not in the sense that he is called to be a ''legislator of mankind" in any political sense. If his humility is great enough and his courage is strong enough to expose himself to the thunderbolts of the gods, if in other words he is willing to leave behind the safety of an already interpreted world, he will be able to bring into language, purified of all opinions, the reality of Being where, as Gadamer expresses it, there is no prophetic magic, no fortune-telling quackery, but where there occurs the actual appearance of a transformed world. It is in the language of the poem, a creative language that is the common possession of a genuine community, that the return of the Gods is celebrated and the world is transformed, not for everyone, but for those who have the ears to hear, those in whose heart the poem continues to echo. III And we who are thinking of a rising happiness would feel deeply moved, even to the point of confusion, if our happiness suddenly fell. Rilke, 10th Duino Elegy When we turn to the essays on Rainer Maria Rilke (18751926), we again encounter major themes already familiar to us. In his critique of Guardini's book on the Duino Elegies, Gadamer is particularly scornful of the inappropriate application of the abstractions of philosophical and religious dogmas to the delicate fabric of poetic diction. In his Christian Catholic enthusiasm, Guardini betrays a cramped lack of freedom that often prevents him from simply being "struck" by the word of the poet. He simply does not hear what the poet is in fact saying because his ear is already full of expected responses. Nevertheless, Guardini represents for Gadamer the best of a whole group of writers of religious and philosophical orientation who were the first to respond to the poetry of Rilke in the 1940s and 1950s. In the meantime, the poet has fallen into the hands of a swarm of literary critics, who, for similar dogmatic reasons, subject the poet to the academic clichés of the discipline of "criticism." In both cases there is a refusal to open both the heart and the mind to the anguish and joy, the truth, of the poet's word.

< previous page

page_xx If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xxi

next page > Page xxi

Particularly impressive is the skillful way Gadamer moves, in his discussion of Rilke's poem "Gibt es wirklich die Zeit, die zerstörende?" from an apparently minor problem of punctuation to a major insight into Rilke's concern for time and human mortality. His position that punctuation is never internally significant for the poet or the poem releases the reader-hearer from a slavish dependence on the so-called rational categories of everyday language so that the ear can freely respond to the actual rhythms of thought and feeling present in the poem. An unimpeded reception of this rhythm leads Gadamer, as reader of this poem, to realize Rilke's warning against assuming that time is the enemy and that life is to be fruitlessly spent building a fortress against it. Gadamer sees Rilke's introduction of the demiurge into the poem as a rejection of a Gnostic heresy in which time, along with the rest of material creation, is the product of a hostile being and human life is seen as a battleground between warring divinities. For Gadamer, Rilke is clearly saying that time the destroyer does not exist and that human mortality, far from being a reason for anxiety, is actually cause for joyous praise, since in the midst of everything transient, man's fleeting life is to be a holy ritual. The essay on mythopoietic reversal in Rilke's Duino Elegies extends this theme to the entire cycle of the Elegies. For the modern consciousness, the world of classical myth is no longer binding, and Rilke's use of myth is no longer an attempt to reinterpret the ancient stories nor, by their means, to "poeticize" the world. All attempts to turn the angel, a major figure of the Elegies, into a transcendent being capable of a "religious" relationship betray a basic misunderstanding of this fictional being. For Gadamer, the angel represents the highest possibility of the human heart, a transcendent fiction in the light of which the limitations of our actual human capacity to love and to feel become fully clear. This figure offers Gadamer the occasion for some fundamental remarks on the nature of poetic language, particularly on Rilke's use of ancient mythologies. The poet in no way wishes to revive the mythical world as an object of belief and devotion. In fact, Rilke's approach is precisely the opposite. His use of mythological material is based on a poetic reversal: the mythical world with its dramatic characters is in actuality a projection of the realm of the human heart itself. The most memorable example of this reversal is found in the stage imagery of the fourth Elegy. This is not a stage where allegorical figures demonstrate transcendent principles of ideal human action, the voice of the gods as it were. It is, on the contrary,

< previous page

page_xxi If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xxii

next page > Page xxii

we ourselves who observe the workings of our own heart, hoping at some extraordinary moment to catch a glimpse of truly genuine feeling with the intensity and endurance equal to the angel's. Our failures are in this respect notorious. Those who come closest to real accomplishment are children and the dying, two of Rilke's most cherished types of humanity. Both of them are Rilke's models for the proper understanding of time and its relation to human life. Stunning is the ability to be so totally unified in oneself, so totally present in the actual moment of the Now, that one is free from both anxiety about the future as well as despair over the unchangeable past. Gadamer then closes his discussion on mythopoietic reversal with a look at one of Rilke's most enigmatic texts: the tenth Duino Elegy. Ostensibly, this elegy depicts the journey of a recently deceased boy who follows one of the Laments beyond the city of distraction and forgetfulness into the fields and mountains, the realm of suffering and pain. As Gadamer, in his reading of the poem, follows the deceased youth, a lad numbed by the experience of death, beyond the confines of the "real" world into the fields of mourning and eventually sees him disappear into the mountains of primal pain, he realizes the purpose of mythopoiectic reversal. It becomes clear that the relationship between the boy and the Lament actually concerns us, the living, those who have experienced a death and are left behind in confusion over the fact of death, particularly an apparently senseless early death, and the urgent question about its meaning. The focus is once again on us whose lives are exposed to the burden of mortality. But the answer lies not in a return to the soporific illusion encouraged by a society whose intent is to make us forget that we must die. Rather, we must summon the courage to endure the journey into the mountains of primal pain. Only there do we find that our pain will be suddenly transformed into joy, our mortality into meaning. We shall be surprised and confused by a "falling happiness." <><><><><><><><><><><><> Finally, a brief word about the translation. It is always with fear and trembling that a translator approaches a text to be rendered not only into a different language, but more important, into a significantly different culture, including in the case of these essays the culture of a different historical period. Even though German and

< previous page

page_xxii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_xxiii

next page > Page xxiii

English are sister languages and many people in several regions of our country trace their ethnic heritage back to Germany, there are certain concepts for which there is simply no precise equivalent. A word like Hölderlin's Vaterland comes to mind, or the word Geist, which has accumulated so much cultural baggage over the last few hundred years, as to require a whole battery of words to give the full extent of meaning in any particular context. Such cases, for better or worse, require judgment and decision, and one can hope only to avoid the more serious pitfalls alluded to in Richard Bernstein's bleak assessment of the Seabury translation of Wahrheit und Methode. 2 In all the essays that follow, Gadamer offers a generous sampling of the original texts of the authors on whom he is commenting, most of them in lyric form. Although most of these texts are available in published English translations, I decided they would not be appropriate for the present purpose. In their zeal to reproduce as faithfully as possible in English the genuine poetic quality of the original text, these translators often necessarily stray from the literal level of meaning. In many instances, an understanding of Gadamer's reflections on a text depends on the reader's ability to follow, for example, the punctuation or the sequence of words. For this reason, there is no attempt on my part to make a particularly "poetic" rendering of the poetry. The emphasis lies in supplying the reader with as literal a translation as possible while still making every effort to preserve the quality of the text.

< previous page

page_xxiii If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_1

next page > Page 1

Goethe and Philosophy In all of world literature, Goethe is one of the most suggestive of authors. The particular aspect from which we will consider him here is only one among many, the investigation of which can promote the knowledge of the author and his enduring significance. The task we have set ourselves here as Goethe and Philosophy does not mean that all his views on life and the world are to be the subject of our consideration. In Goethe's case this task would, in the final analysis, have to be carried out chiefly by the interpreter of his literary works. We, on the other hand, intend to enquire about his relationship to philosophy. Actually, this undertaking seems eminently justified when we consider that the age of Goethe was at the same time the age of the great German philosophical movement, and that the great thinkers of German Idealism, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, were all contemporaries of the great poet; indeed, the younger ones among them, because of their activity in Jena, were familiar neighbors. And yet, something about this undertaking is questionThis essay is based on a lecture given by the author in November 1942 before the Goethe Society of Leipzig in the context of the Goethe Week. It was first published in the Humboldt Bucherei 3, (Leipzig: Volk und Buch Verlag, 1947). On this theme, compare the bibliography in H. Kindermann. Das GoetheBild des 20. Jahrhunderts [The Image of Goethe in the Twentieth Century] (Vienna and Stuttgart, 1952).

< previous page

page_1 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_2

next page > Page 2

able, yes even dangerous. Goethe, this versatile and accomplished spirit, who assimilated and transformed the existential substance of his own time as no other did, maintained during his entire lifetime a peculiar reservation toward philosophy and metaphysics. Indeed, not only did he himself practice this reservation toward philosophy, but through him it almost became a watchword enjoining, on those who sought to form themselves in his image, a rejection of all philosophical speculation as well as an uninhibited surrender to the fullness of experience. It was particularly the middle class during the nineteenth century, those who drew their sustenance from the enormous prestige of the natural sciences, who understood Goethe in this way: "All theory, O noble friend, is gray." However, it is part of the characteristic and almost terrifying boundlessness of Goethe's spirit that this negation of philosophy can be regarded at the most as only half true. In every period of his life he felt a continual challenge to appropriate and offer a considered response to philosophy, just as he did to every other subject matter of intellectual importance. Of course, you will not find philosophical treatises in the more narrow scholastic sense among his works, but rather always only occasional essays and position papers, only "biographical" documents. But is not that the peculiar thing about Goethe's works in general, that they are, like those of no other classical writer of any other nation, occasional works, an expression and presentation, no matter how extensive their range, of this one, unique person Goethe, of his course of life, his experiences and influences, his evaluations and desires? This is particularly clear with respect to a large part of his lyrical work. And did not he himself call all of his poetic creations fragments of a great confession? Even his experiments in the area of natural science, with which he sought to unite himself with those anomymous workers dedicated to building the edifice of science, retain something inimitably personal. The presentation of even such subjects as these have often something incidental about them which, with naive selfassurance, express in the presentation itself a chance happening on his particular path of experience and insight. And it is only proper that his autobiographical sketch From My LifeTruth and Poetry is not an addition or a supplement to his works, but has its own genuine equality of rank in their midst. It may be linked to Goethe's position within the history of the whole Western development, to the considerable tardiness of Germany's

< previous page

page_2 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_3

next page > Page 3

political and cultural entrance into the family of modern nations, that this first classical writer of his people stands at the end of an age and for that reason has concentrated in the unity of his own person that substance of spiritual and intellectual life which constituted the unity of the Western world and which precisely at this time was on the point of disappearing. In any case, philosophy plays a particular role within the broad horizon of this life, and by no means simply an incidental or negative one. Determining one's own position in regard to Goethe has always been, from the very beginning, the genuine concern of the philosophical sensibility. For actually it begins with the unceasing effort of Schiller, a thoroughly philosophical and speculative mind, to understand Goethe's nature, to affirm and justify the poet of reflection vis-à-vis the naive poet. Indeed, Schiller's interpretation still today governs our nation's view of Goethe, so deep and original is the importance of philosophical thought (which speaks in Schiller) for the effective history of Goethe's influence. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Schiller's relationship to Goethe is not simply the effective history of Goethe; on the contrary, it definitely belongs to the history of Goethe's own life, as one of its decisive phases. However, because what concerns us here is more than the historical confirmation of trustworthy facts in a philological study of Goethe, because the influence of Goethe and of the interpretation that Schiller gave him has never ceased to be history and to make history, a philosophical reflection on Goethe's relationship to philosophy remains a task to be taken up again and again. It is now quite clear, given the nature of the situation, that any attempt to redefine this relationship must follow the course of Goethe's own development. On the other hand, it is equally clear that not much can be gained by simply tracking down and making a list of readings and critical responses in the area of philosophy that can be found during the course of Goethe's development. For not only are the statements made from time to time by Goethe on such matters occasional and vacillating, so that almost everything that can be proven can also be refuted, but also his preoccupation with the works of the great philosophers, with Spinoza or Kant, with Fichte or Hegel, is fragmentary and inconsistent in method. What would in others, however, be a sign of impoverishment is in Goethe's case an expression of his own fertile nature. He says on one occasion that he

< previous page

page_3 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_4

next page > Page 4

had always done his learning as if it were a game. But he does not mean that everything came easy to him or that he treated it all with nonchalance. Rather, he means that learning for him took place as a spontaneous activity of personal development. Playing is of course the most extreme form of such activity, oblivious of self and engaged with a matter offering no resistance. That is precisely why it involves such an upsurge of emotional vitality. For Goethe, learning was play because it always brought into play all the forces of his being. In the course of his reading of Kant's anthropology, Goethe writes to Schiller on 19 December 1798, "I just want to mention also that I hate everything that merely instructs me, without increasing or immediately vitalizing my activity." The incidental way in which Goethe pursued his studies in philosophy does not argue against his taking the matter seriously. In his encounters with things philosophical he is looking for the same thing he is basically seeking in all his experiences of the world: the expansion of his activity, a vital increase in the unfolding of his own creative and formative powers. One could doubt whether such an augmentation of being could come to him from philosophy at all. After all, it is a fact that his first brush with philosophical doctrines provoked the response that a separate discipline of philosophy was not at all necessary because it is already part and parcel of religion and poetry. When his teacher tries to prove that these latter have first to be grounded in the former, he obviously rejects this kind of reflection altogether. For him, poetic and religious immediacy is without question the foundation for any mediation of the concept. And the effect of his first philosophical experiences (with the "triste, atheistic twilight" of the philosophy of the French Enlightenment) was a sour vexation against all philosophy, but particularly against metaphysics. So, we will have to ask how, in spite of this antipathy, an inclination to philosophy finds its way into Goethe's sympathies. In doing so, we shall disregard how Goethe was led to a reflection on his art. Philosophical reflection on the technical conditions in the poetic and plastic arts can also be found in those artists who have no concern for the central problems of philosophy, especially metaphysics. Obviously his thinking is inspired by something quite opposite to the metaphysics of the Enlightenment. What offends him is the doctrine of final causes, that treatment of nature that thinks only in terms of purpose and relates everything to human

< previous page

page_4 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_5

next page > Page 5

utility. Against this he sets his own great view of the power of nature, creating and destroying without any concern for human ends. "Nature. We are surrounded and embraced by herincapable of escaping from her, and incapable of delving deeper into her." That then is the decisive aspect of his view: man does not face her autocratically as the final purpose of nature whom he then relates to himselfhe is embraced by her; he is himself nature. Even his own innate poetic talent is wholly conceived by Goethe as nature, and she is so named by him in the prose fragment entitled "The Only Artist" (probably not from his own hand, but certainly issuing from his spirit). In the year 1828, not too long before his death, when Goethe first saw this fragment and took it to be his own, he characterized it in the following way: "We see the inclination to a kind of pantheism in which a foundation was laid for the phenomena of the world by a being who is inscrutable, unconditioned, humorous and self-contradictory." In contrast to the rationalistic optimism of academic philosophy, it is indeed the inscrutableness of nature for the circumscribed and limited human being that gives Goethe the appearance of being a pantheist. For him, nature and God are inscrutable beings, and he always insisted on the homogeneousness of nature and God, particularly so against the Christian philosophy of faith advocated by his friend Jacobi. He simply cannot associate a God ''who comes from the outside" with his own view of the internal life of nature. And yet, with his characteristic liberality he refuses to establish any dogmatic definitions, including one for pantheism. It is chiefly in Spinoza, whom he learns to see with Herder's eyes, that he finds corroboration for his conception of nature and especially for his aversion to final causes. But basically, the conviction about certain aspects of natureeternity, necessity, and regularitywhich were developed under the influence of Spinoza, is the necessary counterresistance for which his excessive vitality and titanic desire to create yearned. He seems, right from the beginning, to possess this urge to renunciation rooted in the recognition of necessity, precisely because the creative intensity of the poet, whose powers come into vital play in every aspect of his life and respond with an intense creative counterthrust to every and any stimulus, seems to have no bounds. Through Spinoza, he feels raised above the play of his passions by which the human being, with respect to his destiny, is at times painfully restricted. This is how the old Goethe, he who had

< previous page

page_5 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_6

next page > Page 6

grown wise and become a memory even to himself, interpreted the profound need that had earlier guided him in his philosophical studies. We can now confirm the correctness of this interpretation and indeed enlarge on it, even if only on the basis of an essay from the 1780s. We are thinking here of the essay Wilhelm Dilthey first interpreted in his treatise "From the Period of Goethe's Spinoza Studies." We find this confirmation in the way by which the concepts of existence and perfection, through which we conceive the infinite, codetermine the Being of limited existences, so that they, that is, the things in God, actually have their own being in themselves and cannot, as living beings, be measured by anything external to themselves. They thus display their own inseparable union of parts and whole; in short, they participate in the infinity of the colossal and the universal. This is how Goethe, even though he does so with the ideas of Spinoza, conceives his own particular view of the nature of a living being and its creative power, a view that reminds us of Aristotle's entelechy and of Leibniz's notion of the monad. The whole idea of a morphological investigation of nature is here marked out. The conditionedness of a living being is by no means prejudicial to the primal power of nature. On the contrary! How worthy it is of nature, Goethe exclaims, that she always has to make use of the same means to produce and nourish her creatures. Now Goethe enlarges on this aspect by including in his consideration the being endowed with the ability to know. Through the act of knowing the soul unfolds its powers by setting limits. "We must limit all existence and perfection in our souls in such a way that they conform to our nature and our way of thinking and feeling. Only then can we say that we comprehend or enjoy something. Just as all living things presuppose an environment conditioned by specific circumstances, so that the fish lives only in water, the bird only in the air, so also for human being and its nature Goethe recognizes a necessity by which it is limited and thereby preserved. We read in Sprüche in Prosa [Sayings in Prose], the whole trick amounts to surrendering our existence in order to exist. Our physical as well as our social life, our mores, our habits, our worldly wisdom, our philosophy, our religion, all these things admonish us to exercise renunciation.

< previous page

page_6 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_7

next page > Page 7

These statements of a Goethe grown old and wise are simply the development of what the young titan discovered in the philosophical idea of nature. We can now well understand the many-sidedness of Goethe's ventures into the world around him, his desire to investigate it, observe it, and creatively form it. Not only a mystical union with the infinite, but also a movement out in all directions in the finite world, this is the teaching, hardly characteristic for Spinoza, that Goethe drew from his Spinoza studies. To use his own wordshe feels blessed with physics. For him, physics is the infinite-finite field of genuine intuitions in which, as effect and countereffect, the soul of the knower develops. The comparative scientist and the creative poet, then, are the manifestations of the same impulse to give form, an impulse that constitutes, as he tells us in the self-characterization of 1797 mentioned earlier, the center and foundation of his existence. Accordingly, his further development as a philosopher was already marked out by two elements; and these had necessarily to become problematic for him in his position between poet and scientist. First of all, the general question about the relationship between the self and the world, particularly how a subjective, creative activity can participate in the experience of the world. And second, the more specific question about the relationship between nature and art. He was to encounter both problems in the philosophy of Kant that at this time was in the ascendency, a philosophy that otherwise played hardly any role in his life except to inspire him to continue passionately to pursue his own individual goals. As he later describes for us, what he had appropriated of Kantian philosophy by way of reading and conversation met with little sympathy among the Kantians. "More than once it happened that one or the other of them admitted with a smile of astonishment that there was about it something analogous to a Kantian way of thinking, but the connection was certainly odd." There was, first of all, the analogy between Goethe's "natural method" of observing objects from every point of view and Kant's demonstration of how much we ourselves and how much the external world contribute to our intellectual life. Although he himself had never separated the two, Goethe was prepared to assume the Kantian position as the one that gives most honor to the human being. As far as his own procedures were concerned, be they creativesynthetic or observational-analytic, he otherwise felt quite in harmony with Kant's epistemology.

< previous page

page_7 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_8

next page > Page 8

In a particular way, however, he felt beneficially influenced by the Critique of Judgment because it taught a correspondence and profound inner connection between nature and art. We see an inner appropriateness in nature; we also experience an inner appropriateness in our taste for the beautiful and the production of genius. In a letter to Zeller of January 29, 1830, Goethe writes in a similar vein, "It is the boundless merit of our old Kant with respect to the world, and I would certainly add with respect to me, that in his Critique of Judgment he places nature and art side by side and concedes that both have the right, on the basis of principle, to act without purpose. Nature and art are much too great to be concerned with purposes; and what is more, they need not be concerned. For we find relationships everywhere, and relationships make life what it is." What he saw enunciated in the Critique of Judgment was, consequently, the inner life of both art and nature, their mutual effect from inside out. Goethe was prepared for this correspondence because he had been in Italy and had studied both art and the laws governing nature as well as life in human society that is woven out of both. And yet, it is quite obvious how little Goethe seems disturbed by Kant's actual critical thought, by the limitation of the teleological idea to a mere procedure of judgment; in other words, by the surrender of the objective validity of the notion of purpose. His whole study of Kant's philosophy remains confined to its "in-house use." But suddenly along with Schiller, Kantian philosophy with its genuine moral passion for freedom enters Goethe's life and exercises a power that, both in its effect and in his reaction to it, carries him far into the realm of philosophy. At the beginning, Goethe had hated in Schiller the savage and revolutionary aspect of his genius as displayed in his tragedy Die Räuber and for that reason had kept a considerable distance from Schiller after the latter had moved to Jena. But then came a moment of mutual understanding, that remarkable conversation about the primeval plant reported by Goethe himself. As Goethe accepts the friendship and constant presence of Schiller, he surrenders to the interpretation Schiller offers him; this is a period, by the way, that turned out to be one of the most fruitful decades of his life. And so, we find ourselves here, with respect to our inquiry, at a decisive moment on the path of Goethe's philosophical development: he learns to see himself entirely with the eyes of Schiller and of philosophy. Now philosophy must appear to him as the final and long-over-due explanation for his own naive faith in

< previous page

page_8 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_9

next page > Page 9

the world. And in that case, German philosophical Idealism opens up a legitimate access to the puzzle that Goethe's life was to himself and to us. But before we make any judgments on these far-reaching questions, we first have to acquaint ourselves with the encounter between Goethe and Schiller and with Schiller's interpretation of Goethe. In the period of their relationship as neighbors, Schiller had immersed himself in Kantian philosophy and had realized for himself in the highest degree the feeling of freedom and self-determination that constitutes the life of Kant's practical philosophy. That was in extreme contrast to Goethe's striving to reflect on nature in the formation of her laws and to affirm in himself what was conditioned by nature. So Goethe accused him of "ingratitude toward the great mother who certainly had not treated him like a stepchild." Moreover, he saw in his pathos of freedom an artificial and ineffectual compulsion for moral self-control that he always found offensive. In 1794 in Jena, after a meeting of the Society for the Investigation of Nature, it happened that they walked home together. Schiller criticized the type of lecture they had just heard and called it a piece-meal way of treating nature. And then Goethe, himself inspired by a different, unified view of nature's totality, revealed to him that he felt exactly the same way. They spoke endlessly in front of Schiller's house. Finally, in the middle of the night, Goethe followed him inside and expounded for him his metamorphosis of plants according to which the plant kingdom was unified into a great totality that could be understood in its formative process. Schilleraccording to Goethe's report listened and considered all this with great interest, certainly with definite comprehension. But when I had finished, he shook his head and said: "that's not an experience: that's an idea!" I stopped short, actually a bit annoyed; for the point that separated us was thereby brought into clear relief. I was about to give in to my usual animosity, but controlled myself and replied, I don't mind at all the fact that I have ideas without knowing it and can even see them with my eyes. For anyone knowledgeable about Kant's philosophyand this Goethe was notthis disagreement is easily shown to be a misunderstanding. The Kantian antithesis of idea and experience (or appearance) is

< previous page

page_9 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_10

next page > Page 10

obtained by a narrowly conceived sense of experience individuated by space-time and represented by mathematics, particularly in the form of classical mechanics. On the other hand, the idea is not simply a subjective inspiration, but rather the regulating unity of experience itself, which for that very reason can never be completely congruent with experience, because it provides the rule for all experience. This is probably the way Schiller, the educated Kantian, expressed himself. Goethe, according to his own report, held fast to his "stubborn realism." Nevertheless, this disagreement had led to the formation of a common bond; and in this way a union of the two great men was established, as Goethe himself depicted it, on the basis of a competition between object and subject, a disagreement that could never perhaps be entirely settled. In their correspondence we have before us the part of this competition they shared together. This correspondence opens with a splendid attempt by Schiller to define his own, as well as philosophy's, relation to the spirit of Goethe. 1 In your own correct intuition there lies everything that is laboriously sought by analysis, and in a far more complete form. And only because it is in you as a totality, your own inner riches are hidden from you. For unfortunately we only know what we do not have. For this reason, spirits of your type seldom know how far they have progressed and how little cause they have to borrow from philosophy that can only learn from them. The latter can only analyze what is given to it. But the giving itself is not the affair of the analyst, but rather of the genius who establishes relationships according to objective laws under the obscure but certain influence of pure reason. The meaning and intention of this interpretation is clear. It is simply that Goethe does not know what he is doing. Kantian philosophy is nothing more than a clarification for the genius who, following his nature, creates unconsciously. Indeed, Schiller, quite consequentially, decides to advise Goethe against the study of Kantian philosophy, "For the logical direction that the spirit, in exercising reflection, finds it necessary to take, is not easily compatible with the aesthetic direction by which alone it gives form." Of course Goethe cannotthat is

< previous page

page_10 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_11

next page > Page 11

the sense of his argumentclaim for his own aesthetic production the naiveté of the ancients. Their reception of necessary form in their very first intuition of things and the developing on this basis of their high style were supported by their excellent nature and an 'idealizing art' that surrounded them. Goethe on the other hand, thrust into the savage world of the North, is in need of guiding concepts in order, from the inside out, to bring forth a Greece by exercising reason. Transforming these concepts back into intuition, thoughts into emotions, is one labor more encumbent on him as well as on any modern poet. With this image of the progress of the Goethean spirit, Schiller clarifies for himself their mutual relationship and the possibility for an encounter between Goethe's intuitive spirit and the speculative one expressed through himself. But he sees the decisive result in the "marvelous agreement of their philosophical instinct with the purest results of speculative reason." For it is his opinion that the many-sidedness of Goethe's investigation of nature is so highly gifted that his spirit, like that of the classical artist, always brings forth individuals, yet ever endowed with the character of the type. And in this he is in agreement with the speculative spirit of the genius who, in turn, creates only types, yet endowed with the possibility of life. Schiller obviously affirms the validity of the Goethean spirit. But from his own point of view and this by no means implies a limitation of the truth of philosophical speculation, that is, of Kantian philosophy. His interpretation of Goethe by the practical correspondence of the speculative and intuitive spirit is rather a complete justification of what is known by way of speculation. The genius who creates unconsciously precisely confirms the philosophical truth of self-consciousness. So Kant is speaking the trutheven about Goethe. The decisive question, however, is whether Schiller is right on this point. Is Goethe's philosophical stance one of instinct? Is his philosophy really nothing more than unconscious Idealism? Goethe himself seems to give an affirmative answer. Even if at the beginningin his answer to Schiller's first important letterhe discovers in himself "a kind of darkness and hesitation" that resists a self-clarification offered to him in the garb of philosophy, yet there is no doubt that gradually he is ready to see himself through the eyes of Schiller as expressed in Kantian terms. This is confirmed by Goethe shortly before his death when, in a letter to Councillor Schultz of 18 September 1831, he writes, "I am grateful to the critical and idealist

< previous page

page_11 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_12

next page > Page 12

philosophy for drawing my attention to myself. That is a tremendous gain." The new epoch into which Schiller leads him is characterized by his passage into a refined, more independent, self-conscious condition. The viewpoint represented by Schiller is a "higher" viewpoint, apparently because it is the standpoint of a higher consciousness. Indeed, we see Goethe grow more and more accustomed to using the language of Kant and Schiller and ridding himself of that "rigid realism." Gradually he finds it natural to speak of the idea as something higher, even to designate his ''primeval phenomenon" as an idea. So now he has gone over completely to the side of Schiller, against whose assertion "that is an idea" he had previously so objected. And two decades later, in the year 1817, the only period of his later life in which there is again evidence of a prolonged preoccupation with Kantian philosophy, he himself speaks of the hiatus, the abyss, between idea and experience, to transcend which all our strength struggles in vain, and expressly agrees with the philosopher who maintains that no idea is ever fully congruent with experience. And he is content if the latter will admit that idea and experience can be, yes, must be, analogous. On the other hand of course, his disinclination toward the tendency of philosophy to pull things asunder remains the dominant motif in all his statements on the matter. For that reason, it has been possible to represent Goethe's metaphysics as a world-view, dynamic, unitary, oriented along the lines of morphology, quite in contrast to Kantian philosophy that proceeds from the atomistic assumptions of classical mechanics. 2 In addition to this, after death severed Schiller's ten-year alliance with Goethe, we notice a subsiding of his effort in philosophy, indeed, even an ever-stronger tendency to return to his previous reservation. Even the statements of a previous period cited earlier are not nearly so unreserved as they sound when taken out of their context. Thus, the continuation of the letter, which had spoken of the achievement of Kantian philosophy as a tremendous gain, continues as follows: "We, as well as common sense, have to admit that it never arrives at its object, so that we could fully enjoy life in our unchangeable relation to it." That certainly no longer sounds Kantian, but once again very Goethean. The question is now: if we consider these and similar statements from Goethe's later period (and it is precisely from the later period that we hear many a cross word on the subject of philosophy), what does this desertion mean?

< previous page

page_12 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_13

next page > Page 13

Actually a turning away from philosophy? An ever more-conscious realization of his own peculiar way of viewing things, seeing everywhere totalities and forms? And so, the return of Goethe the artist to himself? Or does it really mean a change in philosophy itself. For is not this turning away from critical philosophy the very same as that accomplished by German Idealistic thought during the age of Goethe? This actually seems to be the case. First of all, there is the essay on "intuitive judgment." It resumes the discussion with a passage from Kant's Critique of Judgment where Kant is exploring the idea of an intuitive understanding that moves from the intuition of a totality as such down to the individual.By means of this counterimage of a divine, archetypal understanding, Kant wishes to demonstrate the discursive quality of human understanding, its need for images. Goethe, of course, sees in this his own basically archetypal method. Again, that is certainly characteristic for Goethe's Kant studies pursued for "home use." But Goethe has no intention here of interceding in favor of the intellectual intuition of later Idealism. At any rate, what Goethe accepted from Kant shows a natural affinity with the teaching of Schelling. Goethe, too, belonged to those who believe more in nature than in freedom. The derivation of Fichte's entire doctrine of science from the consciousness of freedom of absolute action was of no use to Goethe. He could have no sympathy with a thinker for whom nature was only ''grist for the exercise of duty." For it was precisely Goethe who as far as possible sought to treat freedom and even our very selves as nature. Characteristic for this opposition is Goethe's marginal note on Fichte's statement "nature is independent of us (the non-I)," which reads: "but still bound to us, for we are its living parts." What separates Goethe so much from Fichte is precisely what relates him to the later idealist thinkers; for this is exactly the point at which Schelling and Hegel began to develop their philosophies, as well as the moment of their most extreme difference with Fichte: to comprehend the essence of nature as united with that of the spirit and of self-consciousness. This tendency finds expression already in the very name of the philosophy of identity. Identity does not mean tautological sameness, but rather the inseparable belonging together of the real and the ideal, as it is conceived in the principle of intellectual intuition. Its supreme mode of objectification lies in the work of art that is just as real as it is ideal, just as objective as subjective. Accordingly,

< previous page

page_13 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_14

next page > Page 14

to philosophize for Schelling is necessarily to pass over into the originality of artistic genius. Already this is close to Goethe, who of course never intended to separate the subjective and the objective from one another and who always meant by nature that unity of life which combines the subjective with the objective. Indeed, we might compare the ambitious life-plan for Goethe's investigation of nature described for us by Schiller. "From the simple organization you rise step by step up to one of greater complication in order finally to develop genetically the most complicated of all, man, out of the materials of the whole structure of nature." Even this guiding principle of Goethe's work has a corresponding moment in the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel, who saw their great task in having the ideality of spirit and freedom proceed out of the reality of nature. Schelling called this his physical proof for Idealism, the way in which formative nature intensifies from power to ever-higher power until finally at its most intense the lightening flash of freedom strikes, at which point the highest potency of nature appears. In the light of this freedom, self-consciousness has as its object everything that has being. In this way, the standpoint of freedom is reconciled with the standpoint of nature, the objective with the subjective, Goethe with critical philosophy. While the restless Schelling wanders on beyond this point and loses himself in the theosophical hinterlands of the problem of freedom (where Goethe no longer follows him), Goethe is able to find in Hegel's philosophy the true, and for him more congenial, elaboration of the identity of the real and ideal. "Wherever object and subject make contact, there is life. When Hegel places his philosophy of identity right into the center between object and subject and holds this position, then he earns our praise." Hegel himself understood his task to be an execution of this mediation, of raising substance to the level of subject and thus making the subject substantial. In particular, it was his task to take up the whole substantial breadth of historical life into the subject. It is significant that, on the way to this goal of raising the consciousness of the world to the level of the consciousness of the self, Goethe's way of investigating nature appeared as the highest type of this world-consciousness. With respect to its internal concretion, it transcends physics as the science of mathematical law, because it "lays hold of form in the very process of its living development." Beyond the realm of the unchangeable, the laws of mechanical nature, we discover the genuine infinity of life.

< previous page

page_14 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_15

next page > Page 15

By rising to the level of the self-conscious, "the spirit enters into its native kingdom of truth." So Hegel actually resolved Goethe philosophically into himself; and the fact that Goethe on the whole does not, for his part, respond to Hegel's philosophy is no argument against this." I have no intention of learning anything further about Hegel's philosophy . . ." At times he undoubtedly misunderstands because of his impatience, like for example his indignation at Hegel's formulation in the Phenomenology of Mind that the blossom "refutes" the bud as the fruit "refutes" the blossom. The radical energy of proof in Hegel's dialectic could seem only suspect to him, but this could also be due to the reservation of his philosophical instinct in the sense in which Schiller interpreted Goethe for himself. Indeed, this is quite how Hegel saw it; but that means that he repeated Schiller's interpretation of Goethe when he wrote to the poet on April 24, 1825, "For when I survey the progress of my spiritual development, I see you everywhere entangled in it, and would like to call myself one of your sons. My interior life has received from you nourishment for the strength I need to resist abstraction and has corrected its course by using your works as beacons." Goethe's dynamic, unitary way of thinking is as far beyond analytic rationalism as Hegel's speculative thought and concrete concept. Thus in the plastic figures of Goethe, Hegel can catch sight of a genuine concretion of the spirit, and he saw as the mission of his life the interpreting of this in philosophical terms, that is, in concepts. Thereby he too asserts his own truth of speculative reason and, above the immediacy of living intuition, he places the infinite mediation of the concept, and above poetry and religion, as the highest act of the spirit, self-comprehending philosophy. This then appears to be the result of our biographical wandering along the path of Goethe's spiritual development. Goethe's reservations about philosophy, so often emphasized and practiced, has proven to be not even half the truth. On the contrary, his philosophical history appears as the literary model of what was thought by the thinkers of his age, first Schiller, later Schelling and Hegel. Have we thenwe must askin the philosophy of German Idealism (particularly in the rise from subjective to objective and absolute Idealism) the true philosophy of Goethe? With this decisive question, our investigation has again taken a quite new direction. Not only are we going to separate ourselves

< previous page

page_15 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_16

next page > Page 16

from the endeavor, so dear to our fathers, of bringing Goethe and Kant into agreement. We also do not consider it sufficient to recognize Goethe's philosophy in its actual affinity with the objective Idealism of Schelling and Hegel. Rather, we must now ask ourselves whether it is an accidental and superficial fact that Goethe, who was always glad to see any possible agreement, did not enthusiastically go along with the philosophical speculation of his contemporaries. Is that really nothing more than the expression of his own literary way of thinking that out of love for sensual intuition, shied away from the path of conceptualization. Or rather, is there present in his own way of thinking a philosophical truth that rises beyond the circle of Idealistic thought, not only beyond Kant, but even beyond Hegel? Is Goethe perhaps not only the contemporary and literary forerunner of Idealism, but perhaps its first critic? To answer this question we have been prepared by a whole century of the criticism of Idealism, particularly since Nietzsche's attack on Platonism, that is, on the entire tradition of the Greek-Christian philosophy of ideas and metaphysics, has penetrated the general philosophical consciousness. Because of this, we now occupy a position where we can see Goethe's retreat from metaphysics, indeed his whole reservation toward speculative philosophy, with quite different eyes. We no longer see in this the artist concerned about the innocence of his creative powers, avoiding reflection as much as possible. Rather, we see in this reservation precisely the whole other half of the truth. We recognize in himlong before Nietzschea critic of the notion of the concept in philosophical, that is, metaphysical, truth. The first bit of insight that leads us in this direction is the fact that Goethe himself saw, in his basically creative relation with the world, not the particularity of his poetic individuality, but rather the generality of all human existence. The artist is simply the human being raised to a higher power. The human being is what he is because of his constant effect on the world and of his experience of its countereffect on himself. Man conquers himself not in any detached freedom of standing over against the world, but rather in his daily intercourse with the world, in allowing himself to participate in its conditionedness. Only by doing so does he attain the proper attitude for the act of knowing. It is the pupil of Herder who sees our knowledge of the world not as a possession and a source of information, but rather as an experiencing and an enjoying; but that means

< previous page

page_16 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_17

next page > Page 17

also as a productive answer of the human being to the world, an answer flowing from the totality of human nature. A second element is also involved here. If Goethe tries to protect himself from the pitfalls of philosophical speculation, then he is not only following an instinct for what is most suitable for his own type; he sees in this reservation what is the proper and warranted attitude for the human being as such. But that means that against the whole of the philosophical tradition and its idea of truth he is opposing his own claim to truth. With the strangely relaxed attitude of the precursor, Goethe again points in the same direction in which Nietzsche pursued his intense criticism of Platonism, and so moves close to the beginnings of philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks, just as Nietzsche did later. He too saw what Nietzsche saw: that the plastic nature of the ancient thinkers, the complete coincidence of life and theory, is foreign to modern times; and on that realization he bases his own conscious attitude to philosophy.In a conversation reported by Falk, he says, "Philosophers, for their part, can offer us only the forms of life. Whether these are suitable for us or not; whether we, given our disposition and abilities, are in a position to furnish them with the requisite content or not, is our affair. We have to examine ourselves and check most carefully what we take into ourselves from outside, just as we do with food. Otherwise, we will either perish from philosophy or philosophy from us." This statement is very informative. It shows how clearly conscious Goethe was of the one-sided emphasis on reason in the education of the preceding centuries. It was precisely the Protestant centuries in their concern for the proper faith and correct dogma that gave to modern philosophical speculation its exaggerated penchant for abstraction. From his earliest years, Goethe was always on guard against such aberration. Goethe always rebelled against any dogmatic rigidity. He did not really care whether he was called pantheist, Christian, or atheist, "because no one really knows what all these things actually mean." With such an attitude, and without even knowing it, he is moving close to the origin of philosophy among the Greeks. In any case, it is no mere accident, but a real affinity that, in the previous quotation, reminds us of the Platonic Socrates. Goethe's attitude toward modern philosophy was essentially the same as Plato's opposition to the notion of paideia cultivated by the Sophists. Plato saw the essential educational mission of Socrates in leading his interlocutors away from the noncommittal versatility

< previous page

page_17 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_18

next page > Page 18

of Sophistic education to a real concern for the soul. In the marvelous dialogue between Socrates (in the Platonic Protagoras) and the youth who, in his thirst for knowledge, would like to be introduced into the circle at Protagoras's house, Socrates awakens the young man to the dangers lying in an unexamined reception of Sophistic teachings into his soul. For this purpose, he used here the very same image that Goethe uses in the previous quotation: food for the body is not selected without a proper inspection; how much more does the food of the soul need the same caution and scrutinizing. The task of philosophy, which has the burden of carrying out this examination, is similar to that of the physician who, when faced with the seductions of the culinary art, must determine what is proper nourishment for the body. In this sense, Socrates is the true physician of the soul and the only genuine teacher of philosophy, because he alone understands how, through the art of dialogue, dialectically to undermine the prejudices of early training. Plato actually based the dialectical method in philosophy on this view of Socrates, the dialectician. It was his opinion that philosophy could attain a proper consciousness of itself only by opposing the educational drivel of the Sophists. Now in the same way, Goethe also opposes the abstract speculation of his age, and precisely this unencumbered selfassuredness in his opposition to the dogmatism of the modern period confers on him an aura of antiquity. In the classical sense, he too is a philosopher and is closer to the origins than his great contemporaries in philosophy. For he does not share the faith of his age in the autonomy of reasonhe sees its human conditionedness. It is, however, decisive that he does not see this conditionedness as a barrier to the attainment of truth; rather, he understands it as the human path to wisdom. We can then see that in his opposition to philosophy there lies concealed a genuine philosophical discovery of his own, one that is most clearly revealed in his conception of truth. At this moment he is fundamentally opposed to the traditional conception of objective truth, and this becomes part of a movement that leads from Herder through Nietzsche right up to the present time and the classical model of which is the concrete dialectic of Socrates. On the other hand, what Goethe is talking about here is not that revolt of skepticism that from time immemorial has been nourished by animosity against the dogmaticism of academic phi-

< previous page

page_18 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_19

next page > Page 19

losophy. It is, rather, the will to preserve his own firm ground of truth. The constant drive to be productive, which Goethe was aware of as the rich endowment of his genial nature, is also characteristic of all men's common experience of the world. The world is actually there only for the one who acts on the world and, in turn, suffers the world's reaction. Truth rests on a living relationship. Hence, it is necessarily linked with error, in which this vital relationship is realized. The invigoration of one's activity, the release and intensification of one's vital powers, being productive both in animating and annihilating, these are the standards by which truth is measured. "Only that which is fruitful is also true." This well-known word of Goethe does not, however, dissolve truth into utility as is the case in modern pragmatism: for fruitfulness is simply the enhancement of life itself in which man's experience of the world takes shape. It is simply the reverse side of an objectivity that was recognized by Goethe as one of his own essential characteristics. For Is not the essence of nature In the human heart?

< previous page

page_19 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_21

next page > Page 21

Goethe and the Moral World Whoever loves Goethe also loves the German language. And for whom is Goethe not likewise the embodiment of a human culture that moves along its hidden path in the midst of a world torn by terrible strife!? In the meantime, who are those who love Goethe and find in him something that can unite us? We cannot hide from ourselves the fact that the obvious interest in Goethe, all the truly genuine concern manifested by this sympathy, is borne by the older generation of our contemporaries. The young people, at least those who, growing beyond the educational assiduity of their still immature stage of life, have chosen stars by which to orient their lives, are turning to other models and pass Goethe by with increasing indifference. In 1930, Max Kommerell, who was called away by death so exceptionally early, published a remarkable address with the title "Youth Without Goethe." The formulation of this title is just as valid today as it was decades ago, even though its positive content has changed. Kommerell recognized that the hearts of our poetically sensitive youth seem no longer attracted by an exclusive devotion to the poetry of Stefan George, a judgment even then not fully justified. In Unpublished text of a radio lecture given in 1949. Only minor changes have been made for publication.

< previous page

page_21 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_22

next page > Page 22

the meantime, it is clear that not even the poetry of Hölderlin and Rilke seem to fill their hearts with inspiration. Concern with the works of our greatest poets has come under suspicion of being an escape from reality. Everything "poetic" seems to be little more than a noble impotency when faced with the overwhelming realities that surround us in a society finding its inspiration only in technical achievement. Ultimately, Goethe appears to our inquiring youth today as the author and primary witness of a tendency to gloss over the important decisions that most concern us. This is not the first time that Goethe has been so passionately attacked in this way. Already his contemporaries and, following them, Young Germany, that literary movement which lent its voice to the social and aesthetic tendencies of an incipient liberalism after the July Revolution of 1830 in France, attacked Goethe as the "Olympian"; and this slogan has been often repeated ever since. There was a great deal of unproductive resentment in this hostile attitude toward Goethe. The critics Wolfgang Mentzel and Ludwig Börne, the primary spokesmen in this struggle, saw, in the apparent aloofness with which Goethe looked down on the stormy radicalism of the young, a blindness for the genuine forces that were about to shape the future. The cult by which the upper society honored their idol provoked them to an exorbitant lack of justice. And in the final analysis, it was not only a revolutionary élan directed against the self-satisfied complacency of the status quo with which Goethe had identified himself, but an actual hatred for the unperturbed facility of this genial productivity, that is, an unfulfilled love, which, to take but one example, was responsible for the discordant relationship between Heinrich Heine and both Weimar and Goethe. Whatever had so prejudiced Goethe against the revolutionary radicalism of the young Schiller and deafened him to the claim of such original natures as Kleist and Hölderlin, now appeared as a real barrier in the enormous proportions of this personality. To the radical demands of the young generation, his even-tempered composure was too high a price to pay for peace with the powers of the establishment and, finally, was symptomatic of a lack of radicality and strength of resolve. Since then, this attack has been repeated a number of times by an impetuous youth. With the satiation of the well-todo middle class during the industrial growth of Prussia and the German Empire, the initial battle cry grew silent and gave way to a new cult of education and personal growth. But the impact of the social pathos

< previous page

page_22 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_23

next page > Page 23

among the Naturalists of the 1880s gave it renewed impetus. Finally, the collapse of the educational idealism in the trenches of World War I again brought the revolutionary forces of literature and politics back to the front line. In the meantime, however, an internal debate over Goethe is taking on a more silent, and that means a more serious, form. It no longer has the militant aspect of a literary and political feud, no longer the hot breath of an injustice demanding change only for the sake of change, attacking and condemning simply to clear the way for one's own style of artistic or political action. These people no longer even refuse to recognize just merit; and exactly because of this, they reveal their deadly seriousness. They ask about Goethe's legitimation because they doubt legitimation of anything poetic in our world at all. And they raise the fundamental question about Goethe's attitude toward the moral world; indeed, they pursue this inquiry with a conscientiousness that reveals their hesitant attraction to the work and personality of Goethe. They no longer play the young Goethe, or any particular phase of his work, against that of the older poet, but rather are in search of him as a total personality, directing their resolute questions to the whole phenomenon of Goethe's existence and spiritual reality. Karl Jaspers, in a speech given on the occasion of his reception of the Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt in 1947, posed the unsettling question as to what it perhaps means that Goethe continues to be present to us, indeed, is still absolutely necessary for our existence, and yet is no longer able to be a model for our own lives. He particularly emphasized the critical remark about Goethe made by Kierkegaard to the effect that the poet's own existence had actually become a poetic fiction. In his opinion, Goethe's serious defect was that he had no pathos. No sooner does he get into a situation where he is faced with an unconditional claim or into a relationship that threatens to engulf him, than he liberates himself by making it a subject of poetic composition. Dichtung und Wahrheit, he continues, this most splendid autobiography in the German language, by the very fact that it poeticizes his life, actually obscures the deeply moral force of his existence. One is tempted to ask whether what he once said with respect to a spurious imitation of Werther is not also true of Goethe himself. "Be a man and don't imitate me." It is not enough to examine the justification for this criticism, either accepting or rejecting it, and then cling to Goethe's work as if there were no problem. For the poeticization of his life, of

< previous page

page_23 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_24

next page > Page 24

which he is being accused by these critics, is precisely the vital law of his poetry. His literary works are the purest expression of what has been called the poetry of experience. This is not to say that his ''worthy self " is the key to all his works, or that his work depends for its vitality and meaning only on his biography. What is expressed in his works, these "fragments of a great confession" as he himself called them, is not the unique historical I of their creator. Rather, what actually makes the moral problem so acute is that he "poeticized" his life, that is, he treats his actually lived life like a subject that, like all subject matter of art, has no meaning in itself, but attains it only by becoming part of a larger structure that speaks to us on a universally significant level. Is even the most significant I, an I most rich in the experience of the world, significant enough to fulfill the task of poetry? That is the other question that must be asked along with the ethical one, a question directed squarely at Goethe's art and vocation as poet. Calderon or Dante or the Greek tragedians, who seem to have no personality, to be simple nameless mediators of a universal world-view, are of particular importance for this question. Actually, this question takes precedence over the ethical one that inquires about the lack of unconditional moral seriousness in the person of Goethe. For, after all, it is not Goethe's existence that is given and accessible to us. What is given to us is the polymorphous enchantment of his literary works. "No one will ever fathom how Goethe's life actually was" is Jasper's justified comment on the criticism of Kierkegaard. But what significance his works have in our life is something we not only are able to fathom, but indeed we are obligated to do. Something tremendous happened when Goethe opened his mouth and raised German poetic art to the rank of world literature. The powerful linguistic gesture of Schiller, the self-contained urgency of Hölderlin, even Klopstock's stammering power and the unfettered flow of Herder's rush of words, or whomever else one wants to mention among the artists of the German language who have entered into world literatureGoethe is superior to them all; and because of something peculiarly his own: the perfect naturalness of his language. It affects us as a very particular style because the free use of what is peculiarly one's own was not present in the forms of poetic discourse before him; and it was present after him only because of him. It is not only the uninhibited freshness of his early

< previous page

page_24 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_25

next page > Page 25

dramatic and epic prose creations that have about them the earthiness of dialect; it is also his art of verse, from the simplicity of his early songs to the allegorically laden stanzas of his final creations, from Pandora through the WestEast Divan to the second part of Faust, which seems to receive its rhythmic structure from nature itself. Even in the verse that is most heavily expressive and metrically the most artistic seems to hurry along with an agile gait. The old magic spell that lay on the art of German verse because of the fetters of classical meter seems suddenly broken and powerless. Even Goethe's later prose, which undoubtedly has a ceremonious air of the chancery about it, seems not stylized and artificial, but as the natural expression of a formality become necessary to the poet and his attitude toward the world. Goethe himself has reported concerning his early productive period that his verses came to him as if on their own, often during the night, and were written down on scraps of paper in near darkness, more obedient to sudden inspiration than produced by deliberate artistic will. His verses bear witness to this, and we undoubtedly realize that the perfect naturalness of his language is nothing external and accidental, but corresponds precisely to the way he generally encounters the world and responds to it. It is like a game, and it is precisely this playful aspect of his poetry that, to those trained on the near prophetic tensions of Hölderlin's or Rilke's poetic diction, can appear like an abuse of a sacred vessel. We will certainly not refuse to acknowledge the artistic charm of his treatment of languagecertainly much more than just a manipulation of language. We will even realize that, as far as his relation to language is concernedperhaps even to the world as wellGoethe is, in this easy naturalness of setting forth his life, truly a Greek, like no other since the days of the Greeks. And yet, we are driven to ask where Goethe gets the right simply to poeticize the whole content of his own life, and whether this productive capacity to respond to any and all stimulation by imposing creative form is not precisely what leads to that lack of moral seriousness which tears the kingdom of poetic imagination out of the context of a life normally bound by ethical norms and then banishes literature into a world of aesthetic education, a world of pure self-enjoyment. The way Goethe conducted his own life makes this question even more acute. Of course, he was by no means a man who withdrew from the normal conditions of social reality to cultivate a life of

< previous page

page_25 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_26

next page > Page 26

personal education. When the young Goethe was called by Karl August of Weimar to his court, he actively entered into the political life of the Weimar state. Not only was he a state minister, but over and above his official position, he was an authoritative and decisive personality because he was the mentor of the genial and unruly duke. With utmost conscientiousness he acquainted himself with his administrative duties and performed inestimable services for this small duchy. What is more, for many years filled with hard work and irritation, he assumed responsibility for the Weimar Theater. But still to many, this situation of a patrician's son in service to the court of Weimar could appear like only a betrayal of the mission given to the revolutionary middle-class element in that period of declining absolutism. And then, during the decade of Napoleon's control over Europe, Goethe, who was a personal admirer of the great Corsican, kept aloof from the movement of national resistance that triumphed in the wars of liberation. Last but not least, in the years of the Restoration, he stood entirely on the side of the dominant social establishment by whom he had been accepted. Another feature of Goethe's life that brought him a great deal of criticism and rejection was his marriage with Christiane Vulpius. Of course, with this marriage he had accommodated himself, as least pro forma, to the world of society; but who could possibly see in this insignificant woman a life-long companion who could properly compliment the great personality of the poet and would confer on the moral obligations of marriage and family the high dignity deserved by this darling of prominent women and men of consequence? The truly imperial position that the aging Goethe had acquired in the whole world of culture and that he had cultivated with considerable enjoyment was actually rather a privileged position and became stronger year by year through the increasing authority of his person. So actually, Goethe himself was quite conscious of the fact that the contemporary public felt largely alienated from his work and above all from his moral personality. In March 1830 in a conversation with Eckermann, he replied to the reproach that he had remained aloof in that great period of the wars of liberation. Behind that gossip there is more animosity against me than you know. I find in it a new form of that old hatred which has been pursuing me for years and now seeks to get at me

< previous page

page_26 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_27

next page > Page 27

surreptitiously. I know quite well that I'm a thorn in many an eye; they would all be glad to be rid of me; and since they can not find a blemish on my talent, they look for it in my character. First it's my pride; then, I'm said to be full of envy for young talents; next, I'm accused of wallowing in sensual pleasures; then, I'm told I'm not a Christian; and finally, they tell me I have no love for my fatherland and my dear Germans. Meanwhile, time itself has pronounced its judgment. Today, Goethe stands above both the hate and the favor of the warring parties. It was of course because of this that the view of his character vacillated so much in the historical accounts. And finally, all the criticism has grown silent that dared to impugn his work or deny to him true poetic genius (like certain Romantics obsessed with fairy tales) or even refuse to acknowledge his genuine dramatic talent. His work belongs to world literature in a rarely so comprehensive way. But we must admit that this estimation of Goethe is determined by the standards of literary education that always leave room for doubt about questions of moral value and human significance. No one has doubts any longer about what the Iphigenie is, a work by no means totally Greek, but perhaps for that reason an all the more sensitive transposition of the great classical myth into the moral sensibility of modern times. But the problematic figures of Clavigo or Tasso, or Wilhelm Meister or Faust (like many another of his heroic figures endangered because of their almost feminine sensibility) have little to do with man's need for ideals. Schiller's moral enthusiasm will always call forth greater resonance than Goethe's discordant figures, who are illumined by flashes from the depths of human weakness and confusion. However, in particular, one doubt seems never put to rest: what is the meaning of this poetic self-redemption to which he lays claim both in his life and in his relation to his literary activity? Is it not blasphemy that in its delusion usurps religious formulas? Is it not a dangerous seduction for the human will that depends on the stability of moral certainty? Those are marvelous verses where the poet's profound capacity for suffering is poignantly expressed. And when man grows silent in his agony, a god inspired me to say what I suffer. But is not that the egocentricity of an isolated artist who conceals from himself the existential seriousness of human life? In

< previous page

page_27 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_28

next page > Page 28

the cradling rhythm of the West-East Divan Goethe once formulates this feeling in the verses: What is everywhere the way of man's attaining health? Everyone likes to hear the sound that develops into a tone. Away with everything that disturbs your course, let's have no gloomy striving: The poet must live, both before he sings and after he grows silent. And so we hope life's lode of sound will roar through the soul! When the poet feels his heart grow fearful, he will for himself find reconciliation. What kind of relationship to the moral world is expressed here? Does it not touch the very foundation of the way we human beings estimate our own value, an estimate based on the Christian religion, but having its effect far beyond the living reality of Christianity? Reconciling oneself to oneselfis that not a decisive rejection of salvation offered to us through the Christian church and its proclamation of the Gospel? The titanism of the young Goethe, which in the eyes of his defenders and admirers is the great moral achievement of his life, seems still to be his final word. For titanism is that defiant self-reliance of man in opposition to the divine, as it found revolutionary expression in Goethe's youthful sympathy for the figure of Prometheus. However, titanism seems also to be the literary selfremedy to which Goethe constantly entrusted himself right up to the end. Is it not precisely the limits of an aesthetic attitude toward life that prove to be this great artist's undoing? This question must not be taken lightly. Also, we must not attempt to rob it of its factual basis by opposing one bit of textual evidence to another. Of course, one can prove anything by using Goethe's works and then concluding that no artist is identical with any of the characters in which he lives and that no true work of art permits us to derive from it a clearly defined moral position. But

< previous page

page_28 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_29

next page > Page 29

arguing in this manner would mean a reduction of the real Goethe. At every turn, his poetic activity flows into a form of wisdom that makes an immediate claim and must be immediately attributed to the poet himself. Even the verses from the Divan, quoted previously are not simply didactic verses, but a genuine poetic figure. But the figure they are is that of the poet. And the poetic, of that there can be no doubt, was the basis of Goethe's existence. Those verses show, however, that Goethe has no intention of allowing us to posit an opposition between the aesthetic existence of the poet and the normal form of human existence in general. What is true for the poet is no different from what is true for the human being. Man's recovery to a state of health lies in a process of taking form. "Everyone likes to hear a sound that develops into a tone." That is not an aesthetic view of life that could be opposed to an ethical one. The poet presents us with what is essentially human. Responding productively to the demands made by things is not a particular privilege and special potentiality that could single him out and guarantee him a life free of all moral responsibility. It is each and every soul through whom the lode of sound roars. Gloomy striving is not a condition that only the poet should avoid. What the poet actually means is that such a condition is wrong for all men. In this respect, he fully agrees with the most strict of moralists, the rigorous Kant. For Kant also says, "If one asks, what is the aesthetic nature of virtue, its temperament, so to speak: courageous, on occasion happily or anxiously humbled, depressed? Then no answer is really necessary. This latter mode of slavish humility is never found without a concealed hatred for the law, and the joyous heart pursuing its duty . . . is a sign of a genuinely virtuous attitude." Goethe's watch-word of poetic self-reconciliation is not the expression of an aesthetic view of life lacking all moral seriousness. It is rather a moral truth that perhaps is not even prejudicial to the religious problem of man's need for divine grace, much less a recommendation for political escapism. It is a truth that is particularly supported by Hegel's critique of the immorality of the "ought'' and the untruth of abstract reasoning. Hegel himself was conscious of the fact that the speculative notion of the concept as something genuinely concrete had its graphic fulfillment in Goethe's artistry and personality. (See the letter to Goethe of April 24, 1825.) A consciousness divorced from reality is the unhappy consciousness as such. This moral truth may be diffi-

< previous page

page_29 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_30

next page > Page 30

cult to accept for a youth whose abstract enthusiasm easily overlooks the factual conditionedness of life. But youth as such does not exist. Like everything human, youth is a transition. The way of German youth to Goethe is not the laborious and doubtful path to something alienit is the path of its own vital movement and the future of each and every young person.

< previous page

page_30 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_31

next page > Page 31

On the Course of Human Spiritual Development: Studies of Goethe's Unfinished Writings Introduction The following studies are concerned with the unfinished dramatic works of Goethe, works that were nevertheless added by Goethe himself to the edition of the Collected Works and for that reason are of particular importance. Everything unfinished points beyond itself to that which is still missing, to that which alone could confer meaning on the completed work. And yet, these dramatic fragments have reached a certain inner maturity from which we can infer the sense of the whole. Goethe's finishing off of his Prometheus Fragment of The study of Prometheus and Pandora is based on a lecture given at Leipzig in 1944. In 1948 it was presented to Kurt Steinmeyer on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The study of the Magic Flute is likewise based on a lecture given at Leipzig in 1947 and owes its revisions for publication to Helmut Kupper, who published the whole work for the Goethe Year 1949. In the meantime, the theme of Goethe's Magic Flute has been treated several times (see later). The essay was first published by Verlag Helmut Kupper (Godesberg, 1949).

< previous page

page_31 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_32

next page > Page 32

1773 by the later addition of the Prometheus Ode may to some extent be artificial and questionable. But who would contest the fact that the Pandora or Goethe's Magic Flute is in its own way a complete work? The reader can easily dispense with the sketches for their completion, even though for the student they provide a certain stimulus for surmise, and otherwise serve almost as a commentary on what is actually written. What is the secret of these fragments? I don't mean why they remained unfinished, but rather why they are complete? What poetic impetus is satisfied in them to such an extent that they anticipate their own completion? The studies clustered around this question here are all occasional works. The Prometheus problem, long since an object of intense study for the author, occupies, of course, a privileged place among Goethe's writings, and the two works that we owe to himfrom the eighties of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth centurypoint to one another. The Magic Flute, Second Part, on the other hand, was very tempting for the interpreter because of its connection with Mozart's opera. And yet, it is quite surprising how closely unified with one another these works are, considering that they were written in different periods and are of such varying importance. All three deal with the way in which human culture develops: the mythological drama of the prehistorical world of the titans and how they were conquered; the fairy-tale opera on the struggle of elemental and spiritual forces involved in human development. The elemental and the spiritual, their opposition and their mutual belongingness, govern the spiritual course of mankind in general, the path to culture as well as to the development of the individual. This is what particularly interested Goethe: to show that the constant hidden presence of the titanic element, the continual threat to man's spirit by the darkness of elemental forces belongs to the very essence of human destiny. There is no direct path to enlightenment that can lead man to his high calling. What human beings struggle to free themselves from is precisely themselves. Goethe's various poetic attempts to demonstrate this are so closely connected with his own development that he can revoke them at any timelike these dramatic fragments. No matter how different in form each one is, the cultural achievements of humanity are as little a human "achievement" as the occasional "success" in education. In both we find suffering and daring, anxiety and grace interwoven with

< previous page

page_32 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_33

next page > Page 33

one another. The self-glorification of reason is one of the illusions of modern thought. By reading Goethe, we can judge where its authority ends. The Limits of Titan Power The mythological figure of Prometheus, the titan and great friend of humanity, becomes, by the stealing of the fire, the ancestor of man's cultural labors. For the sake of his love for man, he is struck by Zeus's revenge. His flesh, each day anew, is torn from his body by the eagle of Zeus. And yet, with heroic endurance he refuses to surrender his avowed purpose. This figure was given timeless and universal significance by the Greek literary tradition, by Hesiod and Aeschylus. With a constant shift in meaning, it accompanied the thinking of the ancient Greeks right into the early period of Christianity. 1 Even Hellenistic Christians were able to recognize in the acts and sufferings of Prometheus a prototype of their own religious message of human salvation through vicarious suffering, by referring the myth, in typical Greek fashion, to themselves. Of course, the actual religious teaching of the myth as shaped by Hesiod and Aeschylus was incompatible with the Christian view of God's eternity and omnipotence. Hence, the special interest shown to Greek myth since the beginning of modern times is an indication that the binding force of Christianity is gradually weakening. Now, the Prometheus myth is seized upon in a variation that had already become dominant in late Antiquity. Under the influence of an older cultural tradition, Prometheus is regarded as the creator of mankind, as the clever demon of pottery-making whose skilled genius forms men out of clay and, with Minerva's help, awakens them to life. In later Antiquity, this story was a literary type of allegorical motif having no specific religious determination. But now, in Renaissance philosophy, in the works of Boccaccio and Bovillus,2 it rises to the stature of a genuine symbol that announces, in direct contrast to the Christian tradition, a new feeling for life and a new image of man as creator. But not until the eighteenth century did the new symbol find its militant character in Goethe's famous Ode.

< previous page

page_33 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_34

next page > Page 34

We know that Goethe's poem, written in 1774 and published by Jacobi in 1785 against the will of the poet, marked an epoch in the history of the modern Enlightenment and the critique of Christianity. Jacobi reported on the impression that it made on Lessing who saw in it a confirmation of his own pantheistic view of God. In the century of enlightenment and critique of religion it had the effect of a beacon light when they saw how Prometheus, in overbearing defiance, challenges the authority of the gods and turns their very dependence on "omnipotent time and eternal fate" against their claim to authority. Goethe himself, when discussing the history of this poem from the vantage point of a later time, makes reference to the Pantheismusstreit [the argument over pantheism] that broke out at the poem's publication: "It served to ignite an explosion that exposed and publicized the secret circumstance of worthy men, circumstances of which they were unconscious and that lay dormant in an other wise highly enlightened society;" and he points to the death of Mendelsohn, which occurred during the course of this dispute. What Goethe means here is undoubtedly not the discovery of the hidden pantheism of Lessing as such, which occurs in the conversation with Jacobi after a reading of the Prometheus Ode. Of Lessing, who says he had received all this firsthand, it could not have been said that he had previously been unconscious of his religious position. What Goethe means is rather the breaking out of that passionate dispute about Lessing's pantheism, or rather atheism, that drove men like Jacobi and Mendelsohn into a position of hostile antagonism. The effect of the Prometheus Ode was by no means only that it gave powerful expression to a revolutionary, anti-Christian pathos and agitated the minds and hearts of Goethe's contemporaries. On the contrary, it awakened a religious resistance, and thereby strengthened the opposing forces within the modern Enlightenment. Similarly ambiguous was the effect of Wertherand here too Goethe, looking back from Dichtung und Wahrheit, uses the same image of igniting an explosion that the book provoked. In both instances, Goethe distances himself from these effects by distinguishing the poetic meaning of the ''representation" of this material from attaching importance to its contents and its dogmatic exploitation. If we then look at the Prometheus poem with respect to the effects it had, we find it undoubtedly has a place in the history of religion. What it means for Goethe and what significance it has within his poetic work, on the other hand, can be decided only on the basis of the poetry itself

< previous page

page_34 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_35

next page > Page 35

Of course, it was not only this once that the Prometheus figure occupied Goethe's attention. As he himself confesses, the mythological moment of Prometheus's appearance had become constantly present to him to the point of being an idée fixe. This means that the figure of Prometheus is for Goethe not just one poetic motif among others, but rather represents a special identification, the significance of which we must still determine. As we know from Jacobi, in the circles of his friends Goethe was actually known as Prometheus. The basis for assuming this name is explained from Goethe's own report that his talent as a productive poet was at the time the most secure foundation of his feeling for life, and that he recognized himself in that productive independence manifested in Prometheus as the sculptor of men. In this, Goethe is simply following the idea, ever more-deeply engrained in self-consciousness since the Renaissance, of seeing in the artist a "second God" (alter deus, Scaliger), a second creator, an idea transmitted by Schaftesbury to the eighteenth century under the symbol of Prometheus. 3 This idea has coalesced with the modern concept of creativity and, since the Sturm und Drang period, survives in ordinary consciousness in the form of the cult of the personality and of genius. However, it would be much too rash, in our discussion of these things, to claim as Goethe's own the Prometheus motif in its aesthetic and theoretical form, something we of course can do in the case of the humanistic theoreticians of the concept of genius. Rather, Goethe's poetic and theoretical treatment of the Prometheus figure has a much more far-reaching significance, because for him the consciousness of his poetic talentaccording to his own discussion in Dichtung und Wahrheitgrew out of the experience of a common human destiny that "all of us must bear." The loneliness of the poet, who can be productive only in isolation, simply manifests, in an exceptional way, what is true for all human beings: the fact that "he is thrown back on himself," and in the moment of distress cannot depend on the divinity. Even though the creative self-sufficiency of the titan attracted Goethe in the ancient mythological figure of Prometheus, just as he was attempting to give his own existence a foundation by formulating his ideas on poetic activity, nevertheless the self-consciousness of Goethe, the artist, is closely intertwined with a basic religious feeling concerned with man's position in relation to the sphere of divinity. Goethe separated himself in a Promethean stance not only from men, but also from the gods; not

< previous page

page_35 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_36

next page > Page 36

in the sense of a naive form of self-divinization, as it uncritically happens in the modern cult of creativity, but rather in full consciousness of our inevitable humanity in contrast to the divinity. For this reason, the whole story of Prometheus could take living shape in him: the disorder into which Prometheus fell in his relation with Zeus and the other gods, by making human beings on his own, animating them with Minerva's help, and thus founding a third dynasty. The detailed information given by Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit concerning the genesis of the Ode emphasizes, of course, the poetic character of the myth and is not disposed to enter into any philosophical and religious discussion. However, it becomes quite clear that it is precisely this middle position of the titan, the fact that he is a descendant of the oldest dynasty and yet has no connection with the power structure of universal government, that makes him significantly suitable for his role as creator of mensignificant in the sense that humankind receives in this way an origin independent of the supreme lord of the universe, a telling symbol for the position, accorded him by fate, of being "thrown back on himself" and yet in a state of total subjection. And so, Goethe expressly stresses the fact that the "titanic-gigantic, heaven-storming" aspect provided no material for his type of poetry. "Rather it seemed appropriate for me to represent that peaceful, plastic, in any case tolerant, resistance that recognizes the supreme power, and yet wishes to be equal to it.'' Of course, all this belongs to Goethe's own interpretation of his work in his later years. And such interpretations are concerned not only with the Ode but equally with the two-act dramatic fragment that turned up again in 1820. Just how far Goethe had gotten away from this "capricious production of his youth" is obvious from the fact that he mistakenly took the Ode for the introduction to the third act of the drama and had it printed as such in the editions. The question now is whether Goethe's self-interpretation is equally beside the mark. The answer is made particularly difficult because the drama is an unfinished fragment. Moreover, Goethe was probably right when he told us that at that time he simply wrote away without any finished plan for the entire work. It would simply be idle speculation, then, to try to come up with an exact conception of the events of the plot. Only one thing is possibly definite: that Goethe actually planned (as he later indicates in the printed edition) some mediation between Prometheus and Zeus, and thereby the sanctioning of the human race by the gods. Not only the literary tradition (both classi-

< previous page

page_36 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_37

next page > Page 37

cal and modern) supports this, but also we expect this on the basis of the scenes that Goethe actually executed; particularly the superior confidence with which Zeus accepts the creation of men: This race of worms increases The number of my servants. and he has enough patience to wait until later for the recognition of his lordship. The basic structure of the dramatic action is clear enough at this point. It ends with the recognition of divine authority by both human beings and Prometheus. The offer with which Zeus approaches Prometheus at the beginning of the drama is surely not without significance for the impending establishment of a universal constitution: Prometheus is to live on Olympus and "govern the earth." And this is precisely the constitution of the world that Goethe affirmed: it is through work and activity that human destiny on earth is determined. This Promethean truth will ultimately be accepted even when the supreme authority of the gods finds recognition among men. For it is man's lot to be independent, but this independence is limited and in subjection. That is the frame which clearly encloses the complete work. But how are we to fill in the picture inside? What experience will lead men to a recognition of divine authority? When will they have need of the Gods? If we recall the classical myth, and particularly what is expressed in Plato's Protagoras, then it is the social existence of man, his capability of leading a life in the state, that is granted to him alone by Zeus through his distribution of Justice (Dike) and Reverence (aidos). Indeed, among the Greeks, and even in Aeschylus, Zeus is the genius of the law; and to Goethe, the notion that it is only through the law that man becomes man was certainly not unfamiliar (Diary note of 1797: "It is the law that makes man, not man the law.") However, if we look closely at what is actually written and ask whether Zeus as giver of peace was supposed to bring reconciliation to men who are continually engaged in self-destruction, we find absolutely no evidence for this. On the contrary, Goethe depicts the experiences of Prometheus with those whom he has created not at all as if discord and self-destruction were the danger that threatened them. Rather, man's condition as a natural being is painted with friendly colors. We have here traces of the influence of Rousseau as well as of Wieland's Beiträge zur geheimen Geschichte der Menschlichen Vernunft (1770) [Con-

< previous page

page_37 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_38

next page > Page 38

tributions to a Secret History of Human Reason]. The concept of property as a natural right is derived from man's industrious activity; and his violation of it is regarded as something equally natural, repressed in the human community by an effective faculty of reason. When a goat of one of these persons is stolen, Prometheus comforts him: Leave him in peace! If he raises his hand against everyone, Then everyone's hand will be raised against him. And on the whole he concludes: You are not degenerate, my children: Be industrious and lazy, And brutally gentle, generously avaricious: Be like all your brothers in Fate. Be like the animals and the Gods. So according to Goethe's intention, it must have been something else that is supposed to lead men and Prometheus to recognition of the godsand we may assume that, even if he did not have a precise plan in mind, he was nevertheless guided by some conception of the whole. An intervention of Zeus, for example, by giving of Pandora, as is the case in Wieland's Traumgespräch mit Prometheus [Dream Dialogue with Prometheus] or in his Pandora, would jar considerably with Zeus's surely expectant words at the beginning of the second actand this would also totally disregard the fact that Pandora, according to Goethe, is of course a creature of Prometheus. So the question remains whether there is some other kind of limitation in these human creatures and their creator that is supposed to convert them to a recognition of the gods. We get perhaps an initial hint in the words of Zeus: In new-born joy of youth, You think your soul is like the Gods. That they are not Gods, must certainly become clear to them by the mystery of death. Also we should be attentive to what we hear in the

< previous page

page_38 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_39

next page > Page 39

exchange between Zeus and Mercury: "They will not listen to you until they need you." So one day they will need not Zeus, but Mercury, the messenger and interpreter. And indeed, according to Goethe, it is not the gods who distribute death (and life), but rather Fate. But that is precisely the point: these newly created men know nothing of death. When Prometheus speaks the word death, Pandora asks "What is that?"and we wonder whether Prometheus really knows what death means for human beings. It may be that they need more authoritative, more divine words of encouragement, brought by Mercury, to be reconciled to their mortality. Now let us examine more closely whether or not already present in this early work a limit is set to the Promethean world and its human creatures. It has often been noticed (for example, O. Pniower in the afterword to the Jubiläumsausgabe) that Epimetheus points to this limit when he replies to Prometheus: You stand all alone. Your obstinacy fails to appreciate the joy When the Gods, you, Your creatures, world and sky, All felt at one in intimate unity. Indeed, the first act, in clear reference to the Prometheus of Aeschylus, depicts the "obstinacy" of the titan, that selfconfidence which grows out of his creative activity, the consciousness of complete independence vis-à-vis the gods. Is it possible for you to separate me from myself? It is an unconditioned self-possession of which he boasts: "But what I have, you cannot steal. For it is fully his own world, an "all," a circle filled by his creative activity in conscious separation from the gods. It is quite clear how correctly Goethe interprets himself in Dichtung und Wahrheit when he recognizes here the selfconfidence of his own poetic talent. Here there is no sign of any limit to the Promethean world. The self-confidence of his own productive power and sovereignty is so all-pervasive that even the objection that the creatures which people his world are not actually living carries no weight. The feeling of

< previous page

page_39 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_40

next page > Page 40

their creator is so much the complete and only world that, in him, they have their freedom. So they are then awakened by him to the fullness of life because the world of the spirit, represented by Minerva, is, in contrast to earlier versions of this material, no longer an alien power. To my spirit, you are What it is to itself. So there is no restraint on his creative power that would limit him, no contradiction between inner and outer worlds. On the other hand, the final scene between Prometheus and Pandora, his daughter, who witnesses, in the activity of one of her playmates, the uncanny power of Eros and seeks an explanation of this unknown mystery from her father, is of such poetic intensity that we are forbidden to see in this scene, as in the preceding ones, just one more example of his role as educator. Although the Prometheus fragment, more than any other of Goethe's unfinished works, remains a fragment without a final resolution, at the point where the poem breaks off, we find a genuine climax. We can undoubtedly assume that here, if anywhere, we touch the living nerve of the drama. The way in which Prometheus here intertwines the mystery of love and death cannot be without decisive significance for the whole work. The experience of death is the real limit to human independence and, for that reason, as we certainly have suspected, the limit of the Promethean world. As stated here, having little or no thematic connection and being woven into the experience of the most extreme passion of love, it is nevertheless significant. And this is not simply a pedagogical concealment of what is for the girl an uncanny power, not just one uncanny power concealed by another. What brings them together is the experience of limit. Prometheus describes them in tremendous verses. When you, totally shaken, feel everything Out of the deepest, most intimate abyss; Whatever joy and pain has ever burst over you; Whatever swells your heart in the storm and hopes to relieve itself in tears And increase its passion; And everything sings in you and quakes and trembles

< previous page

page_40 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_41

next page > Page 41

And all your senses swoon, And you seem to lose yourself And sink; And everything around you sinks into the darkness; And you in your own most intimate feeling Encompass a world, Then man dies. In this passage, love is described both as the total self-surrender of the human being and, at the same time, as the extreme intensification of his self-assurance. In his own most intimate feeling, he encompasses a world. Just as Prometheus expands to fill a world that he peoples with his creatures, so too the fulfillment of love "in a storm of pleasure" is a moment of extreme self-possession. We can certainly venture the question whether these two experiences, that of death as it coalesces here with the experience of love, do not both ultimately appear as characteristically limited. Something essential is missing in both of them, as described here, if taken as our own intimate feeling returning in the natural rhythm of sleep and rejuvenation. In death, we miss the notion of the irrevocable, and with it the dark mystery of what lies beyond; in love, we miss the Thou and the mutual exchange with this Thou, the birth of the We. Is it possible that the drama, precisely at these critical moments of human selfpossession, demonstrates the limitations of the Promethean world and the overcoming of his "obstinacy," as well as the disposition of this world into a greater one governed by the idea of divine order? We do not know. But we do know that Goethe's "fixation" on the mythical figure of Prometheus, witnessed also by the plan for the "liberation of Prometheus" from the year 1795, led later to a further development. In 1807, he sketched a dramait was to be called Pandora's Returnof which two acts were executed. Placed in a privileged position under the title Pandora, it forms the conclusion of the Collected Works. Goethe himself called this work intentional and emphasized its importance by the phrase wedged together. Indeed, what he actually wrote, together with the schema for its continuation, perfectly elucidates the idea of the poem that, in contrast to the earlier drama of his youth, is based on a firm plan. Epimetheus has become an old man. Pandora, who once belonged to him, abandoned him and left behind a daughter, Epimeleia. He finds it impossible to forget the vanished Pandora.

< previous page

page_41 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_42

next page > Page 42

His daughter, Epimeleia, is the beloved of Prometheus's son, Phileros, who jealously pursues her. As he gets close to her, whom he thinks is faithless, he is thwarted at the last moment by his father and turned away. He plunges into the sea. Miraculously rescued, he now emerges triumphantly in the form of the youthful god Dionysus back onto the land. There appears (again) a marvelous chest, a Kypsele, and the following scenes of the work were to depict how the quarrel between Prometheus and Epimetheus again arises over whether it should be accepted or destroyed. Not until Pandora appears is the quarrel finally resolved. The Kypsele opens, and deep within we see a temple where demons are sitting: Science and Art. Their solemn reception among men was to form the end of the drama where a rejuvenated Epimetheus rises up with Pandora. Thus the plot is connected with the older tradition of the Prometheus story as handed down in Hesiod, and not, as in the earlier drama, with the later version where Prometheus is the creator of men. The poem, as is so often the case in Goethe, transfers the plot into the next generation. Obviously the idea is that the higher culture is based on the resolution of the opposition between Prometheus and Epimetheus. There is no doubt, the hero of this drama was to be Epimetheus rather than Prometheus, and it may not be insignificant that it was the aging poet who found himself able to execute only the Epimetheus who is devoted to the memory of Pandora and not the Epimetheus who is rejuvenated by her return. But of course, it would be senseless to interpret this in terms of the poet's biography. Not simply because, according to Goethe's own words, he was Prometheus as well as Epimetheus. Even heretofore he had been Prometheus as well as that force which sets limits to him. Even though it is an entirely different plot in which Prometheus now appears, it still makes sense to ask how this new figure is related to the previous one. Looking back in 1830 at the fragments of his youth. Goethe said they contained "what was true, but as yet undeveloped, so that it could be seen as an error." This is particularly true for the Prometheus fragment and its significance for the way Goethe understood himself. In that case we may take the "development" of the Prometheus figure in the Pandora drama as equally valid for the meaning of the earlier work, in the executed part of which the hidden meanings allow only a surmise as to what the plot of the whole might have been.

< previous page

page_42 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_43

next page > Page 43

But the change that occurred is certainly clear enough. The influence of neo-Platonic theology, demonstrated by Flitner, 4 has disappeared. Prometheus is no longer the universal creator whose creative self-sufficiency possesses and peoples an inner world, but rather one who is restlessly active, a model for those who work with robust vitality. But precisely as the representative of the principle of limitation, he remains, in all important aspects, the one he was, the genius of self-help, decisively rejecting what is divine and demonic. Corresponding to the revised story, it is he himself who again opposes the acceptance of the divine gift, just as he previously had refused to accept Pandora. He is the patron of the smiths whom he calls every morning to their strenuous labor. They are his disciples, those active ones whom he once saved from Pandora's seduction (223). In highly dramatic scenes his characteristic sphere is sharply delineated. He, as the defender and preserver of the law, opposed the unruly passion of his son. He who is "fully conscious" banishes the power of passion, the "elemental" (445), from his sphere of activity. In opposition to his brother, he represents what he considers a superior principle: happiness and beauty cannot seduce him, for "neither the one nor the other is found on the highest peaks" (680). He refuses to accept ''demons, god-sent" like those who plunged his brother into pain (731). Chance is odious to him, and he refuses likewise the intoxication of the feast. So we find that his previous, just as his present, rejection of the gifts of Pandora constitute the real center of his being. He resists being showered with gifts: I find no joy in novelty, and the Race is sufficiently equipped for life on earth. Rather, he cares for himself in conscious activity. With his incomparable art, expended precisely on Pandorawith respect to its wealth of forms and intellectual vitality it is no doubt the most tightly constructed of all his worksGoethe was able to intensify and transfigure this sober ideal so poetically that its enduring truth and genuine greatness will always be apparent. But even more apparent are the limitations of this creature. The entire plot is apparently calculated to give a decisive revaluation to the ancient story of Greek mythology. It is not the superior foresight and controlled caution of Prometheus that is the

< previous page

page_43 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_44

next page > Page 44

true ideal of human life, as is the case in Hesiodthe pain that passion causes him are part of his true being. It is in Epimetheus and his sorrowful fate that humanity, in spite of everything, has begun to discover the way to itself Goethe surpasses the wisdom of the old Greek myths by taking up the story in the next generation. Prometheus's own son reveals the limitations of the Promethean world. He experiences the demonic nature of passion, love, and jealousy with deadly violence and shows to his father their superior power: So, Father, you believe the matter is closed? You besiege me with the law's unbending demand, And have no eyes for the infinite power That brought me, the blessed one, into misery. (449 ff) He puts a question to him for which Prometheus has no answer: Now, tell me Father, who gave to form The single, ultimately decisive power? In this way, the limitations of the father become apparent in the son. And when the youth, plunging at his father's curse into the sea, is saved by a miracle and rises, amid the jubilation of all of nature, back onto the land as another Dionysus, then it is not the father's active energy that saves him, but rather something higher: the will of the gods, a power transcending our human desires and planning, a "lust for life" that in him, as in all other beings, is triumphant. Your wit and striving will This time not bring him back. This time it is the will of the Gods, The peculiar, pure, and irrepressible Energy of life which will bring Him back, reborn. (999 ff.) It is the hour of a new festive harmony of all things. The Prometheus figure in the earlier drama had not seen such Joy, When the Gods, you, When all felt at one in intimate unity.

< previous page

page_44 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_45

next page > Page 45

because of his proud self-possession in the world of his own creation. The Prometheus of Pandora has no desire to isolate himself when a daring passion, taking form in Phileros, brings about the supreme hour, achieving in the marriage with Epimeleia what was denied to Prometheus and Epimetheus because of their unyielding opposition: the full realization of humanity. Even Phileros, on discovering the demonic power of beauty, had complained: She drew my life into her own. I lack everything I need to be truly alive. Now however, the loss of the self is transformed into fulfillment: They encounter each other: each feels complete in the other, and completely feels the other, Then, united in love, doubly glorious, they receive the world as their own. Rising above the caution and yearning, and the presence or loss of the self, characteristic of the older generation, the new generation ascends to a higher level of civilized behavior where passion and reflection join in unity. This is symbolized by the appearance among men, at a moment chosen by the gods, of the gift of the Kypsele that shelters within it Science and Art, the spirits of human culture. The following scenes were to depict the battle over the reception of the divine gift. We can surmise very little about how the resistance of Prometheus and his group was to be overcome. The divine abundance, brought about by Pandora's return, carries conviction because of its superior reality "Each one appropriates it for himself" That is the nature of the new spiritual culture spread abroad by Science and Art. Eos had already revealed it: What is worthy and beautiful, at first Concealed, descends to manifest itself Once manifest, it conceals itself again. It is through the acquisition and manifestation of Science and Art that men rise out of the vulgar, prehistoric world of the titans. But this happens not by revealing some secret or other; they are themselves the mystery where all truth is hidden.

< previous page

page_45 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_46

next page > Page 46

Was Prometheus also to have learned to acknowledge this higher reality? Was not this reality, lying beyond his comprehension, the actual fulfillment of what he had desired for the human race? If they would ponder more deeply on what is passed, and appropriate more completely what is present, that would be good for all. That is what I desire for them. It is, of course, Science and Art that bring to the human race a more "noble usefulness"; but not through the hectic activity of Promethean industry. On the contrary, it comes about by being elevated to the level of solemn celebration and festival. "Transforming the past into an image, poetic remorse, justice" are the catch-words written down by Goethe for his interpretation of the Kypsele. Can we not suppose that the poet, in this interpretation of poetic activity, found Prometheus and Epimetheus reconciled both in himself and for all men? Those lovely last verses of the fragment, which crown the unfinished solemn drama of human culture, contain the answer of the entire work: What is desirable is felt by you here below; What should be given is known by those up above. The Titans' initial act is tremendous; but its fulfillment in what is eternally good, eternally beautiful is the work of the Gods. Let them hold sway. The Path to Human Development: The Magic Flute, Second Part Mozart's Magic Flute made on Goethe such a deep and lasting impression when he first discovered it in 1795 that he sketched a continuation of it. He sought in vain a composer for the libretto, and for that reason it remained unfinished. It appeared, as a fragment, for the first time in 1802 with a complete plot, fully executed except for a few scenes. In 18071808 it was finally included in the edition of the Collected Works. So it belongs among those experimental works that Goethe had undertaken for the improvement of the German theatre during his activity with the theater in Weimar. It is obvious

< previous page

page_46 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_47

next page > Page 47

that Goethe's sequel rests quite consciously on the scenario, the characters, and the effective motifs of Mozart's opera. He did this for technical reasons: on the one hand, so that the stages, equipped for the properties of the Mozart opera, as well as the same singers could be used again for other productions; and on the other hand, so that the public, who had become so enthusiastic over the successful production of Mozart's opera, could be further delighted by another encounter with Mozart's world. This was an experiment that, in the world of the theater, was just as frequently questionable as it was successful. Even Goethe's experiment failed. No composer could be found who would have dared compete with the superior and exceptional genius of Mozart. So Goethe's poem remained a fragment, one of those documents that are witness to the collapse of Goethe's hopes for the German theater as well as to his turning away from the theatre in the later period of his life after Schiller's death. Nevertheless, Goethe found this work worthy of inclusion in the edition of his Collected Works. And we of course, faced with the charm and profundity of Goethe's fragment, can only agree that it is a worthy and productive answer of the great poet to his experience of Mozart's opera. The work is so poetic that it fills the entire space of meaning projected by it, and so utterly sufficient in the sensual density of its linguistic form that no space is left for any further development in music. Both Goethe's having a composer continually in mind and the genial scenic and musical hints scattered throughout the work simply cannot alter the fact that the tightly woven structure of the poetic meaning resists any conversion into musical form. It is all the more necessary, then, to subject the poetic meaning of the fragment and its relation to Mozart's opera to an as yet unattempted interpretation. 5 Mozart's splendid opera is based on a libretto written by a mediocre dramatist by the name of Schikaneder. Recently this libretto has been more than once subjected to acrid criticism. No one would have paid the slightest attention to it, had it not been transfigured by Mozart's genius. As a matter of fact, it's simply a wretched piece of work in the traditional form of magic opera, pieced together from any number of sources to make calculated effects. To search for any significance it might have of its own would be wasted effort. Nevertheless, Mozart saw significance in it and poured over it the wealth of his musical inventiveness, developing typical human situations involving hate and love, fear and courage, passion and spirit,

< previous page

page_47 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_48

next page > Page 48

nobility and comedy into a great song of humanity. But this was Mozart's own new creation. And yet even Goethe was obviously able to see in the libretto a peculiar and deeper meaning. In speaking of it once, he said that one could be quite confident that the higher meaning of the work would be clear to the initiates. One way an attempt has been made to understand Goethe's remark is to consider the significance of Freemasonry both for Mozart's opera and Schikaneder's libretto. It has been suggested, when Goethe speaks here of the initiates, he is himself speaking as a Freemason and sees in the opera a secret political barb against the repressive atmosphere of the cultural life of that period under the Hapsburgs, or even that he sees in it a justification of the ideal meaning of Freemasonry. It has even been suggested that we are to recognize the Empress Maria Theresa in the figure of the Queen of the Night, and in the figure of Tamino, the young king on whom rested the hopes of those who longed for liberation. Now there is no doubt that in times when the freedom of speech is severely curtailed, as was the case under the Hapsburgs of that day, the theatre can often quite unexpectedly prove to be a significant political forum, just as, similarly, the pressure building up in a period of strict censorship can form a public audience with a highly developed critical sense and a delight in picking up subtle intimations. We therefore cannot dispute the possibility that a song of praise coming from politically persecuted Freemasons could bring forth political undertones, and that, for example, the final words of Sarastro The rays of the sun drive away the night And destroy the ill-gained power of the hypocrites. could contain a political barb. But we can hardly believe that Schikaneder, in the face of the general tenor of his work, could have had such an effect in mind. How otherwise could be have put into the mouth of the Queen of the Night, that force of darkness, a remark that runs counter to such a political intention. We shall wipe such pious frauds from the earth With a fiery blast and a powerful sword. Those who interpret the Magic Flute in a Masonic sense are not explicating the work, but rather reading meaning into it. The

< previous page

page_48 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_49

next page > Page 49

higher meaning of the events Goethe saw in the Magic Flute is certainly not to be interpreted in the narrow sense of a political pamphlet or a political apology for Freemasonry. Rather, a more general motif, on which the ideas of Freemasonry are also based, constitutes the real theme of the libretto: the theme of true enlightenment, the victory of light over darkness. Moreover, the fact that Goethe valued a theatrical production faithful to Schikaneder's libretto, for example his wealth of dramatic effects, the contrasting scenes, and a sensually pleasing elaboration of the plot, is proven not only by his express acknowledgment, but even more by the way he takes over and further develops its dramatic structure in his own continuation of the Magic Flute. It has long since been noticed that his own work is by no means simply a photographic duplicate, as it were, or a variation of the original Magic Flute. It is rather a genuine work with roots in his own poetic world, significant both in itself and for the whole of his poetic production, especially for the later completion of the Faust. 6 We need, however, to look more closely at the relation between Goethe's continuation and the "higher meaning of events" that Goethe saw in Schikaneder's libretto.7 What is the particular shape Schikaneder gave to the struggle between evil and good, darkness and light? May we actually speak of a totally unified meaning in this work, so abounding in external effects? We may, I believe, assume that everyone is familiar with the plot of the opera: the fairy tale beginning where the fleeing boy Tamino, freed from the pursuing snake, is drawn into the circle of the Queen. He then gets to see the portrait of her marvelously beautiful daughter and is sent by the Queen of the Night to liberate her from Sarastro, the robber. And then the scene changes in a most unexpected and confusing way. On entering the kingdom of the evil robber Sarastro, all the values are suddenly turned upside-down. Sarastro is no evil and violent robber, but rather a noble man who has stolen the mother's daughter in an act of wisdom that mirrors a profound providence. Now through a series of instructions and examinations, Sarastro introduces Tamino, the young son of the king, to his wisdom as it is practiced in a sacerdotal confederacy. The fantastic plot of the opera now leads the pair of loversmirrored comically in the figures of Papageno and Papagenathrough all sorts of ordeals and, after they successfully pass these examinations, guides to a happy union those who had been so violently separated.

< previous page

page_49 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_50

next page > Page 50

Genetic analysis and textual criticism demonstrated already long ago how this strange change of values between the earlier and later parts of the plot came about. The fact is that for simple theatrical reasons the librettist Schikaneder completely transformed the original plan by following a different source. From the second act on, he suddenly recognizes in the hostile power of Sarastro the profound significance of a symbolic confederacy so that the original disposition of both plot and characters begin to vacillate. The character of the woman, originally drawn as a mother demanding justice for her daughter, was then transformed into the principle of darkness pursuing with bitter rage the confederates around Sarastro, the representative of goodness and light. We know that this change got into the libretto in a purely external way, by utilizing an old novel, Sethos, by Abbé Terrasson, a work long since vanished. Recent investigation has shown that this novel, fed by Hellenistic sources, supplied the Egyptian decor of the opera and the religious ritual of initiation into the mysteries of Isis and Osiris. 8 In the light of this historical and religious background, the question arises whether the "break" in the plot of the Magic Flute is simply an external seam resulting from the use of different texts. From time immemorial, however, it has been a standard element in the topos of "conversion" (already in the cult of Dionysus) that initiation into a mystery cult can be based on the initiate's realization that what is alien and evil is suddenly seen as the principle of a new and higher reality. Now it seems certain that we cannot burden Schikaneder with a conscious insight into this religious motif. It also seems to me quite wrong to relate an artistic creation, which experience proves to be unified, to the conscious intention of its creator. The unity here is realized through the formal power of Mozart's music, which simply lifts it out of the realm of argument altogether. The fact is that those who listen to the Magic Flute with a certain sensitive understanding by no means perceive this change in the second act as silly or senseless. Rather, the fact that they accept it without question is precisely what justifies the interpreter in searching for the meaning of this "sudden shift," instead of allowing himself to be convinced by philological analysis that it is pure nonsense. Moreover, we might ask whether we should not understand this shift as a kind of transformation, the same kind of transformation that occurs in every fairy tale? Clearly, transformation is magic

< previous page

page_50 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_51

next page > Page 51

and a surprising change in a state of affairs. And yet, the occurrence of this transformation is in no sense arbitrary. As a matter of fact, it demonstrates the actual affinity that exists between opposing forces. So it may be correct that the robber, now transformed into a man of liberating wisdom, has in fact already undergone a conversion. But conversely, can we not say that any conversion in reality conceals a transformation, a mysterious identity? We must of course admit that the religious motif in the Magic Flute is no longer alive and relevant in its genuine historical and religious significance. But we must nevertheless ask whether the break in Schikaneder's libretto has not given rise to a profound meaning, one readily accepted by the audience, even if less than explicitly. If so, then we must now ask what this significance may be. Can it really be something external and meaningless that causes the relationship between the persons of this opera to be so fundamentally changed that they actually appear to be transformed into their opposites? Mother and daughter are separated from one another by the violent act of robbery. But now, the robber and the world in which this robber lives gain ever-increasing significance throughout the work: the robber Sarastro becomes the protector, one who brings to pass a positive, spiritual, and illuminating necessity. Must we not say that there lies in this change, as presented in the work, an appropriate and essential meaning? From now on, the opposition between the two worlds has increasingly genuine significance: the opposition between the elemental world of the female and a notion of spiritual or intellectual life characteristic of the male. Is the shift of values here really arbitrary? Does it not demonstrate something essential? Whenever the natural, elemental relationship between mother and daughter is severed, it is, as life teaches us, always the result of a peculiar severity and violence. It is robbery! And yet, for the realization of a woman's destiny and for a patriarchally structured society, the rigor of such detachment and separation is necessary. That is what first gives a foundation to the newly formed union of the lovers, to marriage, and to the family. The woman is thereby introduced into the social order structured by the male world. Is this perhaps what the audience understands in the opera as the dominant motif in the shift of the woman and the emphasis on the libretto's accents and what accounts for the thoroughly unified impression the work makes in the articulation of its meaning? When we try to examine Schikaneder's libretto with this observation in mind,

< previous page

page_51 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_52

next page > Page 52

we find as a constant motif both the assessment of the woman and the emphasis on the opposite virtues of the male. We might compare, for example, the particular demands made on Tamino when he is introduced into the confederacy of Sarastro and his men and is there subjected to examination. The three lads address him: This path will lead you to the goal. And yet, O youth, you must be victorious In manly fashion. Thus listen to our advice: Be resolute, patient, and discreet. In contrast, we find a whole series of expressions where women are said to be talkative and deceitful. Let us now compare the passage where Tamino, during his ordeal, says to himself: A master puts all to the test, and pays no attention to what the common rabble says, and when the three ladies vigorously attack him he answers: Gossip, tales carried by women, but hatched in the minds of hypocrites and further, when Papageno censures the Queen of the Night: She's a woman, and thinks like one. Be quiet; for you my word is sufficient! The fundamental contrast between the worlds of female and male is even more pronounced in that pivotal scene where the Queen of the Night speaks to her daughter about the legacy of her husband and the resulting separation. In this passage she says: Your father willingly surrendered the seven fold Helios to the initiates. Sarastro wears this mighty solar disk on his breast. When I took him to task for it, he wrinkled his brow and spoke: woman, this is my last hourall the treasures that I alone possess belong to you and to your daughter. "The all-consuming solar disk," I quickly interrupted him, "is destined for the initiates," he answered. Sarastro will have

< previous page

page_52 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_53

next page > Page 53

manly charge of it as I have done till now. And now, not another word, Do not search into things that a woman cannot understand. Your duty is to surrender yourself and your daughter to the guidance of men of wisdom. And in another passage where Pamina feels it her filial duty to return to her mother, Sarastro replies: You would lose your happiness If I left you in her hands. and calls her mother a ''proud woman": A man must guide your hearts. For without him every woman tends To stray from her proper sphere of action. Hence, there is in the nature of human affairs an opposition, clothed in cosmic symbols, between the spiritual order of men and the danger they face from the elemental principle of the woman, expressed here by Sarastro with superior knowledge. "The woman imagines herself to be great, and hopes, by deception and superstition, to delude the people, destroying the solid foundation of our temple. That she shall not do!" He considers the woman an enemy of male society to the extent that she does not submit herself to the man in love. Protect yourself from woman's knavery, That is the first duty of our order. Tamino's acceptance into the circle of initiates signifies the victory in him of the male spiritual principle. "This youth desires to tear away the veil of darkness and look into the sanctuary of supreme light." In her own way, Pamina passes the same test and is initiated along with him, because she is prepared to sacrifice herself to love (in a desperate suicide of love): Two hearts that burn with love Can never be separated by human impotency. The enemies' efforts are in vain; They are protected by the Gods themselves.

< previous page

page_53 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_54

next page > Page 54

The plot, then, is structured by the opposition of these two worlds: the female and the male, the elemental and the spiritual, the natural and the political. These are clothed in the cosmic symbols of an ancient astro-religious world of images: the nocturnal symbol of the moon (the Queen of the Night is represented with the crescent moon on her head) and the sun (Sarastro as representative of the light of day bears the solar disk on his breast). The demands made on Tamino on the occasion of his introduction into the circle of initiates are, in particular, requirements of discretion. We might recall those delightful scenes in the opera when Tamino, in comic contrast to the talkative Papageno, steadfastly maintains his vow of silence even to the point of being brutally severe in the scene where the loving Pamina implores him to give her a word of love and sympathy. He nevertheless insists on being severe and thereby satisfies the demand of the confederacy. Here we encounter an important aspect of the male world, a challenge that is decisive in sustaining this world and that means in sustaining also the order of the state and society established by this male world. The virtue of reservation and discretion is not a religious duty imposed by a secret cult, but rather is a clear symbol for accepting the obligation of a suprapersonal order where the elemental principle of life, which also has power over the male, is restricted. This interpretation is not an artificial distortion. Rather, we hear a wisdom here that, although in an artificial and secondary form, reaches far back to the prehistoric period of the human race when its religious views were in process of development. We are thereby actually catching a glimpse of the mysterious magic of matriarchal order of society at the margin of our own historical tradition. Bachofen, a late representative of German Romanticism, investigated the problem of matriarchy in its significance for the entire prehistoric world of antiquityperhaps unduly exaggerating the universality of this early principle. But there is certainly enough convincing evidence for assuming that there actually was such a matriarchal order and that this order, in contrast to our patriarchal one, constituted the woman as successor to the throne and as the body corporate of the family. In some scattered mythological reminiscences, collected by Bachofen, we find definite features of a prehistoric hetaerism that created this early order of justice. There is also no doubt that the foundation of our

< previous page

page_54 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_55

next page > Page 55

own cultural world in its historical tradition was predicated on the repression, by the patriarchy, of such matriarchal forms wherever they were found. Of course, we do not mean to say that the Magic Flute itself is witness to such a prehistoric order of matriarchy; but it seems beyond doubt that in this workperhaps by way of the Hellenistic religious tradition present in the source Schikaneder usedthe emphatic insistence on the patriarchal ideal, and thereby also its matriarchal opposite, is vitally present and is transformed, with an acute awareness of the ethical problems, into the enlightened religion of the spirit. We should particularly notice that in the Magic Flute, as in the ancient legends influenced by matriarchal ideas, the girl is encouraged to murder the representative of the male world (even if he is not her lover) and that a victorious defense against the attack does not rest on superior male force. Rather, the success stems from the superiority of one's own principle. Sarastro knows no revenge. "But you shall see how I take revenge on your mother. May Heaven give this noble youth courage and steadfastness to carry through his pious intention: Then you will be happy with him, and your mother will return to her castle in shame." There is no other kind of revenge. The victory of love, the entrance into the world of the initiates, is itself the failure of the elemental world. <><><><><><><><><><><><> The analysis of Schikaneder's libretto has exhibited the significant background lying behind the fairy-tale charm of the opera. Not Freemasonry as such, but rather the problem of a human morality and its relation to the spirit, constitutes the higher meaning of the events that Goethe undoubtedly recognized in the opera. We must now inquire what kind of connection there is between Goethe's sequel and this particular interpretation of the Magic Flute? What meaning, specific to his own personal poetic orientation, did he develop from it? For the mere repetition and intensification of the obvious situations and characters of the opera is simply no answer to the question concerning the poetic meaning of the entire work. It also seems to me quite impossible to explain something difficult by means of something even more difficult, by drawing, for example, on another work of Goethe's, in this case the Märchen [Fairy Tale]

< previous page

page_55 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_56

next page > Page 56

from the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten [Conversations of German Emigrants], which was also somewhat influenced by the Magic Flute. The interpretation of Goethe's poem is, however, incomparably more difficult than that of Schikaneder's libretto. One of the most important reasons for this is the fact that Schikaneder was no real poet, and consequently, he often announces the conceptual motifs that form the basis of the work (or its sources) in the form of reflection, so that for an attentive viewer they can be clearly brought into relief. In contrast, Goethe's work is eminently poetic. Here everything is transformed into action and gesture; everything is a symbol shaped as process, rarely ever offering any possibility of intellectual resolution. It is already sufficiently significant that this work was planned as an opera, particularly in view of the later composition of the second part of Faust. We can see clear parallels to the operatic spectacle in the opening acts of this second part. But after all, it is only a fragment. The plans for the continuation, at least those that have been preserved, provide only an approximate framework. And in the last analysis, the fragmentary character of the work will simply have to be accepted and affirmed. Goethe himself includes this fragment as a complete work in his editions. But what makes it complete? What gives it a unified meaning? The plot opens at the point where Tamino and Pamina have just had their first child and begins with the renewal of the battle between the Queen of the Night and the land now guided by Sarastro's wisdom and governed by Tamino's regal hand. The victorious moral order celebrated in the Magic Flute is, with the birth of the child, once again under attack by the counterforces of the elemental, nocturnal world. Monostatos, Sarastro's renegade Moor in service to the Queen of the Night, returns with his servants to report to the queen on a mission they had undertaken. Their mission had been to steal the child as soon as it was borna revenge of the Queen of the Night on Sarastro and his proteges: Arise and praise our fortune O companions! In triumph we return To the Goddess.

< previous page

page_56 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_57

next page > Page 57

We acted with thievish stealth; We approached on the sly. But the mission she gave us Is but half accomplished. The stealing of the child was only partially successful. At the moment of the child's birth, when the magic of night spread darkness and confusion, they laid it in a golden casket brought along for this purpose. But when they were on the point of sneaking away with the casket, a miracle occurred. It became so heavy it could not be budged from the spot. So they had no choice but to lock the casket by a magic spell and take to their heels. Thus, the revenge was but half successful. The child has not yet actually been stolen, but was nevertheless snatched away from its parents. Even more distressing is the fact that the evil spell continues to have its effects. Not only are the parents seized by madness as soon as they catch sight of one another, but the child too will be snatched away by the Fates if the parents ever look upon it again. The curse penetrates right into the very holy precinct itself, pronounced by a woman whom Goethe splendidly envisions as the "omnipresent power of darkness, silence and death." The second scene depicts the royal court where Tamino in the meantime has assumed the duties of king. Women, singing songs of lamentation, carry away the golden casket in which the child is lying: Move on then and never rest a moment. That is the wise men's will: With blind obedience have confidence in them. As long as you move, the child will live. Tamino and the women join one another in lamenting the dreadful evil that has transformed their joy over the birth of a son into sorrow. But they are also united in the hope that the curse will be lifted: Soon Sarastro, divinely inspired, will Release and save us with his holy word. and that their happiness, devoutly implored for the reunion of the child with its parents, will soon be restored. The scene is of intense poetic power and marvelously blends together torment, anxiety, and confidence.

< previous page

page_57 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_58

next page > Page 58

There then follows a scene between Papageno and Papagena that, in comic contrast, shows the pair grown tired of their idyll in paradise because they have not been blessed with children; and then they are happily comforted when children are promised to thema charming variation on the famous Papageno scenes in Mozart's opera. The fourth scene leads us into the sanctuary of the temple and shows us the lives of the initiates. To the image of this order, Goethe adds a new, and for him quite characteristic, feature: the destiny of the order's initiates is not fulfilled simply by their being separated from the world. Each year, as determined by lot, one of their number must wander throughout the world as a pilgrim. The life of inner meditation must be balanced by wandering "over the far-flung regions of the earth." Only in this way, as a wanderer, does man learn "the sublime language of nature and the sounds of an indigent humanity," a feature that brings us close to the world of Wilhelm Meister. Here too the pilgrimage is conceived as a test to see whether the pure intentions of the confederates can persevere when assailed by the temptations of the world. The returning pilgrim must subject himself to examination by the crystal and is only then received back into the circle. This time it is Sarastro himself on whom the lot falls. Just at the moment when the struggle with the evil empire of the night is again flaring up, Sarastro must separate himself from the circle of his faithful followers. This time it is a very special kind of test, because the wise protector of the whole confederacy will be absent and the battle between darkness and light will be decided without him. There follow two scenes never executed. In the first, another attack by the Queen of the Night causes the casket of the child, placed as offering in the temple of the sun, to sink into the darkness of the earth before the very eyes of Pamina. In the other scene, from golden eggs, discovered by Papageno and Papagena in their cottage, there arise three children. Sarastro comes to them, "some words on the training of children," and then reports on the terrible new misfortune at the royal court. To cheer up the unhappy couple, Sarastro sends Papageno with his flute to the court. The following scene is again executed and depicts the arrival of Papageno at the court. Here we see the superficial optimism and the hollow selfishness of the courtly world: how the court comforts

< previous page

page_58 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_59

next page > Page 59

itself with the rumors of the immanent return of Sarastro (who has actually now begun his long pilgrimage) and with the deceptive news that the child has been found and soon happiness and peace will be restored. Because of the news of Papageno's discovery of the golden eggs in his cottage, he is played up to by the flattering courtiers until he finally, to the disappointment of these worldlings, shows them his eggs, which he has brought along in the form of the brightly colored birds hatched from them. All of this is a criticism of courtly life from the poet's own deep knowledge of his fellowmen. Then follows one of the most charming scenes, one especially worthy of the poet's dramatic skill. The royal couple has been placed into a periodic sleep by a magic curse. When they awake and see one another, they will be struck by insanity and despair. Papageno plays the flute, and as long as he plays he is able to keep insanity and despair at bay. To the couple, everything seems bright and joyous. But as soon as he quits playing, they again fall prey to the old pain and despair. The conjuring force of the music and the limit of its power when Papageno runs out of breathan unforgettable, properly operatic and immediately comprehensible scene, symbolizing both the power and the impotence of the artist's enchantment of life. A messenger now arrives. The priests have discovered the hiding place where the boy is lying, threatened in his casket by a slow death. The scene changes to the subterranean vault, in the center of which stands the sunken altar with the casket guarded by chained, armor-clad lions. The guards then sing a mysterious and melancholy antiphonal hymn whereupon Tamino and Paminajust as in the final act of the Magic Flutemaneuver through the obstacles of water and fire to save their child. The Queen of the Night exhorts the guards to resist, all in vain. Finally, when she prompts the lions to devour the casket, the miracle happens. The child in the casket awakes at the sound of its parents' voices and rises from the golden casket as Guardian Spirit. When the guards push the royal couple back and threaten the child with their spears, the spirit takes flighta scene that anticipates the Euphorion scene in Faust II. Thus the fragment ends, in plot a genuine magic opera, as innocently and straightforwardly as a fairy tale and yet provoking the question of a meaning tying the individual motifs together to form a complete whole. We can inquire what the continuation of the work, planned and noted down in catchwords by Goethe, might tell us

< previous page

page_59 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_60

next page > Page 60

about the part beyond what was actually executed. But this is almost nothing. One scene "Sarastro and children" may have continued the "words on the education of children" from the first scene with the children. Then a scene, ''Guiding Spirit. Pamina, Tamino" seems, if we may place here the verses printed as Paralipomenon 3, to have shown the Guiding Spirit hastening by and encountering his parents. The verses are From East to West From branches to branches From West to East From fruit to fruit I love to taste of everything. So I come and I flee And seek other meadows, And whoever follows me Loses the trace. There I am quite at home. That is the most beautiful tree. The many fruits hardly Suffice for my banquet. Worthy parents make Children worthy and good. On the basis of the scenario, we can further surmise that the Guiding Spirit keeps company with the children of Papageno and Papagena and at that point is captured by Monostatos. In a great battle, "Night scene with meteors," Tamino, apparently through the intervention of Sarastro, is victorious. (Here belongs a contrasting scene "Papageno armed" to which verses Paralip. 4 are appropriate.) Then there follows a great celebration of victory, which is again disturbed by the arson of Monostatos. A notation for the final scene reads, "Arsenal. The conquered priests." This has been properly corrected to read, "The conquered ones, Priests." The final scenes were then to have depicted the battle of the two worlds of light and dark rising in marvelous crescendo to the final victory of the light and the reunion of the parents with their son. We now have the task of showing how the individual sections of the plot are connected to form a complete work with a

< previous page

page_60 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_61

next page > Page 61

unified meaning, just as the plot of the Magic Flute represents a complete action with a unified meaning. For it was precisely the "higher sense of the events," seen by Goethe in the Magic Flute, that inspired him to write his sequel. Of course, that does not mean that the same meaning he found in the opera forms the basis of his own poem. The opposition between matriarchy and male confederacy, which in the opera constitutes the meaning of the battle between dark and light, can no longer be the determining factor in the entirely different situation of the sequel where a union of love between Tamino and Pamina is presumed and that aims to show the happiness and blessing of the family. The renewed revolt of the element of darkness, its short-lived triumph, and its final overcoming must be understood on the basis of the thematic change in Goethe's work. Before turning to the precise details of the action, we must inquire to what extent the relation between these two antagonistic worlds has achieved a new form in Goethe's work, so that the struggle between light and darkness has now a different sense. It is certainly true that the basic scheme of moral enlightenment which constitutes the Masonic elements of the opera is not Goethe's model. There is no linear rise from darkness to light, from elemental passion to the spiritual order of wisdom; and the path of human development is not determined by such a scheme. The fundamental situation of all human life, even when it is unified in a holy confederacy for enjoying the delightful pleasures of the light, is that of threat. The struggle between good and evil never ends. Even the Holy Orderon pilgrimage of course, but even in its basic conceptionis subject to test and examination and has to prove its authenticity in its struggle with evil. The voice of darkness, incarnate in that mysterious, immobile pair of watchmen in the grotto, expresses what is the actual mystery of life: time. Is the day beginning to dawn? Perhaps so. Is the night beginning to fall? It has fallen. Time passes. But how? Is that perhaps the ringing of the hour? Never for us.

< previous page

page_61 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_62

next page > Page 62

And now, seen from the vantage-point of this eternal knowledge about time and its perpetual periodicity, there follows the profound characterization of human striving: It is in vain that you expend So much effort up there. Man runs; and before him flees The ever-receding goal. In vain does he pull and tug At the curtain that drapes heavily Over the mystery of life, over days and nights. In the first version of this passage, it is precisely the "mystery of days and nights," that is, the mystery of the alternation of day and night, that causes all human striving after the light to turn to illusion. Just as day inevitably alternates with night, so too human striving. And when this striving resists the necessity of this alternation, it becomes trapped in illusion. This coexistence of the antagonistic powers of darkness with the course of human "spiritual development" is apparently the new conception Goethe gives to the Gnostic opposition between night and day. What is expressed here by the watchmen is by no means hidden from the wise Sarastro. In his parting speech in the presence of his friends, he says that the strength of the enemy powers is now becoming ever more effective. And in the original version of this passage, later deleted by Goethe apparently because it was too heavily reflective and revealed the sense of the whole all too directly, Goethe writes, "We however are subject to Fate, and Fate, yes even eternal wisdom, may not transform day into night or night into day. But what it can do is determine the periodicity of each. Now is the moment when the light is momentarily to be hidden from wisdom, and the hostile powers are to exercise their influence. The advantage is ours. For we are on trial." If a basic Goethean point of view is revealed here, then it is precisely the fact that even for the highest wisdom it is impossible to establish a world of perpetual day. Just as in the disposition of nature the alternation of day and night is equally determined for both, so human life can never be entirely free from the threat of darkness, that element "closed in upon itself," or from threat by the demonic power of the abyss, of silence and death. A

< previous page

page_62 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_63

next page > Page 63

world of spirit and goodness, peaceful and changeless in its essence, simply does not exist. The trials to which the members of the holy confederacy are subjected, going out into the world where they are to preserve the purity of their heart, do not signify an occasional and providential limitation by an envious Fate of an otherwise essentially heavenly happiness. "The advantage is ours. For we are on trial." Suffering and trial are not only the inescapable dowry of human life. It is they alone that authenticate its truth. Even in the form in which the suffering, due to a separation from the life of the confederacy and the trial of the "journeyman's year," is imposed on the initiates, namely the form of lottery, is of symbolic significance for human life in general. The melancholy choral entrance, in imitation of Mozart's opera, opens the gathering of the priests and explains, as a limitation of human knowledge and choice, the question of the lottery by which the particular pilgrim is selected who is to suffer the pilgrimage. It is the menacing indecisiveness of human nature that finds in the federation's ritual a fit expression: The man can look and choose! But all too often what good is choice to him? Clever men waver and wise men fail, Their suffering is then doubly hard. To act justly, To walk uprightly, Let this be the choice of the noble man. If he is to suffer, Do not decide. Give Chance a chance to speak! The highest wisdom, being one with Fate, is able to determine, that is to say, accept the alternation. But abstract, "gloomy striving," on the other hand, leads from illusion to illusion, that is, is itself a foolish surrender to the power of confusion and darkness. It is typical of this different articulation of Mozart's opposition between darkness and light, evil and good, that in Goethe's work the feminine principle appears in a new light. The Queen of the Night, representative of the opposition of a hostile power, the cosmic force of an elemental, uncommunicative darkness, no longer

< previous page

page_63 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_64

next page > Page 64

has any of the features of the offended mother and the dominating female, characteristic of the opera. On the contrary, here a mother's love represents in Pamina a victorious countermagic. Just as Tamino passes the tests given him by Sarastro and the priests by remaining faithful to the commandments of the confederacy and leads his obedient beloved unscathed through the dangers of water and fire, so in Goethe's poem the love of a mother, as Goethe expressly says, acts as guide through the hostile resistance of the elements and the opposing power of darkness and frees the child, the Guiding Spirit. Here also the Paralipomena offer some clarification emphasizing the central significance of this moral principle: And human love and human effort Mean more than any magic spell. and further: No! Never may love be desecrated By the magic of enchantment; And my talisman is here. <><><><><><><><><><><><> We do not know how these verses fit into the plot, but the fact that Goethe quite consciously replaces the element of magiceven the wonderful spellbinding power of the magic fluteby a more noble moral force, the magic of human love, is doubtless one of those intensifications of something already present in Mozart's opera, of which Goethe speaks in reference to his own work. At this point, a mother's love is revealed as a new moral force surpassing the purely elemental sphere of the feminine. On the basis of these indications, let us inquire about the possible meaning of the work as a whole. What, for example, is the significance of the enchantment of the child, or the strange carrying around of the golden casket, or finally, of liberation through parental love and the escape of the child as Guiding Spirit? From further indications of the plot, we can add here that this Guiding Spirit hurries past his parents like a fleeting bird, that he spends his time with children and, when captured again, finally returns, victorious

< previous page

page_64 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_65

next page > Page 65

and joyful, to the bosom of the family after a conclusive engagement between the hostile forces of life. What are we to make of all this? What does it mean? It would surely be a false start if we tried to explain this poetic fairy tale as if it were a frosty allegory. Only what is actually there in the poetry can guide us. That is, we are not to follow the fairy-tale aspects of the events, but rather the human aspect that we encounter in these events. First of all, what is the significance of the fact that precisely at the moment of the child's birth, the elemental nature of night penetrates the "holy precinct" with magic power and the child is enclosed in a casket? In my opinion, it shows the enormous reserve of a new life with respect to the providential care and scheming hope of its parents. Every new life is for its parents a mystery hidden in the elemental world. On the one hand, it is of their flesh and blood, but on the other, it is a different, individual being not really organically linked to them. And when Goethe now has the casket carried back and forth at the behest of the wise men, so that the child can continue to live, are we not to understand that, in spite of its reserve and defense against all attempts at being made secure, the nursing, the care, and the training are not meaningless, that in spite of this absolute reserve, there is for the child an essential element of life in the parents' loving care and watchful anxiety? And is it not also significant that the liberation of the child, his escape from the casket occurs precisely at that moment when the child hears his parents' voices and answers with his own "first sound"? Is the exchange of voices and the resulting communication in language, his first "expression" not actually an opening up of the concealed mystery of life sleeping in the child? Now he rises up without opposition over the lances of the watchmen and the jaws of the lionsthis undoubtedly symbolizes the indestructible quality of the renewed seed of life, its struggle to free itself from the elemental powers and rise to its own realm of spiritual clarity. And the child's "spiritual course of development,'' its flight as Guiding Spirit by distancing himself also from his parents, has the immediate ring of truth. This new spiritual being into which the child develops now places himself under the law by which his own personal existence will be governed, by rising above all the warnings, the hopes, the fears, and anxieties, any and all concerns of his parents. We think immediately here of the Euphorion scene in Faust II, where a new birth arises out of the marriage of beauty and

< previous page

page_65 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_66

next page > Page 66

wisdom, the charming Euphorion who, as a phantom, like a fantasy in a dream, both crownsand refutesthe marriage of Faust and Helen, the worlds of modernity and antiquity. But in contrast to the highly allegorical form of the later Euphorion motif, the final scene of Magic Flute, Second Part means something essentially different. It is true of course that the rising spirit is removed from the spiritual circle of the parental realm, but he also returns to it as to a new, more spiritual community. For if we may be allowed to make a conjecture about the meaning of the sequel as planned by Goethe, we may perhaps assume that those beautiful verses in which the spirit hurries "from fruit to fruit" according to his pleasure, shows the amazingly genial way the playing child tastes of the world. And taking another aspect, the fact that he is found in the company of children only to be torn out of their midst into renewed seclusion until finally Sarastro's "liberating, divinely inspired word" restores the spiritual order and the moral foundation of the familywould it be too bold to assume that this represents the difficult process of human training, of being formed into a human being, about which the struggle between the elemental and spiritual forces of life is concerned in this operatic work? Whether a poetic text was particularly accessible to human understanding was of no great concern to Goethe. "The more incommensurable and inaccessible to reason a poetic production is, the better" (Eckermann, May 6, 1827). And yet it is the business of the interpreter to explain the incommensurable superfluity of meaning in a poem in such a way that one's receptivity for whatever in the poem resists analysis is expanded and enlivened. We of course were only suggesting one direction for such reception when we pursued the relation of this precious little work to the occasion of its creation, Mozart's opera and Schikander's libretto. The abstract opposition between the natural and spiritual elements of life, which Mozart's opera transfigures into a triumphant hymn to the light, is changed in the poetic medium of Goethe's world where the constant presence of elemental powers is profoundly connected with the vital energy of life to create spiritual form. Only in this context do we have the proper frame of reference that can elucidate not only this work of Goethe'sscorned by Schiller for example as a triflebut also the poet's most splendid and significant works, particularly the Faust.

< previous page

page_66 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_67

next page > Page 67

Hölderlin and Antiquity It is the distinction of classical antiquity in its effect on German culture that it is able, in a mysterious fashion, to keep pace with the constant changes appearing on our cultural horizon. Even if our view of history and the values it posits otherwise change with the changing spirit of the times, antiquity nevertheless remains, within the ever-shifting contours of our cultural life, the guarantee that it is always possible to rise above ourselves. Today we simply cannot find a more accurate test of this proposition than to inquire into Hölderlin's relationship to antiquity. For this is an authentic and still unfinished event in our cultural life, which began in our century with the reawakening of Hölderlin's poetic works. This contemporary of Schiller and Goethe proves ever more to be the contemporary of our own future, a poet who in particular has inspired in our youth a passionate and unreserved followingan utterly unique event in the cultural history of modern times: the history of a poet's work delayed in its reception for more than a century. If the changing image of Greece from Winckelmann to Nietzsche seems to probe the outer limits of the nature of Greek humanitythere is no doubt that, following the humanist and the political views of Greece, our own view of antiquity is being reshaped anew by coming into contact with the world of Hölderlin. The gods of Greece are acquiring a new seriousness.

< previous page

page_67 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_68

next page > Page 68

But the real importance about the question of Hölderlin and antiquity lies in the fact that the poetic existence of Hölderlin is determined by his relation to antiquity; and that to such an extent, that it even singles him out in the period of German Classicism. His poetic works as well as his theoretical reflections on art are, as a whole, both an intense probing of this question and its fateful answer. Therefore, it is not just any arbitrary relationship, one among others, as it was in the case of Goethe or Schiller or Kleist or Jean Paul, when we investigate Hölderlin's relationship to antiquity. On the contrary, this question goes to the very heart of his nature and the totality of his work. For this reason, a purely literary-aesthetic investigation, pursuing the influence of the classical poets and thinkers on Hölderlin, on his world-view, his poetic language, his style, and the images of his poetic world would be entirely inappropriate. It is certainly true that Pindar's hymns are an essential presupposition of Hölderlin's late hymns, just as his constant preoccupation with Greek tragedy is essential for his entire work. And yet, Hölderlin's art cannot be understood proceeding simply from the influence that the classical tradition had on his work. Precisely that is what distinguishes him from classical Weimar, that he encounters the world of antiquity not simply as one of the disciplines of the school curriculum, but rather as a force demanding from him an exclusive commitment. Hölderlin's stout heart claims as its own the territory between the Greek and the German, between the Greek gods and Christ, the master of the Hesperian-Germanic age. Today it has become a habit of thought to transform the transcendent scope of spiritual Being into phases of spiritual development that are then, as such, accessible to our understanding. We must therefore consider as a matter of considerable fortune the fact that the creator of the first great edition, Norbert von Hellingrath, already opposed the idea of viewing the Germanic hymns of Hölderlin as an abandonment of the Greek model, as a "Hesperian turn" that would correspond to the rejection by German Romanticism of the classic ideal. 1 In this way, Hellingrath contributed to preserving the actual range of Hölderlin's poetic geniusor better, he understood the tension between the Greek and Germanic elements as a expression of Hölderlin's authentic self and as the secret of his Greeklike greatness. I think, then, that it is appropriate to direct our attention to the actual high point of this tension, to the great hymns of the

< previous page

page_68 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_69

next page > Page 69

final years of the poet's creative work. According to the reports, Hölderlin appears to have continued to suffer the reverberations of this tension even in the first years of his insanity. On the other hand, the novel Hyperion, which has its setting entirely in Greece, mirrors the Germanic yearning of the poet in a borrowed garment and in the terrible reversal that took the form of the great philippic addressed to the Germans. In the great hymns of the late period, however, this tension finds both its poetic expression and its resolution in the continually renewed attempt to fuse poetically all the forces that he experienced so acutely. Included in these late works is a hymn that is the perfect artistic formation of this discord, the hymn "Der Einzige." 2 What is it that chains me to these old blessed shores? that I love them even more than my Fatherland? . . . When we hear this so-called hymn to Christ, we are obviously confronted by a puzzle: it is not at all the excessive love for the old gods, which the poet confesses early in the poemand he repeats this confession in numerous other poemsthat is responsible for Christ's absence. On the contrary, the fault lies in the excessive love for Christ, (v. 48 ff.). Not that the heavenly powers would exclude one another in jealousythe inclination of the poet's own heart, his love for the Unique Divinity, is the fault that prevents the union of Christ with the old gods. "Never do I strike, as I would, the proper measure" (v. 77). Indeed, this is precisely what Hölderlin realized and to which he gave creative form more deeply than any of the other great Hellas-explorers of the German soul: that the problem of German classicism is not that its preference for classical Greece cannot be fulfilled. Quite the reverse, this preference refuses to be reconciled with the inclination of the heart, which is unable to perfect its Western-Christian and Germanic nature on the "blessed shores of Ionia." Using this poem as a guiding thread, we want to attempt to trace the contours of Hölderlin's thinking and thus learn to understand Hölderlin's, as well as our own, attitude toward antiquity. In regard to the fragmentary character of the hymn, we will supplement our interpretation with motifs of the later version, which remained a sketch.

< previous page

page_69 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_70

next page > Page 70

The poet begins with his preference for Hellas, and we know on the basis of both his poetry and his philosophical writings what for him was the distinguishing feature of Greek life in contrast to life in his Fatherland. In Hellas, the gods appear in the midst of humanity, are united with them in marriage, so that god's image "lives among the people." The lament over the end of this divinely fulfilled Day of the Greeks is for us the most characteristic tone of Hölderlin's poetry, a tone that permeates the Hyperion and conjured into being the splendid images of yearning in the great elegies, like "Archipelagus" and "Brot und Wein." But even the constant philosophical reflections of the poet tell us clearly what and why he loved Greek life so deeply: there everyone belonged to the world with sense and soul, and precisely because of that, there developed in characters and relationships a particular interiority; whereas in the case of modern peoples, there prevails an insensitivity for the honor and peculiar character of the community, a narrow-mindedness that paralyses them all from within, especially the Germans (vol. 3, p. 366). Coming from this general insight, Hölderlin gains a basically positive relationship to the philosophy of his time. He views the task of Kant's and Fichte's Idealism and its wakening of the "vital self-activity of human nature' as an education toward universalityand although he sees in this an admittedly one-sided emphasis, still, as a "philosophy of the time,'' it is the correct kind of influence (vol. 3, p. 367). He certainly feels that it is still a giant step from this universality, binding in duty and justice, to the ancients' way of life. "But then, how much is still to be done to achieve human harmony" (vol. 3, p. 370). The ancients did not need what philosophy must achieve for our contemporaries today. In their case the circle of life, in which they experienced common activity and common suffering, was broad enough so that each one received from it an increase of vital growth. Hölderlin clarifies this by a comparison with the warrior who, fighting together with the army, feels more courageous and more powerful, and in actuality is so. This surpassing excellence, transcending the individual not only in his own feeling, but as an actual power of Being, this sphere in which all people live simultaneously is the divinity of their community. A marginal note to one of the poems actually says, "This sphere which is higher than that of the human being, that is precisely the God" (vol. 4, p. 355). It is of course a matter of general knowledge that among the Greeks all relationships were of a religious nature, all those "finer infinite bonds of life" as Hölderlin calls

< previous page

page_70 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_71

next page > Page 71

them, which we with our enlightened morality and etiquette regulate with our "iron-clad concepts" (vol. 3, pp. 262 f.). What are here called religious relationships Hölderlin defines as "those that one must consider not so much in and for themselves but rather from the viewpoint of that spirit which prevails in the sphere where those relations occur." This life, experienced by the Greeks as openness to the presence of divine forces and interpreted in their name, is, according to Hölderlin, eminently justified in comparison to the life of the modern "snail" who is exclusively concerned with order and security; in other words, it is the more authentic experience of the vital energy of life. Now the poet refers to this divine Day of the Greeks in the hymn "Der Einzige" as a submission (or a being sold) into the "prison of the gods." Imprisonment, however, means enduring the suffering of alienation. What kind of suffering is that? Again we are supported by a theoretical study of Hölderlin's entitled: "The Angle from Which We Ought to View Antiquity" (vol. 3, pp. 257259). Here Hölderlin speaks of servitude as the mark of our conduct toward antiquity, a servitude so all-encompassing and oppressive that all our talk about education and piety, about originality and independence is just a dream, a reaction, a mild revenge, so to speak, against this servitude. In a letter to his brother, Hölderlin once used a grotesque image: "Even I, with all good will, grope blindly in my activity and thinking to catch a glimpse of these unique human beings in the world, and find myself, in everything I do and say, all the clumsier and more absurd because I, like flat-footed geese, stand around in modern water impotently struggling to lift myself up into the Greek sky" (vol. 3, p. 371). For the oppressive character of this servitude he offers here as solid an argumentation as found in the philosophy of Idealism itself. The human desire for education, in any case already weak in modern times, appears vital only in the souls of independent thinkers (an expression of Fichte's). It finds in the educational material provided by antiquity all too much that is premodeled. The near boundless world of antiquity, of which we become aware either through schooling or through experience, is an oppressive burden that threatens us with disaster in no way less than the positive forms, the luxury that their fathers had produced, had brought disaster to earlier peoples. What Hölderlin is obviously describing here is the specter of classicism, an artificial humanism of the schools and the straitjacket of an alien style.

< previous page

page_71 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_72

next page > Page 72

But in this heightened danger, intensified by historical consciousness, he sees also an advantageous moment for being able to determine our own direction, because we know all the essential directions that the impulse toward education can take. When we consider this reversal of attitude, which Hölderlin only hints at, we then suddenly recognize it in the goal and meaning of all his efforts at theoretical reflection on art that we find in the prose studies and the so-called philosophical writings. Almost all of the essayistic projects, elaborated on the model of antiquity, have the same subject matter: the difference between literary genres, which is, as everyone knows, a principle strictly observed by the ancients. For him, the classical poets are models of artistic practice. And it is precisely this strictness of the ancient poets from which Hölderlin expects a rich blessing for the success of his own work. 3 In their practical procedures, the ancient poets become ideal models for him. Quite characteristic is the comment in the Preface to his translation of Sophocles to the effect that this is an enterprise regulated by foreign but still strict and historical laws (v. 91).4 As a matter of fact, the Notes to Oedipus begin with the demand for a poetics according to the Greek model (v. 175). There is an echo of this in a letter to a young poet where he says, "And for that reason I have come more and more to honor the thorough, free, and unprejudiced practice of art, because I consider it to be the aegis that protects genius from the ephermeral." However, the fact that Hölderlin takes Greek artistic practice as a model in no way implies a confession of Classicism. On the contrary, it was in his study of the ancients that he realized, as he writes in the famous letter to Boehlendorff from December 4, 1801 (vol. 5, pp. 318 ff). besides that which among both the Greeks and us must occupy the highest place, namely a vital sense of relationship and destiny, we doubtless have nothing otherwise in common with them. But that which is one's own must be mastered just as well as that which is foreign. For that very reason the Greeks are indispensable to us. It is simply that in what is our very own, in our national character, we cannot imitate them, because . . . the free use of what is specifically one's own is the most difficult thing to achieve. It is quite clear: the theory of art is more than it seems; it is the essential form of the poet's self-emancipation from servitude to the

< previous page

page_72 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_73

next page > Page 73

ancients. We hear the very same thing in the last letter to Schiller, where, concerning the study of Greek literature, he says he had continued to study it until it had given him back the freedom it so easily takes away at the beginning. The "liberation from the 'letter' of the Greeks," of which he boasts at the end, leads to a fundamental subordination of what is Greek to what is German, something he also asserts in that profound contrast in the Notes to Antigone (vol. 5, pp. 257 ff.). This path of Hölderlin's reflection on art is actually a way of liberation from servitude to the ancients. But are this servitude and this liberation the same as those spoken of in our hymn? Is not the breaking out of the stylistic prison of a classicistic aesthetic something different from the overcoming of that all too great love for the divinely fulfilled life of the Greeks? And if intellectual discernment is considered to be the holy aegis, then certainly not only poetic reflection is meant by this. The poetic word is the word as such, and the word is the effect and the experience of the very divine itself in the way it is grasped and "distributed." The binding of the spirit to the earth is not only the task of the poet for which he receives the aid of artistic discretion by uniting Junonian sobriety with enthusiasm. The enthusiastic violence of the human heart is always in need of the holy aegis of quiet understanding to protect itself from the offences of the world (vol. 3, p. 3640). Therefore, Hölderlin, in the face of the "ardent riches" of the human heart, can say of man in general, "that he is to guard the spirit, just as the priestess guards the heavenly flame; that is, his understanding (vol. 4, p. 246). But should that supreme love for Greece that the poet confesses in his poetry be overcome at all? It is certainly not a submission to classicistic moderation, but rather is itself already an expression of a poetically won freedom. The lament, which yearns to return to Greece and celebrates the departed gods in song, bears in itself a poetically transformed meaning. Precisely by refusing to call back the departed gods and to reanimate the dead past, 5 it becomes clear in what way the gods are still present. And yet we do receive much of the divine. The flame was given into our hands and Earth and the flood of the sea. (vol. 5, p. 164, "Versöhnender" vv. 63 ff.)

< previous page

page_73 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_74

next page > Page 74

Thus the language of the native landscape, its fateful signs, mountain and stream, in which earth and sky meet, becomes the object of a new, German hymn. Those are the angels of the Fatherland that the poets intend to proclaim, the mediators and messengers of the divine. This turn to the Fatherland is however not at all a retreat from the ancient journey of the soul to the East; it is the same journey of the heart: Not them, the blessed ones, who have appeared, The images of the Gods in the ancient land, Of course I may no longer call to them; but if You waters of my home, if the love of my heart Can lament with you, what otherwise does it desire To accomplish, that holy mourning? . . . (vol. 4, p. 181, "Germanien") This profession of love for Greece and the lament for its vanished glory belong essentially to the poetic experience of a vigorous and lively presentin the new freedom of the German hymn. To this experience the lament owes the fact that its proclamation of the old gods is more than a display of classicistic pomp, that it really does call forth vital images. It is precisely here, however, in the divine freedom of this imprisonment in what is past and what is present, that there arises a different lament, that Christ remains far distant, that he refuses his presence. To whom does he refuse it? To the hymn of God's image; in other words, the poetic invocation. The poet expressly rejects the idea that this refusal rests on an irreconcilable jealousy among the heavenly beings. In his opinion, the fault lies with the poet who adheres too exclusively to Christ in order to be able to compare him with others, in order to be able to celebrate him as the Present One, as World. A certain sense of shame Prevents me from comparing To you those world-bound men. If any comparison at all seems well founded, then that perhaps with Heracles and Dionysus (vv. 41 ff.). For all three of them are the harbingers of a new and better order: Heracles as the liberator of the

< previous page

page_74 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_75

next page > Page 75

world from monsters; Dionysus as the donor of the grape, the tamer of wild animals, and he who joins men in ecstasy; Christ is the mediator, he who makes peace between God and men. The poet himself has tried more and more to support this comparison in the later version of the hymn. And yet the word diesesmal [this time] with which the sketch of the expanded version breaks off, shows that even now a return to the two final strophes was still intended; in other words, that the failure of the comparison between the world-bound gods of antiquity and Christ has remained the unchanged basic theme of the poem. 6 Seen in detail, the newly added part presents a number of difficulties, but at the same time brings such an important development of the comparison, that its interpretation must be attempted. Christ is accorded an equal status with the "world-bound men" to the extent that he too had his hour, his mission of destiny from God, and thus "stood alone" just as the others did. His constellation, that is, his mission, was to rule freely "over what was appointed." What was appointed was the positive aspect of the law in which the actual spirit no longer liveswhich is of course the main theme of Hegel's early theological writings. That is explained here in such a way that the constant and enduring aspect of the living spirit is overgrown with the bustle of business, thus preventing experience from being understood. But even that is the office of each and everyone of these religious heroes, to dispense fire and life anew when the "holy fire is exhausted" (''Versöhnender," v. 78). And so here we also read: Of course the world ever rejoices turning Away from this earth, that it lays it bare; Where what is human cannot hold it. But they have all appeared precisely to hold and to bind, particularly those who bring a new order, like Heracles and Dionysus. For this reason the poem states: "thus those are like one another." Similarly the poet shows in an earlier sketch of the later version that he insists on this equality of Christ with the others against the Christian claim: "Indeed even Christ had one thing which enraptured him . . ." Namely, each one has a destiny, that is (it?) (vol. 4, p. 379). Now in a rather mysterious way, the story of the temptation (Matthew 4) is connected with those who bring and maintain the fire. Obviously it is the desert, that is, the earth denuded of the

< previous page

page_75 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_76

next page > Page 76

divine presence, that is conjured up here by the temptation story, and again its purpose is not to distinguish him, but rather to equate him with the other orderers of the chaotic earth, with Heracles and Dionysus. Even in the time when the gods are absent there still remains "a trace of a word": so Christ knows how to withstand temptation by the Devil, because for him what is written has still not been extinguished. 7 He is a man who, appearing in the desert of an ossified religious life, still has the knack of catching the trace of a word, and precisely because of that rejects the tempter and takes upon himself the office of the suffering savior.8 Also in what follows the poet endeavors to show Christ in his comparability with the others. By equating him, for example, not with Apollo or Zeus, but with those who are truly comparable, with Heracles and Dionysus, who are themselves different from "other Heroes," he pursues a genuine context of religious history. Particularly Dionysus is for him a truly fraternal companion to Christ; he had already dared in "Brot und Wein" to fuse the two Syrian dispensers of joy and wine. Indeed, these three seem to be like each other, "a clover leaf." In contrast to the other "great ones," they do not exclude one another. Rather, they form a unity, and this makes it "beautiful and lovely to . . . compare,'' . . . that they are under the sun like Hunters of the chase, or a tiller of the Soil who, his breath exhausted from his Work, bares his head, or beggar. Which is to say, they are all three what they are, withholding nothing of themselves in fulfilling their mission ("hunters of the chase"). They all three suffer, thus do not insist on making themselves the center, and for that reason are God: we need only think of Heracles's labors and his end; Dionysus is the dying and rising God of the ancient cult; this above all connects them with Christ who died "with a victorious glance" ("Patmos," v. 89). Therefore the poet now says: "Hercules is like the kings. Dionysus is a public spirit. But Christ is the End"; that is, he "fulfills" what the others lack of the presence of the "divine." Nevertheless, even when making this comparison, he is continually aware of the inequality: "But there is a struggle that tempts me . . ." That is precisely the "sense of shame" that comes over him when he wants to assimilate Christ to the others. It obviously rests on the fact that Christ is not presence in the same sense as those

< previous page

page_76 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_77

next page > Page 77

"world-bound men." Those, "as sons of God," have their signs on them out of necessity. For the Thunderer has provided Quite differently, expediently. But Christ is modestly humble. The nature of Christ is obviously not exhausted in simply completing the "heavenly choir" ("Brot und Wein," strophe 8); that is, in being simply the last in a series of equal gods whose activity is presence. What distinguishes him is his humility. Those others are what they are, fending off present distressthe Thunderer has always provided quite differently. That is, they fulfill only their limited mission for the present. Christ, on the other hand, exercises humility and, because of that, reaches out beyond his own present moment. He even knew about that of which he was silent (''Versöhnender," vv. 86ff), and precisely because he does not just passively suffer the death he was sent to undergo, but rather freely takes it upon himself (and one should no doubt consider that this is the critical meaning of the temptation story), he is the End. But that means that he exercises dominion over all future time (for which no other provision could be made). He is the God, whose annunciation and promise of return rules as a quiet reality over the whole final age of the world. So it becomes ever clearer that he is of a different nature. But does that not really mean that the divinities are precluding one another and that there is here no fault of the poet? In other words, does the actual claim of Christ to be the only God not defeat all attempts of the poet at reconciliation? Is this not precisely the place where the powerful religious authority of Christianity overwhelms the poet? However, any attempt at such a biasedly Christian interpretation 9 is fundamentally contradicted by Hölderlin's basic conception of the nature of God. Hölderlin never makes any concession to this Christian claim to uniqueness. In our hymn it is clearly stated that this supreme God has not one, but numerous mediators. For he never rules alone. And does not know all things. There ever stands someone or other between men and him. (vv. 65 f,) And For many are the high thoughts That have sprung from the Father's head . . . (vv. 13 f.)

< previous page

page_77 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_78

next page > Page 78

The hymn "Patmos," dedicated to the Christian Landgrave of Hamburg, must actually justify its Christian piety before the god-imbued soul of the poet: "For Christ still lives." But this very certainty of the poet himself states that he is not the only one: But all the Heroes, his sons, have come from him, as well as the Holy Scriptures, And until now the deeds of the earth Explain the sudden lightning, A competitive race unstoppable . . . ("Patmos," vv. 204 ff.) What does it mean then to say that the poet's love clings too much to the Single One? He is called Master and Lord; he is called Teacher ("Der Einzige," v. 36), that is, the teacher of the poet and of the age of the Western world to which the poet belongs. Actually then, the poet's tie to his own age blocks the path to the desired conciliation. For it is simply a fact that Christ is the God of this Christian-Western age; and he is so precisely as the one who is invisible and absent. With amazing insight, Hölderlin has described in the Patmos hymn (vv. 113ff.) the new nature of Christian piety: . . . The joy of the eyes Was extinguished with him. From now on it was joy to live In a loving night and to sustain The abysses of Wisdom in Simplicity of heart . . . The eye cast down and inner illumination are the new forms of mediation where . . . Modestly glancing From swelling eyebrows there Falls only quietly burning power . . . ("Patmos," vv. 192 f.) 10 It is then really in opposition to his own religious reality that the poet attempts, with the richness of his treasures, To form an image and similarly To see how he was, the Christ . . . ("Patmos," vv. 164 f.)

< previous page

page_78 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_79

next page > Page 79

Here lies the answer the poet gives to himself: it is not that the divinities themselves, all present for one another, would exclude each other in jealousy, but rather that the poet cannot strike a balance of their divine being, since Christ is of a different nature than presence. However, it is precisely this other reality of Christ that rules the worldhour of the poet, in such a way that he is unable to celebrate him, as he would the Greek gods, as the worldly presence of "Nature." What the poet above all admits to be his guilt, "But I know; it's my own fault" (''Der Einzige," v. 48); what he laments as a failure for which he must make amends, "Never do I strike, as I would, the proper measure" ("Der Einzige," v. 77), he finally recognizes as the poet's peculiar way of having a destiny. So the conclusion of the hymn deals with the imprisonment of the spirit in his human-historical situation. But only "a God knows when the best that I desire will come." Everyone else has a destiny in which his soul is caught. Even Christ was such a prisoner on the earth and "much afflicted," until he became free for his unearthly-spiritual destiny, "until he rose to heaven on the winds." "In the same way the souls of the heroes are imprisoned:" even the unconditioned nature of the hero suffers the fate of imprisonment in time. They too are not free, are not masters of their fate. And now those who are all spiritual, and yet imprisoned, are joined in the final, all-disposing conclusion by The poets must also, the Spiritual ones, be of the world. The poets are by nature "spiritual," that is, they are related to the presence of the divine as a whole, including all the heavenly beings. But even they suffer an irrevocable imprisonment in time. That is precisely what the poet has discovered by his own experience. They too cannot procure the best that they desire simply by force of willit remains at the discretion of "a God." The poets, then, must be of this world, because they can sing only of the present in which they are imprisoned. It is part and parcel of Hölderlin's present that Christ is not accessible to poetic form. The Greek gods are the present time of legend that becomes reinterpreted for the poet in the light of "ever-present" nature. Christ, on the other hand, is he who lives in faith and whose worship is "in the spirit." "For Christ still lives." The poet knows what a transgres-

< previous page

page_79 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_80

next page > Page 80

sion it would be if he wanted to gain by force something that is denied him "But suppose one spurred oneself on . . . " ("Patmos," vv. 166 ff.), or For anyone who gains it by deception It becomes a dream and punishes Him who wants to equal him in power . . . ("Die Wanderung," vv. 133 ff.) The fact of the matter is that the poet belongs to the otherworldly inferiority of the West, which holds him, as poet, captive, sold into the heavenly imprisonment of the world-bound gods, the only ones who offer themselves as subject for his song, and prevent him from achieving the desired conciliation. This tension, readily confessed and painfully endured by the poet, finds its resolution in this insight. But the surprising thing about this resolution is that the renunciation of the desired conciliation, this insight into the fact of inequality, sets him free to pursue the great new task of the Germanic hymn. Christ is, indeed, different from the others. 11 Because the presence of Christ is not that of his short life on earth alone. He is presence in the historical destiny of the Western world. Thus the renunciation is transformed into a mission. I'd like to sing to him, Just as I sing to Hercules . . . But that is not allowed. A Destiny is different. More Wonderful. To sing more richly. Since his coming, Beyond eyes' reach, the story . . .12 In this act of renunciation there opens up to the poet's view the panorama of Western history through a genuinely historical logic. History, "the story beyond eyes' reach," appears along side the poetic present of Greek myth. We have to consider these connections more closely to see how, from this double imprisonment, both in that of his love for the Greeks as well as that of the world-hour of the Christian West, the poet gains a unique depth of knowledge about both of them, the Greek gods as well as the "Angel of the Fatherland." What the poem

< previous page

page_80 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_81

next page > Page 81

"Der Einzige," the starting point of our investigation, tells us is in a way more hidden than revealed, but remains the key we need for our understanding. The world-boundness of the ancients and the interiority of the Christian-Western soul constitute, of course, the incomprehensible burden we ourselves are working out. The poet experiences this in the elegiac form of the gods' departure, their turning away, their flight, as the advent of evening and night. The Greek landscape now lies like a giant, abandoned table ("Brot und Wein," strophe 4), the "honor" of the heavenly beings has become invisible. Only as if coming from the flames of a grave, There moves across the sky A golden cloud, the legend of them, and Now disappears around our doubting heads Into the twilight. ("Germanien," vv. 24 ff.) So the poet, called to be the prophet of the divine presence in the word, lives like one rejected by men. "And what purpose have poets in a paltry age?" ("Brot und Wein," v. 122). The answer that the poet continually finds to the painful doubt about his vocation grows right out of his affirmation of this night. Already in the splendid beginning of "Brot und Wein," the twofold nature of this night becomes visible: by allowing the bustle of the day's activities and its noisy uproar to die down, its previously hidden life is awakened, the night's own voices; but above all, it grants the waking person encouragement to live a "bolder life" that makes it possible to express the mystery of the soul; and thus, by preserving the memory of the day, assures a return to one who stands in the darkness of Western history ("Brot und Wein," strophe 2). Here the Christian liturgical form of the Last Supper finds an interpretation quite peculiar to Hölderlin. Christ, the quiet Genius, the last God to be actually present among men, bequeathed, to those abandoned in the night, comfort and a promise of return; and, as their sign, the Last Supper. Bread and Wine. But Hö1derlin does not see this as a mystical communion, nor as an act of "transsubstantiation," nor even as the memorial meal founded by the departing savior, as taught in the Reformed Church. He sees it in the holiness of

< previous page

page_81 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_82

next page > Page 82

the elements, of earth and sun, from which come both bread and wine. Hölderlin assumes that these two, bread and wine, even in our godless age, are still regarded differently than anything else; they are not there only to be used, but are still honored with thanksgiving, "there still quietly exists some modicum of gratitude"; that is, when using them, one still commemorates the divine beings. Thus, the elements of bread and wine, being of this world and yet considered holy, are the guarantee that the gods will return in fullness of life. Bread is the fruit of the earth, yet it's blessed by the light And from the thundering God comes the joy of wine. Memory is the presence of an absent one in his absence; bread and wine are such presence, a pledge for what is absent, the fullness of the gods' gifts and the divine reality. Their holiness lives not from the legend (for instance, its institution by Christ), but rather the legend, God's image, lives in these symbols, in the presence of these elements and in the gratitude that preserves them. This reversal and foundation of the myth on the present is the decisive shift from abandonment to expectation, giving the night of Western history its peculiar meaning, rich in hope for both present and future. Because memory has a present, it can become expectation. To cultivate the memory is from time immemorial the office of the poet. In this context, this office assumes the significance of the reawakening and calling into presence of what is absent. "Signs in the heavens" stir up our courage. The lament becomes the hymn, the purpose of which is to invoke what lies "before one's eyes" ("Germanien," v. 83). But that is not all: the night itself, the absence of the gods and the suffering caused by it, are not just a matter of emptiness and deprivationin these very things there is an historical necessity. This night is the night of protective care. "Only occasionally can man now endure the fullness of divinity" (''Brot und Wein," v. 114). But it is also the night of gathering strength in preparation for a new day. Thus the poet poses the question and himself gives the answer: . . . when honor for the Demigod and for his companions dissolves, and even the highest God

< previous page

page_82 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_83

next page > Page 83

Turns away his countenance, so that Nowhere in the heavens or on the green Earth is an immortal to be seen. What is this? It is the cast of the sower, when, with the ladle He takes the wheat, and throwing it into the Clear air, spreads it over the threshing floor. The chaff falls before his feet; but then Appears the grain. ("Patmos," vv. 145 ff.) The anticipated future is interpreted as the fruit of Hesperia ("Brot und Wein," v. 150). Precisely that which has long been hidden and reserved in silence, that for which there was no word, because the general sense of it was not yet present, will be the truth of a new day. For "the power of the word grows in sleep" ("Brot und Wein," v. 68). But precisely with this insight, the poet has taken his office and his destiny upon himself. He must be alone because he is the first to invoke and call by name a divinity common to all, just as the organ prelude introduces the chorale, the song of the congregation (''AM Quell der Donau," strophe 1; "Der Mutter Erde," strophe 1). This turning round of memory into the invocation of what lies in the future, as the poet succeeds in doing, is the naming of a very specific presence; not that of the ancient, well-known gods, not even that of the Genius of Christ who reigns over all absence. It is the invocation and interpretation of pure signs and hints, above all the significant figures of the mountains and streams of the Fatherland that, as runes of history, fuse antiquity and the Western world. We need but think of the symbolic course of the Danube. Here nature becomes history; the course of the river, in which heaven and earth are joined in marriage, becomes a symbol of the time and the course of Western history. In the presence of such richly hopeful figures, the legend of the departed gods becomes a prophecy of their eventual return. The presence of expectation is the medium in which the sorely missed harmony of the divine world can now be brought about. Expectation is, like memory, the presence of what is absent. In this expectation, the God of the West, he who reconciles all things, can now be called reconciled. For his reality, like that of no other God, is the presence of promise and expectation. Now the poet can say that heunknowinglyhas always served mother earth and the light of the sun ("Patmos," final verse). For what he did, what carried his song beyond the invoca-

< previous page

page_83 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_84

next page > Page 84

tion of classical specters into a new future, was precisely that his hymn had a vision of what was present. The Father, he who reigns over all, desires most that the firm letter Be cultivated, and that what is Traditional be well interpreted. Such is the law of the German hymn. The letter and the tradition are not simply the teaching and practice of Christianity alone; it is the "languages of heaven" ("Unter den Alpen gesungen," v. 27) that is the poet's task to interpret. "Many have been written by men; nature wrote the others" (Am Quell der Donau," prose version, vol. 4, p. 338). Now the Hesperian poet, because even he sings of the presenteven though not that of fullness and of the commonly shared Daycan take up the ancient form used for the celebration of the present Gods, the hymn, in the shape given to it by Pindar. And yet, a quite different language, the language of Luther, and a quite different spirit transforms and fulfills these poetic forms of antiquity. It is the present of urgent expectation, not that of a secure and artfully woven possession, characteristic of Pindar's piety. It is the present of the Open into which are transformed the ancient images of the gods and that even the Christian God does not deny himself who, more than all of the others, is the "coming God" ("Brot und Wein," v. 54). . . . one is always for all. Be like the light of sun. ("Versödhnender," vv. 102 f.) Here, too, we must refer to Hölderlin's theoretical ideas to contrast with the ancient model what is peculiar to Hölderlin's poetic practice. Indeed, Hölderlin exercised this new freedom, witnessed by his German hymns, even in his work on the poetic documents of antiquity themselves, above all in his translation of Sophocles, as we have learned from the investigations of Beissner. There, 13 in explicit reflections, he has shown the reason why the Western-Germanic type of representation is different, why it is superior to the Greek type, and why it is related to the Greek type as its opposite. The tragic Word among the Greeks he finds "more mediately

< previous page

page_84 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_85

next page > Page 85

factual because it moves the more sensual body": the tragic catastrophe actually occurs in the form of bodily destruction. "In contrast," Hölderlin continues, "the tragic Word is, for our time and way of representation, more immediately effective because it moves the more spiritual body. It kills by annihilating what is internal." We would like to apply these reflections on the tragic Word of the drama to the new style of the hymns and to his Pindaric model. But what we read in his studies on the tragic ode does not even begin to reflect on this contrast with reference to the Greek model. It simply shows that Hölderlin also here, as in the case of the drama, quite in contrast to Romanticism, followed the artistic practice of the classical poetjust as his own hymns obey the strict laws of architectonic structure. Nevertheless, what he thinks through in such general terms on the occasion of the Sophocles translation was undoubtedly clear to him here, too. The lyric word of the Germanic hymn is also more immediate than that of Pindar, for whom the context lay in a pregiven set of circumstances: in the family and the stature of the hero being celebrated and in a firm order of religious reality. Even to some aspects of this too Hölderlin holds fast by weaving into his verse address and dedication; but precisely this seal of dedication makes obvious that the one who is addressed in them belongs to a different ontological order of poetic reality. Particularly if one looks at the religious context of the Word, it is absolutely clear why Hölderlin subordinates the Greek art form to the Germanic. For what Pindar says about the divine is rooted in a firm religious present, whose untainted cultivation is the office of the poet; what Hölderlin says, on the other hand, is exposed to such unreconciled forces as Greek world-boundness and Western inferiority. Even in the case of the classical poets, in Pindar, words are chosen very economically out of the abundance of what deserves to be said. But when Hölderlin says: "Many things could be told about it" ("Patmos,'' v. 88) or "Many are the views" ("Der Einzige," späte, Fassung v. 68), what treasures become apparent! not of what is unspoken, but of what is ineffable. The lament of the individual, "Never do I strike, as I would, the proper measure," has thus proven its significance for Hölderlin's artistic practice in all of his works. It is not the admission of an unmastered task and a failure that would limit the poet's otherwise consistent excellence at one particular spot. On the contrary, the fact that he stands at this extreme boundary constitutes the mystery of

< previous page

page_85 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_86

next page > Page 86

the suggestively prophetic nature of Hölderlin's poetic power. Not "striking the proper measure" is the constant expression of his unique intensity." I wanted to sing a carefree song, but I never succeed" (vol. 4, p. 315). It is the "fullness of happiness,'' the "burden of joy" ("Der Rhein," v. 158), that brings this intimate immediacy into Hölderlin's final poetic tone, a discourse both foolish and divine, continuing to resound even in the silence: But now my song, weeping in soul, Is finished, like a legend of love, and so it has proven to be from the beginning, Blushing and paling. ("Am Quell der Donau," vv. 89ff.)

< previous page

page_86 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_87

next page > Page 87

Hölderlin and the Future The year 1943 saw the centennial anniversary of the death of Friedrich Hölderlin. On this occasion he became the object of the kind of public veneration given only to those exemplary citizens who occupy a central place in the national consciousness. Indeed, this public participation had something quite unique about it; but certainly nothing of defensive jealousy. What emerged into consciousness on the occasion of this memorial was not a forgotten fame that had to be refurbished, not even the pride of the present moment that had to be confirmedit was a renown of yet tender age offered not to a poet who had been dead for a hundred years, but as if to one still living and loved by a passionate youth. Each and every one would like to keep him for himself, the Swabian for the Swabians, the German for the Germans. And yet today, this poet belongs to the young élite of all peoples as their fresh, unexpected possession. Actually, we do not know what we have in himeven in this respect he is like a poet of our own time. We ask ourselves how this new and passionate predilection will find its place along side our relationship This essay was originally given as lecture in 1943 at the Technical University in Darmstadt. It was to be published in the magazine Die Antike, but in 1944 this was no longer possible because of the closing verses. First printed in Beitrage zur geistigen Uberlieferung (Munich: Verlag Helmut Kupper, 1947).

< previous page

page_87 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_88

next page > Page 88

to Schiller, yes, even to Goethe. The portrait earlier generations had of this poet is no longer valid. But then, how are we to measure him against whom all our standards of measurement are thrown into such confusion that even the highest evaluation seems not to be too rash. He himself was consumed by a burning ambition to be equal to our greatest poets, to Goethe and Schiller. Today, a hundred years after his death, this arrogant ambition seems to have been fulfilled. Even the German theater is courting himwhose work is certainly most alien to the stageas if he were its freshest hope. And critics, attempting to interpret his puzzling work, have become legion. To understand the course of this development, one must keep in view the history of his work and its effect. When his mind became darkened by the shadows of insanity, in the obscurity of which he was to live another forty years, his work had by no means attained a complete and final form. Only a few pieces had appeared in book form. The great lyrical production of the last years before his derangement was partly not known at all and partly scattered about in almanacs and paperbacks. And so, the actual nature of his work remained unrecognized. He was read and accepted only insofar as he could be accommodated to a familiar conception of the world. One saw in him a noble expression of the romantic poet. His works were honored, like those of Novalis, as documents of an early maturity in which a similar, Christian-Germanic conception of history found poetic expression. But what was new and unique, what made Hölderlin the great poet whom we honor today, the power of his language and the contours of his world, remained invisible and unintelligible. Whatever blocked the comprehension of his contemporaries could always be attributed to the insanity of the poet. And thus, it was more his novel Hyperion that determined the general view of the poet rather than Hölderlin's major lyrical production. Hyperion is an epic depicting a will to perfection, unswerving in both its enthusiasm and despair, and finally driven to failure by the pettiness of everyday reality. Of coure, there was always a quiet band of secret friends of the poet during the entire century. But he was not accessible to the general consciousness. Even when, toward the end of the nineteenth century, our treasure of Hölderlin's poems began to increase due to the efforts of philological research, it was still really like the discovery of a new poet when, shortly before World War I, Norbert von Hellingrath published, for the most part from the manuscripts,

< previous page

page_88 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_89

next page > Page 89

Hölderlin's major lyrics. It occurred in a mind freshly disposed for a reception of what is genuinely poetic. For this young philologist, to whom we owe the great edition of Hölderlin's work, had been associated with the poet Stefan George. Since then, Hölderlin has exerted a constantly growing influence on German youth. And so it is that, a hundred years after his death, he is being counted among the greatest of the great. A fine new edition of his works began to appear in the year 1943. What happened here is a unique event in modern intellectual history. It is the story of a poetic production the appearance of which was delayed by a full century. In an age of scanty transmission, as we know from the literary history of antiquity, there would be nothing peculiar about thisbut in this case it happened in a period in which the preservation and transmission of texts was the favorite activity of its interest in history. As if to teach us, it is not history that decides whether the spirits sleep or wake. Here, however, a genuine awakening befell Hölderlin's work. This was not and still is not the result of a scholar's gimmick or a literary fad, not even a simple matter of fashion (which spares nothing and has not spared even Hölderlin's work) or of the heightened consciousness of an educated classthat is precisely the astonishing thing: that the great poets of our time, George and Rilke (to say nothing of the lesser lights), are already beginning to have an odor of the historical, whereas Hölderlin's workmiraculously enoughstrikes us as absolutely contemporary. The question we must ask is, How is this possible? And with this question we enter the realm of philosophical reflection. The real question being, How precisely is it that these two moments, that of our own present and that of Hölderlin's poetry, have the kind of meaning for us that allows them to come together as one? If we define the present as the historical unity of the last decades, and if we consider that these are precisely the ones in which Hölderlin's rise to fame occurred, then we can hope that the one will throw light on the other. And especially that the meaning of the present moment will become clearer against the background of Hölderlin's particular significance for us. There is at least one thing that our own time is aware of: that it is the end of an age, andbecause such belongs to the very nature of the historical processthat it is also the beginning of a new one. We can characterize the age now beginning in various ways: as the

< previous page

page_89 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_90

next page > Page 90

age of socialism, the age of admittedly self-conscious power, as the age of struggle for the domination of the earth, or even as the age of the world warsor one can define the beginning of this age by the collapse of Idealism, that is to say, by the disappearance of faith in the original and independent power of reason; or one can characterize it by the disappearance of education understood as an essentially middle-class formation of the human spirit. In each case what the self-consciousness of the present age lacks is the security of a stable structure on the basis of which earlier generations were able to understand themselves. A new insecurity, a new immediacy toward our impending fate, a vulnerable exposure to all that is uncertain is with us, even where the pathos of any kind of heroism is scorned, even that of an heroic nihilism. If we inquire what in our contemporary consciousness responds to the poetic nature of Hölderlin, then historical reflection will undoubtedly find related features in the general makeup of the periods. We will recall that the age of Hölderlin, too, was a time of dissolution and expectancy. The French Revolution caused a tremendous shattering of the European social order. It was the beginning of a century of revolution, reaching right into our own time. Along with this, came a realization of standing on the threshold of a new epoch, boundless both in expectation and in fear. Our own time seems almost like the final stage of this progressive realization. On the other hand, such elements common to both periods are not yet sufficient to explain the peculiar effect of Hölderlin in our own time. He certainly does not share this effect with his great contemporaries. Precisely with respect to the classical norms of Schiller and Goethe, one can detect in the effectual history of Hölderlin something nearly like a displacement on the genealogical tree of our illustrious ancestors. Of course Hölderlin, even today, is considerably less a staple of our national education than are our classical poets; but precisely because of this, his significance is almost greater. He speaks to us in a different and incomparable tone. The idea, for example, that he could supply our early educational training with a treasure house of quotations as in the case of Schiller and Goethe would be quite preposterous. There is simply no life situation that could be accompanied and illuminated by Hölderlin's work. He can neither confirm us in anything, nor can he provide us with assurances; on the contrary, he forces us out into the open. In contrast to the plastic self-sufficiency

< previous page

page_90 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_91

next page > Page 91

of Goethe or to the rhetorically powerful enthusiasm of Schiller, Hölderlin's work and being are unmistakably stamped with the immediacy where he is exposed precisely to those forces of which he is the prophet. The fact that, among these forces, the poet felt his love for the fatherland to be the final and highest poetic experience assures him a special response from a generation for whom the old light-hearted forms of patriotic sensitivity and expression have disappeared, having given place to a new consciousness of Fate. Hölderlin's immediacy is an immediacy to his time. The core of his being is defined by his consciousness of history. Not that he was in any sense caught up by that historical consciousness which we call historicist, where the idea of being an heir of the past is linked with that of being simply a link in the endless chain of historical development and existing only in the act of perishing. Hölderlin's consciousness of history is rather a consciousness of the present moment and of a future of which the present is witness. What is past, both epochs and individuals, is for him a sign of a Fate for which we are destined. None of our other poets is similarly absorbed by the presence of the future. The future is his present, which he sees and poetically proclaims. It is quite characteristic that, for him, the night is the poetic expression of his consciousness of history. For the night has a profound ambiguity about it. Of course, its approach means the end of the day's bustle. The darkness robs the things around us of their articulated order and veils the day in obscurity. But while thus cloaking the presence of the world, it also opens man's mind for what was concealed in the light and noise of the day: the distant strains of the violin, the ringing of the bells, the bubbling of the springs, the fragrance of the flowers; all of these things inspire man's soul in hope. Thus the immortal lines of the first strophe of "Brot und Wein" [Bread and Wine] depict the prophetic approach of night: The city, round about, rests; the lighted lane is quiet and the coaches, fitted with torches, rustle away. People, heavy with the joys of the day, go home to rest, and thoughtful heads, comfortably at home, weigh the balance of loss and gain. The bustling marketplace is empty of grapes and flowers and rests from the work of human hands. But the play of the harp

< previous page

page_91 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_92

next page > Page 92

sounds out of gardens far away. It may be that a lover is playing, or a lonely man thinking of distant friends and the time of his youth; and the springs, always freshly bubbling, rush noisily past fragrant flower beds. Quietly in the night air rung bells resound, and with the time in mind the watchman cries the hour. Now too there comes a breeze and excites the tree tops of the grove. Look! the shadow-image of our earth, the moon, now secretly enters too; there comes also the night, that fantastic being. She startles us with her shining, full of stars and no doubt little concerned about us; she, the stranger among men, rises above the mountain tops, splendid and sad. By the power of their lyrical mood, these verses inspired the admiration of his contemporaries and were printed at that time in poetry annual under the title "The Night." However, they do not actually belong in the context of emotional enthusiasm where the night is conceived as dissolving all things in the magic of mystery, so cherished by Herder and the Romantics. These verses are the first strophe of a great and philosophic poem, a prelude that honors the night because it is a symbol for the historical situation of Western humanity. Honoring the night means to honor the "night of history," the nocturnal Fate of the Western world destined to live in a godless age far from the classical world and the presence of its divinities. In his Hymns to the Night, Novalis too had given a historical sense to the night. But his Christian mentality sees in this night a higher truth in contrast to the bright show of the day. As much as he honors the night because everything unessential disappears in it and the pure spirits can espouse one another without hindrance, its historical meaning is still that of having overcome death in Christ, precisely that aspect in which the serenely bright world of the Greek gods failed. In contrast, the opposition between day and night characterizes Hölderlin's consciousness of history in a negative sense; first by the distress of the gods' absence and then by the contrast of Greek life as the brightness of day filled with the presence of the divinities. These are by no means obscure experiences formed by Hölderlin in both image and counterimage. By the godlessness of the moderns,

< previous page

page_92 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_93

next page > Page 93

he means that "lack of sensitivity for communal honor and property," that narrow constriction into a limited sphere of life, particularly that narrow-minded domesticity that Hölderlin recognizes in the German character, a spirit of menial concern always on the lookout for its own advantage, where mistrust separates each from the other. In contrast, the poet knows: "The sphere which is higher than that of man is that of the God." The divinities are the animating forces that ensoul the individual as a member of a community. In our days, when "things are driven by servile anxiety," love alone is the only sign of a more beautiful age. Only in the souls of those who love one another is the community of life truly alive. To them the world is still divine, for they accept everything they encounter as a sign of favor, a miracle, just as they are a miracle to each other. Therefore, the poet feels transformed and healed by Diotima: "For then, in divine stillness, I learned what it is to honor, after Diotima healed my mind." But wherever anxiety prevails and exacts its brazen service, where day after day ''utility," the constant preoccupation with what is useful and profitable "steals our souls away," there life has become inhuman so that the divinities entirely withdraw. It is the night in which the God is absent. But woe! Our race wanders in the night; it lives without divinity as if in Hell; they are rooted to their own urges and in the bustling workplace each hears only himself. The savages work hard with a tremendous arm, restless; but ever and always without issue, like the Furies, is the labor of the poor. In contrast to this night, Hölderlin defines the "divine day in the presence of Hellas' flourishing children," as a life lived completely in the presence of the divine powers, where the conduct of life is ordered in honor of the gods, whose ordinances we love and admire like the glorious temples and cities, like the festivals and theaters of classical Greece. The presence of the divinities in all the delicate, varied relationships of life that we have rationalized with our "iron concepts," that is, our moral preceptsthis all-pervading religious conception of life in the Greek world is in truth a "higher enlighten-

< previous page

page_93 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_94

next page > Page 94

ment." It does not consist in the abstract generalities of a rational morality but rather in the concrete universality of a commonly experienced reality, a common spirit. But this night is not only the moment when the God is absent, of distress when all life's supports have vanished. It is also the night preserving the memory of the day as well as the expectancy of its return. "For when it is finished and the day extinguished," the divinities have disappeared and their images become invisible, A golden ecstasy, as if from the grave's flames, rises up and beyond and plays around our doubting heads like twilight. But this time of separation of gods and men still retains a memory of their unity. Even in our godless world, we are not totally without a knowledge of the divine realm. Bread and Wine, the pledges of the Christian promise, are interpreted by the poet as gifts of the gods for which "there is still some quiet gratitude." The consecration by the harmony of earth and sun, their visible dependence on powers lying beyond our control, like the elements present in the weatherall this reveals them as a guarantor of an experience of the world that has otherwise become incomprehensible to us moderns: it is the experience of the world in joy. "For joy, with spirit, the greater became too great among men." It belongs to the very nature of joy that it is "spirit." That means, first of all, that it is common and creates community. Not that it is first joy that then wishes to be shared; rather it becomes joy only at the moment of being shared. . . . No one was able to bear life alone; being shared, such things rejoice the heart, and, shared with friends, become an exultation. And, second, we must not think it's only a blind feeling; rather, it is found in the openness of being received; when it sees and knows itself shared as a common possession, only then is it "joy with spirit." This experience of classical man, recognizing and honoring the gift in the possession, no longer abides among men. Only Bread and Wine, according to the poet, preserve something of it. Otherwise, men are always in the habit of relating everything to their own profit. But the spirit of profit is one that separates. The anxious concern

< previous page

page_94 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_95

next page > Page 95

only for one's own advantage puts us in bondage and makes us lonely. It is the "night-spirit" of the Western age. Precisely from this situation arises the office of the Hesperian poet, to preserve and transmit knowledge of the divine. Certainly it is difficult to be a poet in a paltry age, and Hölderlin laments, "To be full of insight is sweet, but also a suffering." The words do not open themselves to him like flowers, these words in which a people recognizes itself and its world. "We must often be silent; the holy names fail us: our hearts pound, and yet speech falters." But precisely for that reason, his solitary work is no idle waste. But you say, they are like the holy priests of the Wine God processing from land to land in the holy night. And so, the night gains a new and further meaning. It is not just the twilight where something of the fading day is preserved. It is also the twilight in the shade of which the spirit is renewed, the secret place where a new future is prepared. The Hesperian night is one of preservation and recollection. The God now lives far from us "up there in a different world." . . . That is how well the divinities protect us. For a weak vessel is not always able to contain them. Only on occasion does man endure the divine abundance. Life is then a dream of them. But we are helped by error and sleep, and distress and the night make us strong. That is the insight to which the bold, nocturnal spirit of the poet rises: this Western age is a holy night that points to a definite return of the Gods. What the hymns of the ancients prophesied about the children of God, behold! we are they, we: It is the fruit of Hesperia. In an early fair copy, the poet puts it this way: "Behold! We are they, we. It is Orcus, Elysium." Both versions shed mutual light on one another. The one says that even Hesperia, the land of the shades, will

< previous page

page_95 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_96

next page > Page 96

bear fruit, something that no one ever expected. The second says that: what seemed to be the Underworld of the gods' absence is in reality Elysium, the land of promise. A continuation of the poem in a late draft reads (first published by Beissner in his dissertation "Hölderlin's Translations from the Greek," but, as I show in what follows, incorrectly interpreted): For the spirit is not at home in the beginning, not at the source. His homeland consumes him. The spirit bravely forgets, and loves the colony. Our flowers rejoice, like the shade of our forests, the parched mouth. The giver of soul came close to being consumed by fire. These verses undoubtedly belong in the same context as the final strophe of "Brot und Wein." If so, then they must be interpreted with this context in mind. They speak likewise of the amazing fulfillment of a future promise, which the poet recognizes in the fact that the new children of God shall arise from the Western night. In that case the meaning must be that the spirit is not at home in its origin, that is, in its native South. The spirit is at home only where it truly abides. But the spirit may not stay in its hot, consuming native land. And so, it begins to move; it "loves" the idea of a colony, that is, in a heroic forgetting of its past happiness, it seeks to found a new world, the place of its home and abiding. 1 And, miraculously, our flowers and the shade of our forests gladden the parched spirit. The twilight of the North and the period of its rule is the new, previously hidden dwelling place of the spirit. A new understanding of Western history is realized in this reinterpretation of the night; and the poet, who knows and proclaims it, is one initiated into the meaning of history, whether it be that a sudden rapture carried him away to the beginning of Western history, granting him a reflection on its nature, or whether it be that he is a seer, moved by many metamorphoses and following the path of the word from the East and the flight of the eagle. . . . He comes from Indus and across the snowy tops of Parnassos, high above the sacrificial hills of Italy . . . who finally swings over the Alps and calls the world of the Germans into its historical destiny. The poet's reinterpretation of the night

< previous page

page_96 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_97

next page > Page 97

culminates in this patriotic promise. It is precisely the distress, the innocent defenseless position of Germania "among the kings and the peoples" that founds the promise of its being chosen. O holy heart of the peoples, O land of our fathers! All-patient like our silent mother earth and unrecognized. Thus begins "Der Gesang der Deutschen" [The Hymn of the Germans]. And in another ode "An die Deutschen" [To the Germans], confidence in the "Genius of our people" is victorious over the ill-humor of any who accuse his people of being pensive and slow to action. Finally, the eye of the poet, isolated in the night of a paltry time, is opened onto a new present, the present of what is future. He who suffered only because he had to say of himself, "I recognize only what blooms" and was thus forced into a tone of lamentation for the faded glory, now becomes a singer of hymns who decodes the signs in which the future is proclaimed But the father, he who has dominion over all, desires particularly that the firm letter be cultivated and what actually exists be well interpreted. In this conclusion of "Patmos," the new task is neatly delineated. All depends on how one interprets the present so that it becomes a sign of the future and a meaningful text. This is the task the poet has in mind when he undertakes from now on to sing of the "Angels of the Fatherland." They are the witnesses and messengers of the divine world, known by the poet, above all, in the great primal text of the elemental life of nature: But we receive a great deal of the divinity. The flame was given into our hands, as well as the sail and the flood of the sea. For those strange powers around us are no longer familiar in a human way. When the elements, as is their wont, go beyond what is humanly familiarpaticularly in the moment of profit and usethat is their divinity; and precisely because they are "before your eyes" they can become our "teachers." In the ordinary round of daily life, they com-

< previous page

page_97 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_98

next page > Page 98

pel us to reflect on the divine, and admonish us to practice proper gratitude. The waters rush past the rocks and storm through the forest, and, at their very name, there resounds from ancient times echoes of the departed divinity. Even more significant for us, however, are those fixed forms of our native landscape, particularly its rivers and mountains. For the course of the rivers and the ranges of the mountains are like decrees of Fate already befallen us. They form the historical space of our existence, and even more important, they point beyond this space into other realms of origin and destiny. So it is when the Danube rushes before us to the East on the path of our historical memory, and when the Rhine, inhibited in its urgent desire to attain the land of its origin, is "content to wander about in the regions of Germany" and finds both for itself and for us a "justly alloted destiny." "For they should be as a language." Obviously Hölderlin is not simply talking about a vague symbolism that creates a sense of ordered relationships for explorers of the unknown. Rather, he means the significance of a genuine correspondence. The joints and furrows of heaven and earth are signs of Fate for us. For human history, of individuals as well as peoples, is not only coordinated with those features of destiny by which Nature is informed; it is itself such a destiny, an encounter of gods and men, a part of the history of the gods. There is no doubt that Hölderlin found such significance in the great men of Western history. They were men of destiny, self-fulfilled, a "ladder of heaven'' forming history's meaning. . . . Wherever, namely, the divinities need a fence or a milestone to mark their way, or a bath, the spirit rises like fire in the breast of the men. Here then we finally attain the ultimate stage in the reinterpretation of the night. It is not just a time of distress, nor simply a period of preservation and preparation pointing to the future. At the same time, it is the enduring ground and a stable existence constantly shared with the figured day and the ever-present divinity. It is the myth of the titans in whose light the poet completes the interpretation of history from the perspective of the future. To

< previous page

page_98 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_99

next page > Page 99

this myth Hölderlin devotes several hymns that remained fragmentary sketches, but it is also present in the background of several other great poems of the last period. In Greek mythology, the titans are the enemies of the gods, the opponents of the Olympians who, according to Hesiod, are defeated in the Thessalian war of the gods and thence banished to the dark abyss of Tartaros. However, Prometheus in particular 2 must be counted among the titans, the friend of man who obtained fire for mortals, thus establishing their dominion over nature. Seen from this point of view, every fresh threat to the divinely established order of the world is a revolt of the conquered titans, even including that of human beings who, in boundless opposition to the divine will, desire to rule. These are the more or less relevant features of the Greek mythological tradition that Hölderlin revived out of the depths of his own experience. How does the poet view the titans? Obviously as a forgetting of one's origin and the consequent attempt to "become like the Gods." The Rhine is a son of the gods who does not forget his origin when he takes upon himself the quiet destiny of his slow and generous passage through German lands. Consequently, he awakens the opposite image of what we think of as "titanic," of what is presumptuous. That which is genuinely divine never reveals itself in insolence. On the contrary, When one wishes to be like them, and will not tolerate what is less, the fanatic. Then he is struck by God's judgment: . . . So that he smashes his own house and scolds the one he loves as he scolds the enemy, and Father and Child are buried under the ruins . . . Here again it is possible that a mythological motif is in the poet's mind, particularly that of Bellerophon and Hercules who were punished by insanity; but also here, the primary experience is a present one: the self-destruction of one who insists on obstinate self-sufficiency. Who was it that first corrupted the bonds of love and made from them bonds of repression?

< previous page

page_99 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_100

next page > Page 100

asks the poet, and he is certainly not looking for an answer from some mythical prehistory. Rather, he is asking what this mythical revolt against the gods actually means, particularly as an ever-present temptation: a forgetting, an actual forgetting of the gods, a reversal of the true relationship between gods and men. This shows its effect in the reversal of our relationship to things. Bonds of love and bonds of restraint: a kind of subtle guidance and direction carried out in loving union ("in light embrace") as opposed to the push and pull of executive authority. This is a good indication of the change in our relationship to nature that has come about because of man's unrestrained desire to be master. The gifts of nature are no longer accepted and used as they are offered; instead, they are violently compelled to be further productive. But this is still to speak mythologically. What is meant is the transformation of our relationship to Being into the mode of calculation, which in fact characterizes the fate of modern times. To take an example, when faced with the abundant blessings of nature, the course of a great river perhaps, we no longer recognize what we love, the immemorial familiarity with our homeland, but rather, in our economic fever, see only a occasion for calculation, say, a water way with so and so much potential for transport. Actually what characterizes the present time is the fact that the spirit is "put into service." For, much too long has the divine been in service, and all the powers of heaven, the gracious ones, have been trifled away, consumed, for pleasure, thanklessly, by a cunning race. It is the spirit of the savage, of one who refuses to participate within the bonds of community, whom the poet recognizes in the prevailing spirit of his time. "In the frantic workshop each one hears only himself" He sees in this spirit a mythical power. These are the princes of the titans who seize the gifts of their mother "like stolen goods." They have violently accepted the curse into their hearts; a curse, because in the final analysis the revolt of the titans is impotent, and their destiny excludes all blessing. It would seem, of course, that there is no power that imposes limits and obligations on them, for the simple reason that the divinity conceals itself. But the Father, so that we may abide, closes our eyes with the night. He despises the untamed . . .

< previous page

page_100 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_101

next page > Page 101

And yet, even the most extreme revolt of the abyss, the most arrogant presumption of those arrayed against the god can never be a real threat to the divine authority of the Father. But I would not like to say that the divinities become weak, when discontent arises For only in the final moment, when the "father's head is threatened," does he rise up "wonderful in his anger." This is, so to speak, the profoundest knowledge a seer-poet can discern. Precisely in the night and in the rise of "ancient confusion" is to be found the strongest sign of what lies in the future. The signs of the heavens, which the poet recognizes and which predict for him the return of the gods, are not just any "deeds of earth" that lie open for any eye to see. Only the poet sees them, and that means they announce themselves only in the word of song, a word only the poet can achieve. The general validity of the myth of the titans is so great that even the poet's ability to interpret signs is touched by the temptation and threatened by the curse of the "titanic." He is threatened by the temptation to be too hasty, "to impose his own meaning in anger," to "spur himself on" and to approach the abundance of the gods' table in the spirit of restlessness and dearth. This temptation must be countered by the insight that the law, whereby the God rises up in justice and defeats the revolt of the titans, is inscrutable. "For the scheming God hates untimely growth.'' And so the poet admonishes himself to realize that he is not called to "be something, but to learn." In particular, success as a poet does not lie in his power. He cannot force it. And for that reason it becomes a sign. Then it is the time, like now, for song, and here is the staff of song beckoning from above . . . The staff of poetry, the ancient sign of the Rhapsode, must awaken the dead who are not yet enslaved to vulgarity. There are two important aspects here. Song is only a hint; that is, it does not awaken and choose everyone"For nothing is common"; but it has this awakening power because it both loosens and binds; it loosens the bonds of vulgarity, releases from barbaric concerns, and it binds because it calls us into the community of the word. In this word, it realizes and

< previous page

page_101 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_102

next page > Page 102

preserves for us all that which filled the "secret breast" of a few single individuals. For the poet, even the divinity of Wine was guaranteed by the fact that the hymns sung in its honor were sung "in earnest." This song did not spring from a learned mythology, but from the experience that wine is a living, redeeming, and inspiring power. But the important question is still, How is it that success in song can be a pledge of Being and a guarantee for the return of the gods? Of course, success is not the result of a calculating effort on the part of the poet, but appears rather as the poet's being at the disposal of a higher power. But in what sense does this imply a guarantee for the transformation of the many? Obviously, language is the common possession of world in its authentic possibility, that is, when it is not the expression of individual opinions, but has rather, in its poetic structure, its own center and determines by itself alone how it is received. As such a poetic structure, isolated from all opinions, poetic language is an ontological reality surpassing any single individual as well as its own creator; not mere enchantment, but the appearance of a transformed world. This transformation of the world into an order of Being that rises above any single individual consciousness is precisely that return to the lost contact and commitment between gods and men that is the theme of Hölderlin's poetry. Thus, song is not a sign in the sense that it points to something other than itself, something still on the way. What is on the way happens in the very poem itself. A late fragment can make this context more coherent. We read: . . . Open are the windows of heaven and the spirit of night is free to roam, the stormer of heaven; he has wheedled our land with many and unpoetic tongues; he has rolled in the rubbish right up to the present hour. And yet, what I want will come, if . . . Obviously the poet has here fused two mythical motifs: the Greek myth of the titans and the story of the Tower of Babel with the resulting confusion of languages. This siege of idle chatter in unpoetic languages, this distortion of the linguistic cosmos, appears at the same time as a confusion of the divine order. To be unpoetic means to claim to know nothing about the divine. When we then say that

< previous page

page_102 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_103

next page > Page 103

languages spoken by human beings are unpoetic, we are actually speaking about a titanic revolt. On the other hand, there is an obvious correspondence between a language spoken by the poet, common to all men, and the day that is also common to all. The word of the poet gives to the experience of the divine both firm support and committed obligation. Support and commitment to firm paths of conduct also characterize the day in contrast to the crude, the savage, the obscure, the confusing aspects of the night. Day and night are not simply experienced in their opposition, but precisely in their inner connection. Words have to arise "like flowers," just as effortlessly, but likewise just as well prepared as the roots of the plant in the nourishing soil. ("The earth must bear beforehand"); in the same way, the being of the day is related to that of the night, when there appears, feverish and in chains, what is truly living; when the "light is pure and the divinities drunk with the truth that everything is as it is?" The clarity of the figured world and its divine ordinances preserves the connection with what is unformed: But all of you feel, too, another way. For alas, a measure of the crude is necessary so that what is pure can be known. In the myth, this is represented by the restraint of the titans by the power of Zeus, who heaps enormous mountains on them. The poet constantly and everywhere sees the unformed forces of the titanic powers at work, even within the divine order; but here, of course, only in restraint. The divine order is a containment of Chaos. And the real message of the poet is the indestructibility of the rule of ordering spirits. The revolt of the titans, the repudiation of the divine, is essentially impotent. It is only an illusion if the power of the divinities ever appears to be weak. The law rules even over the despiritualization of the world and contains it. We need but think of the conclusion of the "der Rhein" where God is recognized: By day, when what is alive appears feverish and chained, or also by night when all is mixed, without order, and ancient confusion returns.

< previous page

page_103 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_104

next page > Page 104

Considering the surprising firmness of Hölderlin's mythical world, we can easily connect with this myth of the titans that other motif which the poet (at an earlier period) has rendered in the poem "Nature and Art, or Saturn and Jupiter": You have great dominion by day and your law blooms; you hold the scales, son of Saturn! You distribute the lots and then rest happily in the fame of the eternal art of your rule. But the singers tell one another you once banished your own old father to the pit and there, where the savages wait upon you, there, ever so long wails in innocence the God of the Golden Age. Once without effort and greater than you, even though he issued no commandment and none of the mortals knew him by name. Come down, then! or do not be ashamed of gratitude! And if you want to remain, serve the ancient one and do not begrudge it him when the poet calls his name in the presence of Gods and men. For just as your lightening issues from the cloud, so behold, everything you have is from him, what you rule bears witness to him and from those ancient joys all power has emerged. And if I first felt vibrant life in my heart and gradually saw what you fashioned, and if in their cradle shifting time fell into ecstatic sleep, then I hear you, Kronion! and know you, the wise master who, like us, son of time, give laws and proclaim what is concealed in the holy twilight. The mythological data, on which Hölderlin here builds, are connected with the myth of the titans. It concerns the relationship of the new ruler of Olympia, Jupiter, with Saturn, his overthrown and ban-

< previous page

page_104 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_105

next page > Page 105

ished father. "There where the savages are justly before you"there in the abyss that conceals and protects the titans, the God of the Golden Age is without guilt. Jupiter is admonished to free him from there and to grant him proper honor. We are reminded of Aeschylus's Prometheus, whose task it is to teach even the young ruler of Olympia to pursue moderation and reconciliations. 3 Here it is not Prometheus who teaches Zeus to be a just ruler; but also here the fading twilight of the Saturnian era must be united with the clarity of Jupiter's law, if this permanence is to be victorious. The rule of Saturn, the Saturnian Days, was for man that blessed time of effortless pleasure in the joys of existence. Saturn ruled without enjoining commandments, just as nature works without effort. In contrast, Jupiter is the art of governing, conscious rule according to justice and law. But it is prcisely this new order that is to be reconciled with the flow of time. Only then will Kronion (Jupiter) be the wise master, when he . . . like us, a son of time, gives laws and proclaims what is concealed in holy twilight. The reconciliation of Saturn and Jupiter, of nature and art, expresses in somewhat archaic language the same overcoming of the opposition between night and day we found in Hölderlin's development of the titan motif. The order of the Day cannot arise from the mere high spirits of the victorious god; otherwise it would have no permanence. "Understanding" must also be present; but that means knowledge of nature, knowledge of the dependence on the origin from the twilight of time. The titans are justly banished to the abyss because they are "savages" that Day cannot tolerate. On the other hand, Saturn is no antigod; he is nature and thereby a genuine power of divine governance. Art, all its glory notwithstanding, can only bear witness to it. And the poem means that only the ruler attaining such wisdom can remain uncontested by any revolt from the abyss. Perhaps one should pursue this thought even further. Because he simply allows the titans to revolt and only at the culmination of the insurrection rises up to restore order, can he be the undisputed ruler. He does not maintain in abstraction an order of things (and men), but rather he shows his "understanding" precisely by consenting to the will of "ripening time" and the unwritten laws by which ''nature" holds

< previous page

page_105 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_106

next page > Page 106

sway and restores its balance. For this reason he permits the present moment to run its apparently terrible course. We need hardly be more explicit as to how this mythological interpretation of things by the poet is to be transferred into the consciousness of the hearer. It is certainly not the case that the hidden features of this symbolism would have to be united and assimilated in an expressly conceptual understanding to effect its meaning. They simply represent the mythical formation of what is experienced by everyone when faced with the final characteristic features of Hölderlin's poetic individuality and what constitutes his strange contemporaneity. Hölderlin is so fully directed to what lies in the future he sees and to which he bears witness that he has again conferred on the poet something of the ancient dignity of the seer. The ancient seerand the poet who knows himself to clothe the office of vatesis not a miracle worker who succeeds in sounding out the future by a kind of magic; rather, he is one who knows. He tries to read the signs of what is to come because he knows what has beenand how it always is. But whereas the ancient seer and poet, whether he warns or admonishes, curses or blesses, knows himself to be a spokesman for the God who visibly penetrates all being and action with his power, the situation of the Western poet is quite different, and even what seems most familiar is of different composition. Hölderlin's word also is the word of one who knows, the word of an initiate. From the affectionate remembrance of "gratitude," in which past divinity continues to live, there comes to him an interpretation of the coming hour. "Yet, what is past as well as what is future is to the poets holy." So he too knows because he knows what has been and what can be. Like the ancient seer he stands, like one gone blind, under the crush of divine abundance of which he alone is witness. Like him too, he stands in the dangerous solitude of one who is called. Nevertheless, everything is quite different, and precisely this difference confers on Hölderlin the uniqueness of his destiny. In contrast to the visionary of classical antiquity, he knows nothing of future and past, not because the extraordinary knowledge of the seer includes all of Being, but because, by virtue of his heart, what is past is transformed into what is future. The symbol of the night, of the twilight between the fading and the waking day, represents the historical situation of the poet, at once one of abundance and dearth. It

< previous page

page_106 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_107

next page > Page 107

is not as though, under the influence of divine knowledge, he reads the signs of the future to which others have no access, but the knowledge of which is nevertheless a vital necessity. The future events he sees are not the still hidden happenings of a time not yet come. We would certainly go wrong if we were to understand and ponder this poetic message as a "reconnoitering of the future." The future that he proclaims is not an event sent by the gods, whether good or bad; rather, it is the return of the gods themselves; and this happens in nothing other than this evocation of the poet (and its echo in the heart of the people). In this sense, the seer, along with his knowledge, is exposed to the most extreme uncertainty. His song sings not only of what lies in the future, but is itself the essential happening in which the future must come to pass. What seems to subjective reflection like a process of poetic inspiration and reception is actually the appearance of divine Being and participates in both the certainty and the uncertainty of what is coming. And the times of the creator are like the ranges of mountains that swell up from sea to sea and move over the earth . . . In this way, the visionary word of the Hesperian poet is an independent event and awaits its own realization. Having within it its own future, it remains a pledge of enduring Being that is nevertheless exposed to all the uncertainty of the time. For this reason, all the overhasty applications of his poetic discourse to the present and its expectations miss the mark. Even though the poet, particularly in a poem of such intense and impressive power as, for example, "Der Frieden" [Peace], seems to express the experiences of his own battle-scarred and sorrow-laden generation. His poetic word does not, nevertheless, point to an expected event in the future; rather, he speaks his enduring word both as one initiated into the future as well as one experienced in all human destiny. As if the old waters were coming again changed into another, a more awful rage, since the time has come to cleanse.

< previous page

page_107 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_108

next page > Page 108

And so, that unimaginable battle worked and grew and heaved from year to year, restless, and swamped the fearful land so that darkness and paleness veils the heads of men. Who started it? who brought the curse? It's not so young as today or yesterday and our fathers didn't know who were the first to lose the sense of limit. And yet they were driven by their spirit. Too long, much too long, do mortals step on one another's heads and argue over dominion, fearing their neighbor. Even in his own land the man finds no blessing. The desires of this fermenting race, like Chaos, still drift about and wander in confusion: But the life of the poor is unruly, full of despair and cold with care. But you, O Mother earth, securely travel the certain path in the light. Springtime blooms and, with ever changing melodies, your waxing time continues in the abundance of your life. You who are contented, come with your quiet fame, yes, and your unwritten laws and with your love, come and give our lives an enduring abode, give us back our hearts.

< previous page

page_108 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_109

next page > Page 109

Bach and Weimar Johann Sebastian is a child of the Thuringian landscape. We find here no puzzling fate that so often suffers genius to spring up unexpectedly and incomprehensibly from an indifferent world and an indifferent family. Johann Sebastian Bach grew up in a pious, music-oriented land as the son of a family where for generations there had accumulated a solid inheritance of musical gifts; even his sons display a rich portion of this family endowment. There was also no special destiny involved in the fact that J.S. Bach was, during his intensely creative life, active for a significant period in Weimar, the capital of Thuringia. He came to the Weimar court in 1708 as a young man of 23 where, for nine years, he enjoyed a career as organist and concertmaster. And actually his success in his chosen profession of organist and the deep family connections with the land of Thuringia led him in the most natural and logical way to this position. For this reason, Thuringia and its capital city have an undisputed right to honor and love him as their faithful soneven though his genius, on no less comprehensible paths, led him via Köthen to Leipzig and there stamped him as the almost legendary figure of the cantor of St. Thomas Church as which he continues to live in the This lecture, given in Weimar in 1946, was the motivation behind a long letter written by Karl Straube to the author that appeared in Archiv für Musikwissenchaft 14 (1957): 138144. This essay was first published in Weimar in 1946 by Verlag Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger

< previous page

page_109 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_110

next page > Page 110

history of German culture. In our time, when so many bright stars of our past national life have become veiled in an obscurity for which we are responsible and the effects of which we must continue to bear, we are particularly obliged to recall our own living essence as vitally displayed by the greatest sons of our people, "so that in this moment of hesitation, in this darkness, we might have something on which to anchor our lives." It seemed natural, during a Weimar music festival devoted to Johann Sebastian Bach, to recall particularly Bach's Weimar years; after all, the work of his Weimar years was the decisive epoch in which he learned to narrow the immense range of his talents into the dense coinage of his own style and thereby predetermined at the outset the immeasurable fullness and depth of his late work. And who, considering his analytical and interpretative skill, would have been more qualified to awaken the fruitful and decisive aspect of these years than the past-master and continuing guardian of German Bach scholarship, Karl Straube? It is for all of us a painful disappointment that Karl Straube, for reasons of health, had to resign his intention of contributing to the common celebration of Bach's Weimar years. In place of this singular connoisseur, there now comes before you simply one from the great circle of admirers of Bach's music. Because of this, we are all going to lose the instruction Straube could have given us on the theme of Bach and Weimar. He could have shown us how Bach, during the Weimar years, succeeded in fusing the North German culture of organ playing with the effectual charm of the Italian-French art of opera; how the tremendous architectural structure of the fugue was combined with the recent media of monody, recitative, and aria, an event that opened to his age a completely new dimension of religious and artistic expression. Even beyond that, he could have brought into view the artistic and religious forces out of which Bach succeeded in unifying and intensifying these different musical traditions. He surely would also not have neglected to show the beginnings in these Weimar years of those works of his later period that grew to such gigantic stature. All this we must forego; for I can speak neither as musician nor musicologist, but only as a reflective amateur who must count on indulgence from the specialists and friendly cooperation from other amateurs. For the reflective amateur, however, the theme of "Bach and Weimar" must accordingly shift its focus. Bach and Weimar. Can these two not be related to each other in a different sense than that of biography and scholarship? Do not

< previous page

page_110 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_111

next page > Page 111

these two names signify two supporting pillars of our whole spiritual being? Does not Weimar, the Weimar of Schiller and Goethe that was once also the Weimar of Johann Sebastian Bach, does it not really still bear alone the ruins of what we are? Here is the beginning of our poetic present; what lies beyond is almost totally the past. The range of a people's spiritual present, however, is decisive for the possibilities of its future. When we begin to consider this with concern and hope, at the same moment we see that brilliant star Johann Sebastian Bach rise into the firmament. For his music designates no less sharply and decisively a boundary of our spiritual present. Just as in the realm of poetry there is seldom something that reaches back before the great poets of Weimareven Luther and Lessing are hardly perceived by us except through the language of our classic literatureso also is the horizon of our musical past literally bound by the massive phenomenon of Bach's music. Only a few connoisseurs have a proper ear for Heinrich Schütz, or even the great Dutch contemporaries of Martin Luther. J. S. Bach is the first of the great classic composers of German music. But this must not be understood as a matter of style. The concept of classicism has another, deeper sense than that of style (the use of which outside of its historical origin in classical antiquity is, anyway, methodologically questionable). According to a statement of Hegel's, which itself can be considered classical, classical means "that which signifies itself and thereby also interprets itself." This is readily convincing if this statement is given an historical dimension. For it cannot, of course, mean that such self-signifying would be a characteristic of works in the sense that they are continually expressing themselves in a suprahistorical timelessness. Rather, this is a judgment on the inexhaustible riches with which a work or a master enters into the process of historical change. Of course, it seems to each present moment as if a common human word speaks to us in Homer and Sophocles, in Dante, in Shakespeare and Goethe, in Bach and in Beethoven. But what is this common human word? What seems to us all to be human is determined only by the gathered word of these great poets of humanity, a word that coheres in our consciousness. We ourselves purify them, as it were, of their historical singularity and their passing transcience, until we finally perceive their pure essence as our own, as belonging to general human nature. So this means that the classical is not something that endures

< previous page

page_111 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_112

next page > Page 112

by its own strength; rather it is something continually revived, something that ever grants us a fresh present. Just like Goethe and Schiller, like Beethoven and like Bach. For even the music of the great cantor of St. Thomas is for us inexhaustibly present, no matter how much it is also the expression of a feudal age, an alien age that speaks the language of robust faith from which we are separated by a world of skepticism and thorough-going arbitrariness. That this is true for Bach is by far more amazing than that it is true for Beethoven or for Goethe and Schiller. For these genial individuals, manifestations of modern creative genius, have, beginning with themselves, initiated a chain of constant impression, evaluation, and imitation that holds us firmly in the grasp of the successive generations of their influence. Even more, they were themselves quite aware of creating something new and enduring with their works and activity, being animated by a monumentally self-assured realization of establishing new foundations. Johann Sebastian Bach, on the other hand, considering the reputation and fame he enjoyed, was quickly forgotten by his contemporaries and successors. Actually, he forgot himself even more rapidly by creating ever new works in careless profusion, bringing them to performance and then pushing them aside like a naive artisan for whom every work can seemingly be replaced by further industry and fresh success. And yet, in a creative and as yet unfinished process of discovery, he too has joined the ranks of those classical masters of German music, acquiring ever greater depth from decade to decade throughout the world. And so, the theme "Bach and Weimar" has been for us transformed into a question directed just as much to the figure of the great master of music as to us ourselves. Or better, how could it happen that he too became a classic, a compelling presence in our own time, and a guarantee of the future of our culture? In this instance, it was a matter of chanceor was it not more than chancethat the history of his newly recovered actuality is, in its beginning, associated with Weimar classicism. Forkel, the first great biographer of Bach, whose work appeared in 1802, endeavored to win over the "patriotic admirers of genuine musical art" for the priceless national heritage of Bach's music. How would such an undertaking have even been conceivable without the increasing self-consciousness of the German spirit and German art that Goethe so forcefully established and strengthened by his own work? And Zelter,

< previous page

page_112 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_113

next page > Page 113

the musician and Goethe's friend, won Goethe over to Bach's music at the very moment when Mendelssohn, with his new production of the Passion According to St. Matthew, inaugurated the great revival of Bach, the effects of which have been felt now for more than a century. The fact that a Romantic conception of music was responsible for this movement has remained, right up to the present time, decisive for the continued cultivation of Bach's music. The expression of deep feeling, a powerful dynamism, a melodious welling-up of the waters of life, mysterious even to itself; these are the basic features of a Romantic experience of music. And although not a valid yardstick to be applied to Bach's music today, they still remain the basic counterstandard against which we can realize what makes Bach unique among the classics of German music and raises him to the status of a contemporary. What is it that today makes Bach's music so convincingly alive? What is the source of our life today? For some time now we have not been able to answer that this source is the heritage of Lutheran piety. Of course, it is true that Bach's music in its secular and spiritual, its vocal and instrumental forms, resounds out of that same pure, clear metal and everywhere has as its purpose the honor of God. It is also true that this music is one of spiritual inwardness that could have grown only in the soil of Christianity and its renewal in the Reformation. But its validity transcends its source in the same way as the history of human interiority has its beginnings beyond its Christian origin. It is a long road from the musical space of Gregorian plain chant, used by the Dutch to structure their polyphony, to Bach's compositional technique where the passion of the word is joined to the order of a formal system. But it is even further than we tend to believe from these superbly crafted works of the cantor of St. Thomas to the powerful confessions of Beethoven or Bruckner. The inner path of the modern soul has many twists and turns, but hardly one that so reminds us of a conversion as does the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. It is an art containing an inexhaustible wealth of expression reaching all the way from the inwardness of a spirit in dialogue with itself to the formality of onomatopoetic imitation. But the law of its being is provided neither by the attempt to express an ever-deepening inwardness nor by the allurements of picturesque effects of sound. As far as the expression of mood is concerned this music can compete with any other; yet we totally misunderstand its

< previous page

page_113 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_114

next page > Page 114

true nature if it is interpreted as the expression of moods or feelings. Even where it rises to dramatic discourse between actors, as for example in the music of the Passions, or to a dialogue of a comfort-seeking soul with the word of revelation and the confidence of the community, its law is still not that of the immediacy of inner expression. For this reason, any psychological interpretation is untoward. It is as if the expressive and experiencing subjectivity, the individual law of personality, has not yet been released and possesses no form-giving validity, as it does in later classic and romantic music. Rather, the law of this music is a supraindividual order, a music of inwardness, but never the mere expression of interiority. It can explain nothing; but there is no doubt that it can be a source of clarity, particularly when we consider Bach's relation to his divine instrument, the organ. Of course, its voices sing; but what sings in them are not voices in which an individual being expresses itself. Rather, they are instruments by which the great form of this music is structured. Even the singer's voice has its full determination only in the objective presentation of the musical architecture. That is precisely why this music so touches and admonishes us. It has a tremendously expressive character, but is nevertheless not an art of expression. It is characteristic of subjective expression that what is here expressed is not transferred into external objectivity, but rather remains enclosed in itself. All expression has the task of revealing what is hidden precisely as that which is hidden. Every gesture is the witness of a mystery. Only what is and remains for-itself is capable of being expressed, so that it is then retrieved from all externalization, returning back into the realm of the for-itself. Bach's music, however, is always completely expression, completely reality, the expression of the whole, indeed the reality of the whole, of God, of the Son of Man, but not that of an individual human soul. From time immemorial it has been noticed with a certain astonishment that Bach refused to be influenced by the religiosity of Pietism in which the soul converses with God in so confident and human a manner. To say that this Pietistic current of his time would not have permitted to the striving of Bach's music the extended space needed for his artistic activity is just as superficial an explanation as to explain it biographically by attributing it to the Lutheran tradition of the Bach family. The fact that this pious musician sought the honor of God in an ever-clearer, ever morecomprehensive intensification

< previous page

page_114 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_115

next page > Page 115

of musical symmetries and responses, tensions and resolutions and was not simply content with the devotional inwardness of the chorale, of which he was unsurpassed master, points to the original law of his spirit and of his piety. This law was to honor God as the Lord of the world with all the means art has at its disposal. The force and sublimity of his genius are particularly apparent for us in the fact that he was able to integrate the most extreme tensions into the most powerful form and knew how to fuse into the organ playing of his own tradition the new delights of monody, and with it the language, both luring and seductive, of an immediate expression of the soul. The continually spinning figuration of the organ style gained, by the unity of the monodically phrased theme, a new architectonic strength and greatness. He encountered in himself alone that to which recent centuries have succumbed almost to the point of dissolving all binding form. But for him, all expansion of the language of tone was simply the occasion of a new triumph of spirit and form. The history of the Western soul possesses in him one of its great moments of victory. The forming and binding of the world of feeling into the formal order of the spirit is the mystery of his increasing power over our souls. He has often been favorably compared with Leibniz, his great contemporary in philosophy. Quite justifiablyeven though the comparison of the masterfulness of his all-encompassing musical architecture with Leibniz's doctrine of preestablished harmony remains somewhat superficial. But actually, Leibniz has for us, like Bach, a similar exemplary significance. His important system expounded in the Monodologytransformed into the Romantic form of a dynamic pantheismbecame the seed of the gravest dangers of modern subjectivism. Nevertheless, the vital law of the monadthe law of expression, of an organic unfolding of obscurely concealed poweris the wrong witness for the claims of modern ego-consciousness. The windowless monad, producing only its own individual conception of the world, is not the final conclusion of Leibnizian wisdom, nor the initial expression of the desperate inwardness of the modern individual. Not only does this monad have its place in a predetermined order of divine creation, but it can even ascend into the realm of an understanding that recognizes this order in its rational principles. The architecture of the universal masterbuilder can be perceived by this power that gradually rises into the brightness of understanding.

< previous page

page_115 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_116

next page > Page 116

The organizing principle of Leibniz's system is not the blindness of dynamic impulse, but the spirituality of teleology borne up and perfected by it. And just as in the realm of philosophy, modern subjectivism must always remember this superiority of its origin if a new order of the world and of social life is to be erected on it, so also in the controlling presence of artand nowhere more strongly than in Bach's musicthe ordering ideality of the spirit over the cosmic homelessness of the individual soul is victoriously present. Even the formal world of great counterpoint is a kingdom of grace. We shall now test this thesis that Bach's music represents for us by a flash of insight from Goethe's old age, thereby allowing the Weimar of German classicism to respond to the Weimar of Johann Sebastian Bach. After Zelter had introduced Bach's work to him, Goethe, with his boundless power of penetration, replied: ''As if the eternal harmony were conversing with itself as it might have happened in God's heart shortly before he created the world. That is how I was moved in my own heart, and I felt as if I neither possessed nor needed ears, certainly not eyes, nor any of my other senses." (sketch of a letter to Zelter, 1827, Weimar Ausgabe, 42, p. 376). Of course, we must understand this statement correctly. It does not mean that this music is like a raging sea of ideas in which the solid forms of reality are not yet visible. That is a Romantic conception of Goethe and a false Romantic interpretation of Bach's music. Rather, Goethe is here composing a variation on an idea that Hegel applied to his Logic, one of the most abstract and yet most strictly constructed works of philosophical thought. He refers to logical relation as "the eternal life of God in Himself, as it were, before the creation of the world." (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, vol. 1, p. 69). Pure ideas in their ideal structure, before they are released into the otherness of nature and become realities, "are the representation of God as He is in His eternal essence before the creation of nature and of the finite spirit." (Logic, vol. 1, p. 31). This correspondence between Goethe and Hegel is most suggestive. The logical relation of ideas, represented by Hegel's dialectic, coincides here with Bach's music. The movement that Goethe sees in Bach's music and that he feels in himself is not the state of a productive chaos out of which a world is yet to arise; but rather, quite the opposite. This movement is the "truth, unmasked, as it is in and for itself" (Hegel). The clear precision of these ideal structures, for which our ear and our senses

< previous page

page_116 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_117

next page > Page 117

are not pure and precise enough, are compared by Goethe to the essence of Bach's art. Just as the understanding of God in calculation with itself foresees the possibility of all creation and thereby becomes the creator of this worlddum deus calculat, fit mundusalso the great calculating art of the cantor of St. Thomas seems to be only an abstract game with the sensual material of sound; but in truth, it is the creation of a formal world order that needs neither Romantic animation nor sentimental humanization. And even if it is a world of art, and thus a possession and task of our interiority, yet the structure and edification of this world of inwardness is more than just a turning away of the disinherited from the confusion of the real world. Precisely those who have the task of erecting, from the ruins of the past, something new and stable in the material and moral world must realize the significance of the pure and original form of sustaining order with which, in Bach's music, past life has united. And for their own ordering activity they will, along with Rainer Maria Rilke, believe in the advantage, that they are now building it in the inner world, with pillars and statues, greater.

< previous page

page_117 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_119

next page > Page 119

The God of Most Intimate Feeling The fact that the theater pursues its own bold and often frivolous game with both gods and men is well known to us from antiquity and other cultures. Something is quite persuasive in the fact that a religion with a fixed cultic and ritual order can afford what, for example, the Christian religion, with its Holy Scriptures and demand for orthodoxy, cannot offer its faithful. When within Christian culture the material of classical comedy, for example the Amphitryon with its confusion of gods and men, is revived by Molière, then these gods are simply masks for disguising the human contrast between the high lords of court society and their servants. Even Kleist's Amphitryon, which is hardly more than a revision of Molière's play, seems to belong in this category, even though serious poetic tones manifest a kind of pantheistic conception of God. So, it is not surprising if Kleist's recasting of the work is usually interpreted not with respect to its religious significance, but rather with emphasis on the profound depths Kleist brings to the play as such. But is this right? Is this even sufficient really to fathom the full extent of this play? If we are going to analyze this play again after the work of such critics as Thomas Mann, Max Kommerell, and Arthur Henkel, then First printed in Neue Rundschau (1961): 340349. The essay bore the dedication: "to Gustav Sellner on his departure from Darmstadt."

< previous page

page_119 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_120

next page > Page 120

we are doing it precisely to get at this question. We have to remember that the Amphitryon was celebrated by Kleist's contemporaries, particularly by Adam Müller and the Christian-German Social Club to which Kleist also belonged, as a document of genuine religiosity, exhibiting a purified conception of God. Of course, we cannot agree with this on all particular points, for example when the figure of Alcmène is specifically compared to the immaculate conception of Mary. But the religious atmosphere of Berlin Romanticism where Kleist was at home is undoubtedly apparent here. We must ask ourselves, then, whether the religious seriousness of Kleist's statements can in any way be compared with, for example, Hölderlin's pronouncements on the nature of God. It is certainly true that the basic religious mood of the age achieves, in both poets and thinkers, strangely bold and liberal forms. But if, as Guardini has correctly determined, we are prepared to "believe Hölderlin's gods, then it seems to me that Kleist's Amphitryon must also be understood from the experience of transcendence and not from its loss. His Jupiter is not just a symbolic figure of the humanistic consciousness like that of Molière's, who represents the soverain des dieux without any metaphysical or transcendent dimensions and who, because of his princely rank, stands above the laws of human society. In contrast, Kleist's Jupiter has no social profile at all. The boundaries of his person continually shift, in an incomparable way, into the totality of being. He is the all-encompassing, the one who is not only this particular person, but is everything that exists. He is present in every form of nature and the human world. Is that simply a pantheistic heresy as it so often occurs when Christian culture begins to disintegrate? Or is it a human experience that Kleist here extends into the mythical dimension of divine reality? And do we have to attend to this game of confusion of gods and men to the point of following him? First of all, let us ask which features of Molière's play he has emphasized and how he has recast the whole of the work. For the moment, we can simply disregard the original story of the Greek myth with which Kleist certainly had no immediate contact. Indeed, we do not even need to go back to Plautus and the literary intermediaries between Plautus and Molière about which Kleist knew just as little. Rather, it is the clever turn given by Molière to the old comedy, his confusion between human husband and divine lover, that so fascinated Kleist, so that distinguishing husband and lover in the passion of love becomes itself a central concern. The

< previous page

page_120 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_121

next page > Page 121

social institution of marriage, the circle of duties it entails, the rights granted to the male, all of this seems to any loving sensibility like an alien distortion of what is actually present in his passionate heart. It is on this basis that Molière gives meaning to the fable. The divine sovereign, who would like to feel that he is the lover and the one who is conferring happiness, will seek to move this beloved woman to an unconditional recognition of passion; but that means that he really wants to destroy the very deception he is using to achieve his end. In Molière's play, the comic entanglement comes from the fact that the real Amphitryon appears and insists, as the offended husband, on publicly demanding his rights. As Fate will have it, the God has no other recourse than to continue to play his assigned role of husband. Subsequently, after Amphitryon has denied a nocturnal visit with his wife, the God has to trivialize the actual breach as a bad joke and plead with his wife for forgiveness. This action is not without objective comedy, but also not entirely without dignity. At the end of the play, there occurs the theophany in which Jupiter explains to the whole gathering that he was the nocturnal visitor and that sharing the woman with the sovereign of the gods is nothing dishonorable, especially since the god could have won this love only in the form of the husband. Alcmène is by no means the main character in the play. At no point of the action does the least suspicion fall on Alcmène that someone other than her husband might have been with her. Kleist's Amphitryon, on the other hand, is the drama of Alcmène who is approached now by the loving God in the form of her husband, now by her real husband. These exchanges threaten to throw her "infallible feeling" into confusion. Molière's motif, that the god is urging her to distinguish between husband and lover, is introduced by Kleist in exactly the same way; but the actual outcome is determined not by the quarreling gentlemen, but in the heart and mind of the woman for whom the distinction between husband and lover is not unknown, but for whom their unity is essential: Not that it escapes me in this serene night how the lover can often be more in evidence than the husband; and yet, since for me the gods have united the one and the other in you, I shall most gladly pardon the one for the offence of the other.

< previous page

page_121 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_122

next page > Page 122

This new invention, whereby Kleist deviates from Molière's text, consists in the fact that Alcmene cannot be deceived. She discovers in the belt given to her the wrong letter and is subsequently troubled by the ambiguities with which the god pledged his love. Of course, her most intimate feeling can only continue to be in accord with the memory of the night of love. In this she is quite sure of herself. Just as for my soul! my innocence! For you would have then to misinterpret my excitement, that I never found him more beautiful than today. I could have taken him for his picture, actually for his portrait, by artist's hand, true to life, yet transposed into divinity. He stood, I don't know how, before me as if in a dream, and an ineffable feeling seized me in my happiness, as I had never felt before, when, beaming, he approached me yesterday as if in glory, the great victor of Pharissa. It was he, Amphitryon, the God's true son! But already he seemed to me among the glorified; I could have asked him if he were coming down to me from out of the stars. Certainly, that is the "vision of love." But is there in this a lesson to be learned? And is this truth, in the final analysis, the central concern of this whole intense scene between Alcmène and Jupiter? This is where Kleist's real contribution lies. Because the letters in the diadem are switched, Alcmène loses her selfassurance and believes she has been betrayed. Molière's great scene of reconciliation between Alcmène and Jupiter becomes a conversation between Alcmène and Jupiter that measures out the whole breadth of the feminine soul. This scene is one of the greatest literary treasures of world literature. But the question is, Have we really understood the meaning of this conversation? Of course, there are here always illuminating flashes of truth, but two aspects to this seem to me not fully understood: first, this is a conversation moving toward a definite conclusion; and second, the question as to its final purpose. We undoubtedly feel that, under the influence of Jupiter, Alcmène's soul

< previous page

page_122 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_123

next page > Page 123

is disturbed and confused and finally liberated, and that this is separated from the operatic reconciliation scene in Molière by an unbridgeable gulf. However, the meaning of this scene, I think, is always being obscured by reading into the figure of Jupiterin imitation of Molièrethe same kind of dramatic action that is going on in Alcmène, and then even identifying the agony of the unredeemed god with Kleist's own tortured existence. Instead of anthropomorphizing the god, I would much rather see in this scene a guiding of the human being into the realm of the divine, a witness to genuine mystical experience. Of course, it is true that the god would like to be recognized and known in his divinity; and when Alcmène, just as unerringly assures him of preferring her mortal husband, he feels he is being robbed of his self-encounter in the love of this woman: "Cursed be the delusion that enticed me to this place." But what is the bitter element in this knowledge? Is it that the man sees that he is not being recognized as a man and is tortured by jealousy, or is it that he realizes that his divinity is not being acknowledged? Why is Jupiter not simply satisfied in disturbing Alcmène with his deception? Why does he again and again disconcert her in the most agonizing way? The real meaning of this conversation seems to me to lie in the fact that the god really wishes to affirm himself when he wants to teach Alcmène not to deny the infallible feeling that is in her; and that she, in doubting herself, is actually also doubting the divinity of the god; and vice versa, when she owns up to her own feeling she is also allowing the god to be the god and to appear in his true divinity. Naturally, we must not forget that it is a comedy in which this dialogue between the feminine heart and god takes place. And we must certainly not consider the contrasting scenes with the servants to be the only comic element in this play. When Charis thinks she sees Apollo in the eye of Socias that is flashing with rage, then this parody makes visible the objective and metaphysical aspect of the comic action, an action that is constantly occupied with the differences between human finitude and the infinity of the divine. But the real truth involved here is one of almost deadly seriousness. In that calm solemnity of the concluding theophany, something becomes evident that is an abiding truth of the human heart: that the confusion of persons that takes place on earth, and is therefore to be understood as tragic, is after all a confusion with a god and, for that

< previous page

page_123 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_124

next page > Page 124

reason, not really a confusion at all. What in Molière's case the dénouement signifies in the sphere of courtly etiquette has here in Kleist a religious seriousness. Alcmène's "Oh!" with which the play concludes, allows those differences driven between the human and the divine, between husband and lover to be joined in a unity that includes and brings to perfection everything finite. The way to this final dénouement is anything but comic. When in high solemnity the universal god tries to banish from Alcmène's heart the idea of committing sacrilege, "Who, besides me, would there be, oh beloved?" the attempt fails. First of all, because Alcmène no longer trusts her most intimate feeling. She also finds no peace upon being informed that the deceiver is himself the one deceived, and that he must acknowledge the superiority of the husband because, to achieve the deception, he had to imitate him. In Molière, this information was finally sufficient to restore the honor of the husband. But in Kleist such things cannot bring peace to Alcmène's feminine heart: "Oh, God! We must separate for ever." So, she becomes the real heroine of this comic-tragic drama because she cannot be appeased. The god has no other recourse than to force her completely out beyond the sphere of human conflict, thereby placing her before a different test, and one quite difficult for the feminine heart. He awakens in Alcmène the belief that it was a god, Jupiter, who visited her. This has the effect of completely distorting what is supposedly being proven. For by Jupiter's convincing Alcmène, in the form of Amphitryon, that it could only have been Jupiter, he is forced to find out what little significance divinity has for her. I have nothing against feeling the pain which Jupiter brought upon me, if only everything remains as amicable as it was before. And this brings us to the strangest and most exciting scene of the entire work. This god, who wants to be God, must try to prevent divine Being from being forced by the loving heart of a woman into a half-heartedly performed ritual. There is here no sudden desire of Jupiter to torture her; actually it strikes her very heart when he reveals to her that the appearance of the god is vengence for the fact that, because she allows herself to be distracted by her earthly husband, she had forgotten the most high God, even in prayer. Yes, it

< previous page

page_124 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_125

next page > Page 125

strikes her heart, but not so that she learns from it. Rather, she understands the warning as a confirmation of her delusion that she must separate God and lover, and that this is something she is actually able to do. Let us be bold then. I swear on all that's holy! I know down to the least of his expressions exactly how he looked, and I'll certainly not mistake him for you. Of course, it would correspond to our theological conception of the transcendence of God that confusing the husband with the god is precisely what constitutes religious sacrilege. What seems to be more obvious than that the god should forbid such confusion? But is that Kleistean theology? I believe that Kleist's theologyif we intended to construct such a thingwould certainly not include an emphasis on the transcendence of God. In that case, what would the god be for Alcmene? Very well, you shall be satisfied with me. In the first hour of each morning there shall be no further thought of you. However, afterwards I shall forget Jupiter. Are we supposed to believe that the god is satisfied with this and can really be deeply moved by such improvement? This kind of piety would ultimately consist in forgetting the divine altogether. Kleist makes that completely clear by having Alcmène expressly desire "to live one day back and lock herself away from all gods and heroes." It is not that she exactly wants to refuse the divine destiny that has befallen her, but If I am given a choice . . . . . . . . . then I would reserve my reverence for him and my love for you, Amphitryon. That is how secure she seems to be in her distinction of God and husband. This presumed assurance of Alcmène's is in reality the very pinnacle of confusion or, to be more exact, of her disavowel of her

< previous page

page_125 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_126

next page > Page 126

feeling. And what she is promising here is precisely what she cannot do. To make this clear to her, and not from any self-seeking or jealous desire to torment her, Jupiter suddenly asks: "And suppose I were now this god for you? On hearing this further probing question from the god, she reveals her confusion in all its depths. Her would-be selfassurance in her ability to make these distinctions collapses, and she is forced to enter into the intimate chamber of her feeling precisely where she is no longer able to maintain her pretended knowledge and power of discernment. If she were now called upon to choose whether she would prefer the god whom she is holding in her arms or Amphitryon who appeared to her, she finally confesses yesthen I would be immensely sad and hope that he would be the God to me and that you, Amphitryon, would remain for me what you are. And at these words of Alcmène Jupiter concludes the conversation with imperial self-possession: JUPITER: My sweet, most adorable creature! in whom I count myself most blessed! In such perfect harmony with the divine idea in form and measure, in lyre and sound, as it has not left my hand for aeons! ALCMÈNE: Amphitryon! JUPITER: Be quiet, quiet, quiet! Everything will conspire to bring you victory. Desire drives the God to show himself to you. And before the dance of the starry host rises up through the region of the night, your breast is already aware for whom it begins to glow. We really have not understood this scene until we recognize the necessary conclusion to this whole discourse on the soul. It is not that Jupiter is falling out of his role here. Rather, he has come to the end of his role-playing. He hasfinallygained the victory of being

< previous page

page_126 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_127

next page > Page 127

the god. Now, finally, Alcmène owns up completely and unconditionally to her most intimate feeling. She no longer insists on maintaining the distinction. She knows she is quite secure in her knowledge of the facts. Now Jupiter finds her ''in perfect harmony with the divine idea," obviously because she loves Amphitryon no longer because he is Amphitryon, that is, her husband, but because she chooses the one whom she loves and keeps him present in her feeling. In this way she completely measures up to the divine idea. By no longer distinguishing between the husband and the lover, she gives her very being to both, the husband and the god. The god is the god of the most intimate feeling. It is only to be expected that from now on Alcmène's confusion is gone and does not return. After all, the purpose of the preceding reconciliation scene was to reconcile Alcmène's "theological" mark of distinction with the certainty of her most intimate feeling. The god is no longer "the other." This is so completely true that it does not even occur to Alcmène that the one who is speaking to her, whom she takes to be her husband, is really the divine visitor. It does not even occur to her when he tells her that a mortal has appeared who insists he is Amphitryon. She simply feels once again the indelible disgrace that has befallen her: "Oh!, most dreadful. A mortal, you say?" In all her despair, she is so certain of herself and her trust in the one who is present that she has no doubts, even when, moving among the people at Jupiter's side, the real Amphitryon confronts her. She does not hesitate to deny the true husband and curse him. We must not think that Alcmène is making a mistake here. Rather, by this action she has regained her own self-assurance that, like all lost and regained certainty, is a higher certainty than it was before. This is also the theological meaning of Jupiter's theophany that appears so similar to pantheism: he accounts himself blessed in her. And that means that the divinity of love has become visible in her. For the god, it means the recognition of his divine Being. Now that the distinction between husband and lover has become untenable, it is likewise no longer possible to confuse the husband with the lover and with the God. Even though the drama of Amphitryon is also the drama of Alcmène, it is true that Amphitryon, just before the final revelation of divinity when Alcmène decidesand decides wronglyfor Jupiter/Amphitryon, Amphitryon himself begins to realize the same truth to which Alcmène has fought her way clear: with the greatest em-

< previous page

page_127 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_128

next page > Page 128

phasis he asserts his unshakable faith that the other "Amphitryon is for her." In the drama between Amphitryon and Jupiter we find here the same climax that occurs in the action between Alcmene and Jupiter where, at the end of the long agonizing dialogue, Jupiter exclaims: My sweet, adorable creature! in whom I count myself so blessed! For this reason, Jupiter now clears up the confusion and explains before the entire assembly: "Very well! You are Amphitryon." And when Amphitryon then says and asks, "It is I! And who are you, terrible Spirit?" and Jupiter answers, "Amphitryon, I thought you knew," then this is not an intensification of comic contrasts alone; rather, it shows the dissolution of any particularized experience of the self resulting from the inspiration of divinity. Amphitryon! You fool! Do you still doubt? Argatiphontidas and Photidas, the fortress of Cadmus and all of Greece, the light, the ether and everything that flows, that which was, is, and ever shall be. This is, in my opinion, the moment when we discover the basic religious idea in Kleist's reworking of Molière's play. In Molière, even when Jupiter appears in his immortal glory, he is still unable to triumph in his own name; and Seigneur Jupiter knows exactly how to "sweeten the pill" for his vassal Amphitryon. However, when Kleist's Jupiter appears in his own glory, there is no longer any disparity with the triumph of the mortal man: What you have done in yourself to me will, for you in me, cause no injury to what I am eternally. The triumph of the god and the husband is the same. The mortal and the god, the husband and the lover, are united in the assenting heart of the woman. The comedy of confusion has dissolved. The Being of the one is the Being of the other; not only in the sense that

< previous page

page_128 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_129

next page > Page 129

Jupiter is universal Being and therefore also the Being of Amphitryon, but also because, inversely, Amphitryon too is not only the imperial consort of Alcmène and the "hero of Pharissa," a fact confirmed by the citizens of Thebes, but also the only one who exists for Alcmène, her lover. Might not Kleist, like Hölderlin, also be saying: "It is a god who holds sway in us?"

< previous page

page_129 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_131

next page > Page 131

Poetry and Punctuation Does time really exist, time that destroys? When, on the resting mountain, will it break the fortress asunder? This heart, belonging infinitely to the gods, When will it be raped by the demiurge? Are we really so fearfully fragile As Fate would have us believe? Is childhood, its depths and its promise, in the rootslaterstill? Oh, the specter of what is fleeting moves through him who unsuspectingly receives it, as if it were smoke. As those who we are, those who are drifting, We are considered by the enduring powers as a divine usage. (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 2, XXVII) Like orthography, punctuation belongs to the conventions of writing. Every author experiences a shock when he discovers that he has chosen an expression or form of punctuation that the style First published in Neue Rundschau 72 (1961): 143149

< previous page

page_131 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_132

next page > Page 132

manuals expressly forbid. In the area of these conventions, it is always the rules that triumph. Not even the modest need for differentiation, which might appear in a deviation from them, seems admissible. And yet, what a perversion this actually is! As if orthography, and even punctuation, really belonged to discourse and its meaning, as if the primary concern were to observe these rules instead of seeing them simply as an expedient to facilitate the articulation of meaning in written discourse. As is well known, there have been periods, particularly those in which reading aloud was still a common habit, when no punctuation was used at all, or was introduced only at a later stage of development when silent reading was becoming more common. Even in literary periods when silent reading was becoming predominant, reading meant more than a mere deciphering of signs. It meant rather the reproduction of speech for the inner ear of the person reading. But that also means that the articulation of speech is infinitely more differentiated than the few written signs would indicate. We ought then to draw the consequences of this knowledge for poetics. For one thing is quite clear: the written image on the page has very little to do with the phenomenon of poetry. In no way can the written sign insinuate itself as an equal partner into the delicately balanced relationship of sound and meaning that constitutes a poem. Whatever cannot be heard in the inner ear of the reader, whatever does not serve the rhythmic structure of sound and meaning in the shape of the poem, has no actual poetic existence. This is part of the doubtful character of any highly developed mannerism when writing becomes an equal partner with the original sphere of spoken language, as is the case for example in some forms of the Baroque poem. Or, let us take an example from the present. In the fifth Duino Elegy Rilke dares to introduce a singular intermixture: Angel! Oh take it, pluck it, that modest medicinal herb. Bring a vase, preserve it! Place it among those joys not yet Revealed to us; and in a lovely urn Praise it with a flowery, energetic inscription: "Subrisio saltat." The "modest medicinal herb" of the artist's smile that is to be preserved in a pharmacist's vial, bears the inscription: "Subrisio

< previous page

page_132 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_133

next page > Page 133

saltat." The letters on the page instruct us that we are to resolve the abbreviation "saltat," into "saltatoris," that is, "of the dancer.'' But we cannot hear this abbreviation. The ear has no part in it, and therefore too much is demanded from the reader: the transposition of something read into something heard with the inner ear; the raising of what is heard into the full visibility of what is meant; the discovery in the same word of both what is inscribed and what is written; and finally, even the unqualified expectation that the written sign before our eyes, the point of abbreviation, is not to be simply a help for reading, but must be the very visible presence of that "flowery, energetic inscription" itself. Like all extremes, a mannerist one like this points up the norm, which consists in transposing the reading of poetry back into the spoken language, freed from the conventions of writing. For the poet then, the rules of punctuation are quite different from those used in the business transactions of everyday life. They are fundamentally conditioned by rhythm. We think for example of the breathlessness of Kleist's periods symbolized in their breathless haste by the abundant use of commas. On the other hand, we see that, under certain conditions, punctuation can be completely scorned by the poet. This happens particularly when verse is involved, and the clarity of the verse is already threatened by the stylistic ideal of a psychologizing naturalism. Stefan George, for example, introduced his own peculiar punctuation, sparingly used partly to accent the meaning and partly for simple reasons of rhythm. By this means, he tried to impede the fashionable confusion between gestures of language and psychological portraiture. In any case, punctuation does not belong to the substance of poetic discourse. It is a help for reading and, as such, an aspect of interpretation. This has fundamental significance for the question of its authenticity. We have no intention here of taking a position with regard to the difficult problem of deciding to what extent a modernization of punctuation in the case of classical texts should be permitted or even imposed. But if we are correct in assuming that punctuation is always already a part of interpretation, then for all questions of interpretation the authenticity of punctuation is always fundamentally in question. It is often hard to discover the compromise whenever the poet at times tries to strike a balance between the reader's ordinary habits of punctuation and the need to express his own peculiar meaning, and thus presumes a certain freedom toward

< previous page

page_133 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_134

next page > Page 134

the rules of punctuation. Then there is a further objection that calls into question much more fundamentally the binding force of authentic punctuation. Precisely those freedoms that the poet presumes are really a kind of selfinterpretation. The poet tries to make clear how he understands his poem. He may not use punctuation consciously at all, and he will certainly not overestimate its value for what he hears in his inner ear. Self-interpretation is, of course, of great interest for everyone, but it cannot claim to have any binding force. We cannot at the moment be more explicit about the reasons for this. 1 Such preliminary considerations provide, it seems to me, a legitimate reason for appealing to the rythmical evidence of a verse, under certain conditions even with respect to a traditional punctuation. When one analyses the first two verses in the sonnet quoted at the beginning, one can hardly avoid the impression that here, even if the form of the two questions is exactly parallel, there is nevertheless audible a definite contrast in the language gesture. The first question seems to come from a great distance, like an answer to endless doubts, not yet confident enough to deny that there is such a thing as time, the destroyer. From a rhythmical point of view this question asks, Is there really such a thing as time, time that destroys? A broad stream gushing by, moving from time immemorial into an undetermined future? The second verse, on the other hand, seems, given its lack of connection with the first, like a repetition of the first question; but it has an entirely different movement. By means of the poet's two commas, enclosing "on the resting mountain," it is scanned to the point of breathlessness; and from the viewpoint of logic these commas are certainly not necessary. And now here we are compelled to ask, Is it possible that yet another comma is missing? Is the rhythmic form of the two verses possibly structured on the basis of yet another scansion: "will it break asunder, the fortress?" The strong ritardando, demanded by the comma after when and after mountain would form the unity of a staccato rhythm only if the it of the second half of the verse does not refer back, but rather forward to "the fortress." I must admit that, even before I drew such consequences here, I never, when listening to this verse with my inner car, arrived at "it breaks asunder" without stopping for breath a third time. If one draws the consequence that I have indicated by the position of the comma, that would mean that the fortress is an apposi-

< previous page

page_134 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_135

next page > Page 135

tive subject and that the breaks asunder is used intransitively. Is this correct? Is this the way it is meant? This question is not concerned with what the poet "meant." For what the poet meant can and must not have a binding force here. If we want to understand a poem, then that requires that we understand what the poem "means." That is, we ask for what purpose it has assumed form? Into what shape and significance it settled when the movement of the language stopped hovering indecisively between possibilities and finally attained form and fixity as a structure obscurely ordained, perhaps just as surprising for the poet as for us. Could the following considerations give us a hint of what is "meant" here? How do we finite human beings experience our transitoriness? How ought we to experience it? As defending ourselves against destruction that threatens us in our mountain fortress, which has seen so many sieges and stormings in the course of time? As defending ourselves against time itself, this constantly beleaguering oppressor? Or does that enemy really not exist? Is he unreal? Is, in the final analysis, our transitoriness not of a quite different kind? Not a destruction that occurs when flagging resistance is finally defeated, but rather a passing away that is "right," almost like a ritual habit, something cultivated and cherished? In any case, is it not something that has no cause, certainly not one we can call guilty, including time itself? If that should be the meaning of the poem, then it would seem objectively more correct to understand the parallel sound of the first two verses of the poem as a logical harmony by perceiving in both of these questions the same doubt about the correctness of the usual attitude toward time and transitoriness. Is there really such a thing as time that destroys? Are we right in continually dreading the idea that our being, defended on the resting mountain, will one day fall prey to destruction? That would be an actual doubling of the question. The usual conception, suggested to our imagination by the missing comma, would, on the other hand, permit a new question to be asked after the general doubt of the first question. This second question assumes that the first one has been answered positively, because it no longer asks "whether," but "when." Or, are we supposed to come up with a negative answer to this second question also? Perhaps with a "never"? But that is hardly possible. The fear of the finite creature is not simply groundless. But it might well be the case, even if the certainty

< previous page

page_135 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_136

next page > Page 136

of our end is an essential part of the certainty of our existence, that it is still wrong in the sense of the first question to keep defending oneself against the destiny of being finite as if it were an enemy. One day we shall no longer exist. But, is it really time as an enemy that acts destructively here? Is it really destruction at all that threatens us? "Breaks asunder" could be meant intransitively as a clarification of that mysterious passing away of life that is possibly described as break asunder only because the lord of the fortress sees it soand that means, sees it erroneouslyin his desire to defend himself. By such a scansion, the end of the verse, "the fortress," would receive the kind of accent imperatively demanded by this bold metaphor, a metaphor that expresses the false idea of self-defense by having the appositive in final position. What expresses more appropriately the dread of the finite creature: a quiet interrogative, without haste and caesura, and having the syntax of a normal, everyday question, or a repeated interruption with a view to expressing the suspense of the uncertain moment of death, indicated in the verse by the repeated caesura and the impatient anticipation of the subject, "the fortress"? 2 We can still add several observations that reinforce this reading. For example, the fact that the next two verses contain one single sentence; and that means unquestionably a single unit of meaning. This suggests that the first two lines are structured in a similar way; that the when question does not introduce a new thought, but rather that the idea of the first verse is changed. If the second pair of verses repeats the initial doubt in active form, that is, in a transitive mode, then that does not speak against our understanding of the first two verses. For now, time is no longer spoken of abstractly. In the place of the abstract puzzle about time, there now stands a mythological person, the Gnostic concept of the demiurge. That is not simply a variation of expression, but a further development of the idea. It is an allusion to a coherent religious system that attributes the creation of this less than perfect world, not to omnipotent gods, but to a mythical being of hostile intention. Without doubt, the answer to the second when question should also be negative, because such a negative power, opposing the Being of the gods and causing such dread in us, does not actually exist. It is a Gnostic heresy that interprets human fate as the result of conflicting forces. The second strophe seems likewise to confirm this same observation. Here, quite unambiguously, we are spoken of intransitively as the fragile ones. The emphatic "really" that relates back to

< previous page

page_136 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_137

next page > Page 137

the first question clearly shows that this prevalent opinion is false. Obviously a deceptive appearance leads us to espouse such a conception of "Fate": a chimeric Being that fluctuates between granting and withholding favors and that then causes us, in constant desire and hope, to chase after the favors. It is this delusion that awakens in us the false idea of time the destroyer. "Fate is fond of inventing patterns and figures, but life itself is heavy with simplicity"this sentence from Malte can serve as a motto wherever the poet speaks of Fate. When here, as is so often the case in Rilke, he recalls childhood and its profound promise, the point he wishes to make is precisely that the child knows no fate. It lives without a sense of time, so that, for the child, "being here" is wonderful. In the child's simplicity and internal harmony, it shows forth a truth that reveals the fallacy of the fear of time with which we live. And now there follow the two final strophes as an answer to the initial question: How are we to experience time? This question is answered poetically in a thoroughly inimitable way, by an elegiac oh that voices the usual complaint about transitoriness and yet fundamentally annuls this complaint; and does so in verses, the falling rhythm of which produces at the same time a magic harmony. Lament becomes praise. What is transitory is really not something to be feared if we are innocently receptive and, like a child, take whatever comes without allowing hope or fear to form a rigid and obdurate spirit in us. It is precisely at that moment that transitoriness becomes a "specter," something unreal, passing away like smoke. We, on the other hand, are considered to be a ritual usage, which belongs to the realm of the gods and is, no matter how transitory, something that endures. Time that destroys simply does not exist. What is inimitable in these verses is precisely that they sound like a lament, but are actually a comfort; that the affirmation of transitoriness in them receives a new and enduring validity. It is Rilke's most characteristic sound, a sound that remains with us long after the last Duino Elegy has died away: And we who are thinking of a rising happiness would feel deeply moved, even to the point of confusion, if our happiness suddenly fell.

< previous page

page_137 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_139

next page > Page 139

Rainer Maria Rilke's Interpretations of Existence: On the Book by Romano Guardini There is no need to prove that the literary work of Rilke is not only an object of literary criticism, but, for those living today, also an object of genuine philosophical study, that is, an occasion for self-reflection and for an analysis of the poet's interpretation of the world. The proof lies in the immense number of writings devoted to the study of Rilke. For what speaks to us from these innumerable books is no longer simply an aesthetic-literary interest. The book by Romano Guardini is certainly no exception to the rule. To this extent, his claim that his work is the first to take Rilke seriously is First published in Philosophische Rundschau 2. Although this essay is a kind of book review, my analysis of Guardini's interpretation of Rilke was by no means written for one particular occasion. It involves the effort over a long period of time, since around 1930, to come to terms with the Duino Elegies. Provoked by the irrelevance of the current interpretations on the part of Protestant theologians and continually amazed by the imprecision with which Rilke's poems were being read, I planned already at that time a thorough commentary that I repeatedly used for my university lectures. In the years of increasing gloom after 1933, the later poems of Rilke, along (footnote continued on next page)

< previous page

page_139 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_140

next page > Page 140

simply unfounded. However, it is true that it surpasses most others in its sensitivity for the poetic and in its art of interpretation. But that is by no means the reason why it deserves special philosophical consideration. Rather, what gives this work its particular significance is the fact that taking Rilke seriously does not imply a silent identification of the opinion of the interpreter with the opinion of the poet, but rather presupposes a conscious critical distance. Nevertheless, there is a common assumption that Guardini shares with almost all Rilke interpreters: that Rilke's poetry is not to be understood merely aesthetically, that is, as an expression to be evaluated on the basis of its genuine authenticity, but also as a statement that purports to be an expression of truth. However, in the light of Guardini's work there arises a fundamental problem: what kind of criticism is concerned not with the work's success as poetry but with its truth? On the other hand, in his introduction Guardini immediately confuses the issue by stating this common assumption, even for his own interpretation, in a very ambiguous manner. Basing himself on Rilke's own personal statements, he views the poet's literary works as a religious messageand wants to examine their legitimacy by asking if these statements are true. It is not a simple matter to bring these goals into agreement. Guardini is appealing here to two entirely different kinds of judgment: the natural claim of every reader of Rilke to have been told something true, and the alleged claim of Rilke to be transmitting a (footnote continued from previous page) with the later poems of Hölderlin, took on ever-increasing significance for the defense of our inner freedom. His invocations, with their tone of urgency and distress, were finding widespread and enthusiastic reception in every quarter. Slowly an understanding of this hermeneutic poetry began to grow that at the same time gave inspiration to philosophical thinking. It was at this time that Guardini's first Rilke interpretations appeared and gave rise to those of my own, which were meant for classroom use only. Then after the war the market was literally flooded with philosophical interpretations of Rilke. But not until Guardini's poetically sensitive and ideologically based interpretation of all ten Elegies, did I feel compelled to show that a more precise reading was imperative, and that Guardini's theological criticism tended to be deaf to the poetic demands of Rilke's poetry, even though this work certainly represented a significant advance over the theological assimilation of the early 1930s and the eclectic philosophical assimilation of the 1940s. In the meantime, the intellectual constellation have shifted considerably. Rilke is no longer read in the same manner as before, having now become the object of specialists in literature.

< previous page

page_140 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_141

next page > Page 141

specific religious message. In actual fact, Rilke uses formulas to describe his poetic inspiration that sound almost like a claim to religious revelation; and in the context of the Sonnets to Orpheus, he actually says at one point that these poems demand not explanation but obedient submission. For Guardini, that means that they demand belief. But it seems to me there is no doubt that the general claim to truth which Guardini rightly assumes in Rilke's case is not really a claim for religious authority. It is simply a fabrication to say that Rilke's poetic statements have to be understood with religious gravity unless we assume that Rilke was "no longer capable of such existential seriousness." There is no third possibility: religious message or aesthetic playfulness (pp. 20 ff). Whoever is searching for truth in Rilke's or in any great poetry without being able in naive immediacy to experience Greek tragedy, for example, as a pious Greek, or Calderon's plays as a Catholic Spaniard, in other words, whoever is searching for poetic statements of truth and not those having religious authority, finds himself doing something quite illegitimate. Having such an attitude is attributed by Guardini to the "relativism characteristic of the end of Modernism." We begin to understand Guardini's exaggerated interest in the question of truth when we look more closely at his individual interpretations. For Guardini is not actually examining the truth of poetic utterance as a pertinent and precisely stated expression or as a vehicle of sudden astonishment. Rather, out of an intricate metaphorical discourse he is constructing a unified system of the interpretation of human existence and of "religion." When Guardini, a Catholic Christian, measures this system by the truths of the Christian religion, a very important historical insight emerges. Rilke becomes an example of the general process of secularization in modern times in the sense that he uses the world of Christianity, and the motifs of the Bible simply as material to express his own personal views. But we might gently inquire of the Christian interpreter whether the expressive power of such poetic discourse is not being nourished by Christian truths even when they are transformed to the point of deformity. The story of the Prodigal Son, for example, comes to mind. Rilke sees it as the story of one who did not want to be loved. But a historical fix of this kind does not seem decisive to me as far as the truth of Rilke's poetic state-

< previous page

page_141 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_142

next page > Page 142

ments is concerned. No one will argue with Guardini's justified assertion that Rilke obtains decisive possibilities for poetic discourse from his Catholic environment and heritage. But when one observes how Guardini, in his interpretation of the first Elegy criticizes the "doctrine of love" because Rilke gives a supreme place to a love having no response from the intimate self of the lover, then we are compelled to inquire whether a more "relativistic" understanding would not, in fact, better recognize the truth of what we are hearing. Guardini is obviously not taking into consideration here that Rilke's doctrine of love is a theory on learning to love: "Love is not something that can be learned." So, as one who is learning, he calls up models whose ability to love is maintained without any possibility of response. These are the abandoned lovers. How can we not realize that those who truly love, those who "infinitely" surrender themselves, give to one another the same openness as that achieved by the abandoned lovers, a fact that makes them ideal models. I simply would not know why this is not trueand, by the way, in the fullest possible agreement with Christian ethics. There is no aesthetic irresponsibility here if one allows the soaring freedom with which the poet, as Pindar so beautifully says, sucks honey from all the flowers. Precisely one so concerned about the truth of poetic statements must not forget the intricacy of objective motifs that poetry makes use of. Whatever comes to expression by this means ought to be understood and accepted as true. That, however, cannot succeed if, instead, the objective motifs used as the means of expression are treated as the essential matter itself. What Guardini, for example, says about the Angel in the second Elegy is surely correct as far as the history of motifs is concerned (pp. 77 ff.). But what Rilke is saying to us when he creates such beings whose ability to feel infinitely surpasses our own and in whom we, the most ephemeral of beings, recognize ourselves, is simply obscured by the question of whether they are Christian, heathen, or some other kind of numinous figures with whom we can enter into a religious relationship. I do not see why we must deny both to the poet and to ourselves "existential seriousness" just because we cannot give a religious interpretation to what he says. What is meant in the second Elegy, and why the Angels are Angels, is actually quite clear. Feeling for us human beings is something quite ephemeral. Beings, whose feeling is not similarly volatile, are no longer human beings. So it

< previous page

page_142 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_143

next page > Page 143

seems to me quite beside the point to associate the Greek experience of divinity with the naming of the Angels that are not divinities at all. In the well-known letter to Lou Andreas, Rilke calls them not the appearance of the invisible, but rather a warrant for the fact that the invisible has a genuine claim to Being. At this point a critical remark is appropriate. Is this standard of pure feeling, which even for lovers can be fulfilled only at the initial moment, sufficient to view human existence correctly? Already Rudolf Kassner called our attention to the limits of Rilke's world. According to him, this world is at home "only in the 'kingdom of the father,' not in the 'kingdom of the son.'" What it lacks is the truth of incarnation. Of course, Guardini's criticism is similarly motivated. For he too misses in Rilke the central core of the person and sees precisely in this depersonalization the questionable aspect of the contemporary moment that links Rilke with Modernism. According to Guardini, the loss of the person and one's vulnerability to what is totalitarian, which characterize our contemporary world, belong together. On the whole this is perhaps correct. We will return to this question later. But is what the poems say for this reason not true? Does not every person find it true when the poetic I views itself both as the one who is learning and the one who is unteachable, for whom the selflessness of true feeling and thereby also true love is impossible? Is this standard really false? Precisely the third Elegy, the one that Guardini accuses of expressing Gnostic heresy where what is dark and evil is seen as an existing power in opposition to what is light and good, gains from this point of view its important position. It is difficult to be a self; difficult, most especially in the matter of love, not to lose one's selfhood to the impersonal power of passion. Just where does the error lie? Is it perhaps not true that the young man in love, when confronting the "pure face" of the girl, must find the "river god of the blood" guilty? In my opinion, it is a correct principle, in fact it is a necessary hermeneutic requirement for all interpretation of poetry, to allow oneself to be struck by the word of the poet. Only the one who is so struck will understand what is being said. And then, finally, in the case of poetry like Rilke's Elegies, which address no one at all (Guardini misunderstands the "Thou" of I, 23, when he does not recognize

< previous page

page_143 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_144

next page > Page 144

here an intensification of self-address), it is a matter of understanding each and every Elegy as the unity of a meditative movement. The finely sensitive interpretations of Guardini, no matter how helpful they are in respect to many details (the fact that I consider some of the individual interpretations incorrect does not alter this fact), often do not allow the unity of the central poetic concern to become apparent. One feels this shortcoming most acutely where this concern is itself not recognized. That seems to me to be especially the case in the fourth and fifth Elegies, and to a certain extent also in the tenth. The unified theme of the fourth Elegy, in which the general theme of learning how truly to feel becomes concrete, is the guile that arises from being too hasty and that has a pernicious effect on human relationships. Here too we need no biographical explanation. ''Who is it who has not sat in fear before the curtain of his heart?" Guardini believes that it aids our understanding if we have additional information at this point from Rilke's biography; the fact that the father, having failed as a professional military officer, destined his son for the same career and, as a result, experiences fresh disappointment. . . . So, the way in which Rilke addresses his father is understandable: "He who, because of me, tasted the bitterness of life, tasting mine (. . .) the first gloomy infusion of what I had to do as I grew up" . . . Here is where the center of the relationship between these two seems to lie: in the anxiety which the father has for his son; and, likewise, in the fact that the son feels touched by this anxiety, a touch which signifies gratitude as well as pity, perhaps even irritation. When the son has hope, then there is in this hope the father who is anxious. So the son feels: my father has no real confidence in me, otherwise he would not be anxious. That depresses him, irritates him also perhaps. On the other hand, he tells himself: how poor my father was that he, who expected nothing more for himself, couldn't even have hope and confidence in me. And that's still the case. It's still impossible for him to have confidence in me. He still has not liberated me to where I can have confidence in pursuing my own path. (pp. 155157)

< previous page

page_144 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_145

next page > Page 145

That, it seems to me, leads us down the wrong path. This attitude has totally disappeared in the poet's mature reflection on his father. He speaks of nothing but the love of his father. The distortion of this whole aspect culminates in the misunderstanding of the words "you closely examined the guarded glance of my upraised eyes." Rilke is much more exact, much less impressionistic than his interpreter assumes. He is describing with amazing precision what happens between a father and his son when the son, conscious of concealing his true feelings, looks at his father with fervor, at once both secure and insecure, while his father, in his worried scrutiny, attempts to take his son's real measure. Similarly beside the mark are his reflections in connection with the phrase "my little bit of destiny": Who could possibly have had a richer life than he? He was a poet, probably the greatest since Mörike. Numerous people had a close relationship with him, among them some of considerable vitality and importance. He received love from all sides. All of Europe was his home, and he was constantly going from one beautiful thing to another. He was received in places which others were permitted to see only from the outside. And still his feeling: "my little bit of destiny"! (p. 158) Actually, this phrase does not show concern about having more or less of life's goods, but rather about what destiny can possibly mean in the face of the simplicity and greatness of life and death. (See in this regard the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.) Let us rather stay with the text of the fourth Elegy. "Who is it who has not sat in fear before the curtain of his heart?" For anyone admitting the duplicity of his feelings, the animal and the child or even someone near death become a source of concerned reflection. At this point, Guardini does not come even close to hitting the mark. And yet, what could be more graphic than this description of the duplicity between those who love another? How they exaggerate to each other their willing helpfulness because they actually limit each other like enemies, so that lovingthe contours of feelingnever attains full definition, each one being for the other so ambiguous and full of subterfuge. The poet shows precisely that the stage, about

< previous page

page_145 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_146

next page > Page 146

which the following lines speak, is that of one's own heart. For some incomprehensible reason. Guardini sees in this a turning aside from the work of the heart into a stance of mere contemplation. But in this whole process we are certainly not only those who are watching, but are ourselves precisely what is being played. The scenes on the stage of the heart are the feelings. The self-searching heart learns that they are all false, forced, simply fictitious (like bad actors). And yet, again and again we are expecting the appearance of a pure feeling; we wait unerringly because there is no such thing as the complete death of the heart. There is always the possibility of watching and waiting. It is hard to believe that this beautiful expression for the heart, never completely winter bleak, is so misunderstood by Guardini that he does not even recognize the summoning of such witnesses as the loving father and the beloved women. Whoever is no longer trying to fool himself and could really know how to wait, for him the Angel will bring about the pure appearance of feeling by raising up the doll (which by its very nature tries to fool no one): "Then what we are continually pulling apart, will come together simply by being there." Guardini finds this sentence monstrous. But, has he really understood it correctly? Is this lament of Rilke's not true, that we cannot produce in our lives that flawless totality of an unreserved, selfless feeling? And is it not true that only the one who is almost ready to leave his life, the one who is dyingand the child who is just beginning to liveknow what this pure undistorted avowal of feeling is? As soon as they can do that, the Angel is present. We suspect that death, this terrible and dreaded aspect of our finitude is the real reason for all our precipitous actions and subterfuges. I cannot agree that Guardini's interpretation of the fifth Elegy has grasped this context correctly. Of course, it is true that at this point Rilke's artificial metaphors are particularly comical and the complaint of the interpreter understandable. Everything obviously depends on understanding the acrobats, with their continual exercising and their rare and senseless successes, in a symbolic sense: just slightly more ephemeral than we ourselves; we who are woven by death into the tapestry of our Fate and always restlessly attempting false pretexts and shortsighted ways to conceal the approaching winter. It seems to me quite significant that Guardini (p. 200) limits the collision with the grave to the possibility of some accident happening to the artists, instead of perceiving in this a transparent symbol of the acrobats and a preparation for its application to the

< previous page

page_146 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_147

next page > Page 147

destiny of all of us: all human failure bounds against the grave. Therefore, at the end of the Elegy we witness the stage play of ourselves and of the happiness that would lie in our ability to lovethis, too, a play because it is an ideal type and the transcendent fulfillment of an ever immanently failing dream. Here too I cannot understand why Guardini finds false and ominous (p. 222) the fact that the human heart endlessly experiences a great deal of failure and only rare success in the work of the heart, or that the effort we put into the work of the heart produces something false, and only genuine ability makes a genuine smile possible. In what way does this annul our personhood? Incidentally, that the pure too-little is suddenly transformed into the empty too-much (verses 82 and 84) is an unalloyed image of ability, of balance. What appeared to be too little effort turns out later, after one is able to achieve balance, to be an empty too much. The account balances perfectly. Guardini (p. 213) fails to appreciate this. Guardini forgets here, it seems to me, what an elegy is: a lament for the limitations of our existence, an experience of its imperfection by contrasting it with models of what is sound and whole. It is quite true that an elegiac poet, who is also Christian, might speak quite differently about the finitude of our lives, which would issue from an entirely different kind of knowledge. But Rilke is quite justified in speaking from the knowledge that he has. And we treat him unjustly when we fail to measure the truth of what he says by the experiences on which his statements are based. So it seems to me quite senseless to confront Rilke's claim, in the seventh Elegy for example, to see the deliverance of all things in the gaze of the Angel with the Christian salvation of all things in God (p. 282) Deliverance here means nothing more than "the protective keeping of the recognized form," its preservation in the feeling heart. The Angel surpasses us in this work because its feeling is not so conditioned and limited, so often troubled, as our own. There seems to be nothing praiseworthy that these beings of greater feeling have not already long possessed. But in the ninth Elegyin Guardini's eyes the most beautiful onewe find something especially reserved for the human being, this creature of such reverse capacity; and that is the things of the earth, the simple things, those things that have taken form in human feeling and thus have become "tellable." We would have expected that Guardini would once again show how this is the secularization

< previous page

page_147 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_148

next page > Page 148

of a Christian idea. It is the incarnation that Rilke here attributes to the human being. We earthly beings are superior to the Angels' pure essence of feeling in the sense that our feeling knows nothing unconditioned, and precisely for that reason we can awaken what is conditioned, the things, to their genuine being. And we can do this because, and insofar as, we gain the proper relation to our own conditionedness, and that means to our death. These are very weighty arguments with which Guardini opposes Rilke's "doctrine on death." It is precisely in a protest against death that he sees the "ontological dignity" of the human being, and in its absence that he sees man's capitulation. This is undoubtedly correct, but is it also correct with respect to Rilke? Does he actually believe that Rilke lacks ontological honesty? Would a constant effort to affirm death be necessary for Rilke if he did not bear this protest in himself more consciously than any one else? It seems to me that this ''doctrine" of Rilke's also contains a truth. There is both a wrong way and a right way of relating to one's finitude: one can pretend it does not exist (through the illusions of a glamorized happiness), or one can admit its truth, an admission that devotes all the energy of one's feelings to what is finite and unique. I miss Guardini's explanation of why Rilke can call "familiar death" a holy insight inspired by the earth. The fact that the human heart can transform everything that exists into things of genuine permanence by allowing its own human feeling to be incarnated and spiritualized in them is really a result of the experience of its own finitude. This was already known to Aeschylus. Even though for the Christian it is incomplete, does it not remain a correct description of earthly being insofar as this insight of the earth, the earth itself, and the human being are a divine creation with a divine destiny? One may doubt whether it is possible for man to make an existential affirmation of death by his own volition. But we must not deny that what Rilke preserves of the significance of our age, at the end of which we find ourselves, is certainly true. Is it not precisely the privilege of the poeta privilege denied to him by his interpreternot to be obliged to have a complete philosophical and theological system, but rather to make statements, true in themselves, but the conceptual verification of which, in the sense of a universal meaning, is no longer his concern? (Rilke's letters often contain interpretations and are certainly valuable hints for

< previous page

page_148 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_149

next page > Page 149

what the poet means, but his attempts at systematization we sometimes hear in them, remain those of the dilettante, and Guardini pays much too much attention to them.) We find here a permanent kernel of truth in that "aesthetic relativism" so tabooed by Guardini (by no means merely a modern phenomenon: we need but think of the treatment of classical mythology in Attic tragedy and comedy and of Plato's criticism of the poets). This kernel is the idea that the truth of art, and for that reason also the meaning of its statements, finds only in the interpreter the definition and limitation that make direct criticism possible. All criticism of literatureunless it maintains that the alleged literature is not literature at all because it lacks "realization"is always the interpretation's own criticism of itself. The task of the interpreter, precisely insofar as he is seeking truth, is to detect the precise location of such realized truth, and at the same time to discover in himself his own limitations by gathering examples of a contrary view. He must openly admit what is valuable in self-criticism. It is very deceptive to criticize as aesthetic relativism precisely what makes the truth claim of literature possible in the first place. Even if I take into consideration the particular assumptions of Guardini's interpretation of Rilke, it seems to me utterly astonishing that, given his distinguished sensitivity to what is poetic, he seems impervious to the superior quality of the textural density in the tenth Elegy. Rilke's poetic discourse is permeated to a fault with reflection: his metaphors represent at times the most extreme kind of artificiality. But given the qualities of his style, the tenth Elegyin this his own judgment is unerringly correctrepresents the supreme moment of poetic transformation. It simply requires a firm resolve to seek out the truths that are conveyed here in the form of narrative action. It is the story of how all true emotions, above all that of suffering, have been eliminated from the contemporary world. Where is suffering still to be found? Where does it still admit its own existence? In the funeral lament! The melancholy youth realizes something of the essential connection between suffering and Being. He follows one of the laments a short distance beyond the vulgar noise of the world's street fair until, having matured, he returns to a sobering reality. The lament is still present with someone who is recently deceased. It is now no longer possible for a rationally organized

< previous page

page_149 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_150

next page > Page 150

funeral industry in the modern city of suffering to pretend that lament does not exist. It is a young lament who receives him; and later he is accompanied by an older one. From this particular case of mourning, she already points the way into that immense kingdom of laments and suffering, and finally leads him to realize the sublime majesty of death, how this suffering is part of a vast heaven constellated by suffering. Finally the older lament leaves him too. Only wordless suffering is still with him out of which there ultimately springs forth the source of joy. Nowhere is the principle of Rilke's mythopoieia more clearly visible than here. The being of one who has died is accompanied by lament until he is "infinitely dead," that is, when no lament, no final tears, are any longer with him: indeed until his suffering, endured to the end, dissolves into joy. Those "infinitely dead," affirming their own death, is the Yes to their own finitude with which this Elegy, and all the Elegies, close. The true happiness of human existence is not a rising happiness, that is, it does not consist in the projection of a future or of permanence. The resignation that lies in this insight must be simply intolerable for anyone abandoned by God. But we have no right to say that it is no insight at all, even if the truth of the insight is of only limited validity for one who unites the Christian hope in a future life with such healing in the present one. But even for him, it is not false. From these considerations it follows that a legitimate philosophical criticism of poetry cannot begin with what is said in a poem, but rather precisely with what is not said in it. It is a matter of realizing the limits of its truth. The value of Guardini's book, not counting the abundance of rich interpretative insights, lies in the fact that it promotes a discussion of this question in Rilke's poetry, even if the criticism itself sticks much too closely to the statements made in the poems themselves. The question of the limits of Rilke's truth can be understood properly only if we mean by this the limits that can be attributed to Rilke's truth in us. Any criticism of a poet that presupposes being struck by the word of the poet is and remains self-criticism of the interpreter. We might add in reference to such self-criticism, which owes its existence to the work itself, that Rilke's overriding theme is love and death. Its thematic context can be most clearly seen by proceeding from Rilke's remark about lovers: what is closest to us is enmity.

< previous page

page_150 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_151

next page > Page 151

No matter what attitude we have toward ourselves as human beings in the course of life, we experience the enmity of the Thou as the limit of our beingand this is particularly true of death. In this way, learning to love and learning to affirm one's death are the same. Of course, we miss in Rilkeand that is the bleak aspect of his worldthe fact that the one is actually at the origin of the other. Indeed, this is the way it appears to the extent that one's "reaching out in feeling toward all things," and that means the affirmation of everything that exists, springs from the rapture of the lovers and is only expressed by the poet. But such complete surrender, whereby all that exists returns into its inmost being, is for Rilke only the beginning of love, something that is quickly lost. For "what is closest to us is enmity." We will have to admit that this is true. But there is still another truth, not the closest, but perhaps the most distant and the most difficult, that Rilke does not mention; and that is the truth of forgiveness and reconciliation. Between lovers it is the real truth, in which the freedom of both toward the other, this freedom so threatened by enmity, is won back and even intensified. Only in such an experience does the person become truly a complete person. There is in Rilke's poetry a hint of such fulfillment only in the mode of lament. But even that is true knowledge. Guardini is wrong when he continually turns against Rilke the significance of the Thou (which is, of course, not an "object'' of love) for the true self of the person. The Christian teacher will justifiably add that even a Yes to death is a Yes to reconciliation, and only then a genuine salvation of the personality. But of course, Christianity teaches that this Yes can be spoken neither by a human I nor a human Thou. That Rilke assumes that this is possible for the "individual heart" in the affirmation of finitude, will appear to the Christian as a Christian truth hidden even from the poet, but at the same time one by which the poet is sustained. And perhaps even one who does not think as a Christian will have to admit that the truth of reconciliation is the unstated basis on which even the infinite toil of Rilke's learning to say Yes was alone possible. That would meannot only for Rilke's relation to Christianitythat, from a philosophical viewpoint, Rilke still belongs in Hegel's sphere of influence.

< previous page

page_151 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_153

next page > Page 153

Mythopoietic Reversal in Rilke's Duino Elegies All interpretation is one-sided. It has as its main goal a particular line of aim, a point of view that cannot claim to be absolute. Ultimately, whoever interprets poetry can do it from various points of view. He can proceed in the direction of the history of genres by classifying a particular poem among the models of the same literary genre; he can proceed in the direction of the history of motifs by examining the reception and transformation of certain traditional motifs; he can extricate the rhetorical and poetic techniques and demonstrate their connection with the "structure" of the whole, etc. But he can also take upon himself the original hermeneutic task of explaining what is incomprehensible. And in this case also, he can proceed by examining particular instances (as was done by Protestant This essay, first delivered as a lecture at a summer seminar on theology in Mainz (October 1966), owes its origin to my disappointment about the great effort that Jakob Steiner wasted in his assiduous commentary. I have just barely been able to resist, wherever I could, correcting the detailed explanations in a great number of individual cases. The essay coincides to a large extent with my criticism of Guardini of twelve years ago. But the theoretical interest in the hermeneutic principle seemed to me to require a more explicit treatment and a demonstration with concrete examples.

< previous page

page_153 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_154

next page > Page 154

hermeneutics of the New Testament right up to the end of the eighteenth century), seeking to clarify, by analysis of the context or the comparison of parallel texts, certain isolated difficulties that cause textual obscurity. Or, he will proceed from the unity of what is actually being said and try to explain what the poem wishes to say; this latter is especially useful in the case of poetry with a very high degree of reflection and for that reason considered generally obscure and hard to understand. Rilke's Duino Elegies belong to such a type of poetry and clearly demand an interpretation of this kind, the very kind that has been amply applied to them: first, on the part of theologians; then on that of philosophers and other authors who are philosophically oriented. They have all endeavored to transpose what the poems say into the prose of their own ideas and into the binding truth of their own concepts. In most instances, they have had little concern for the text and its exact recovery. We can never, of course, completely exclude the engagement of the interpreter from the interpretation of poetry (or at least it ought not to be so). But at the same time, we are continually tempted to read and hear out of the text whatever corresponds most easily to our own preconceived notions, even though, in doing so, we offend against the canon of understanding that is accessible only through the coherence of meaning in the complete structure. Very recently, specialists in literature have begun to concern themselves with the Elegies and to pay close attention to the text, which, of course, easily disintegrates into individual words. As an example, the commentary of Jakob Steiner, very diligently and conscientiously prepared, is more a commentary on the words and draws particularly on parallel texts in a most extravagant manner. But it is something of a ticklish problem to determine what textual parallels can actually achieve in the interpretation of poetry. Of course, they always have a certain directive value for determining linguistic usage and for the interpretation of individual motifs; but, if it is already difficult and rare in the area of philology to find parallels that actually make sense, it is all the more difficult in the case of the interpretation of poetry, because the parallels that do make sense also entail the danger of distorting the resonance awakened by the unity of the poetic discourse. Today we are living in an epoch that is being swept by a new Enlightenment and restricts poetic statement to an ever narrower

< previous page

page_154 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_155

next page > Page 155

range, so that poetry lays special emphasis on the pathos of sobriety, of exaggeration, epigrammatic allusion, and of journalistic side lights. Rilke, on the other hand, back in the 1930s and early 1940s, was the poet who, because of the extreme mannerism of his language gestures, was able to express most clearly the period's consciousness of itself, particularly in its resistance to conformity. At the present time, however, a different kind of consciousness is demanded of us. Of course there is, in our dealing with poetry of any kind, the necessity to comprehend what grips us (E. Staiger); but compared with the engaged transpositions lying behind us, this necessity has acquired a different face. Rilke's poetic word, which is still being acknowledged as great poetry, demands a clarification of the horizon surrounding it, but not in the sense of a literary analysis and commentary, nor in the sense of those precontracted applications. Rather, we must clarify this horizon across the distance of a tremendous change in the way we feel about life. It seems that the time has finally come, by explicitly developing a hermeneutic horizon, to reach a level of reflection on which Rilke's poetry moves and to distance ourselves from that immediate proclamation of theological or philosophical truth which was formerly the main concern of the interpreters. 1 If we want to reach this level of reflection where the Duino Elegies are at home, we must free ourselves from all theological and pseudo-religious preconceptions, as if, by making a discreet detour by way of the Angel, we were actually talking about God. What the Elegies are actually talking about can be determined in a very simple way provided by the hermeneutic method, and it is amazing that the literature on Rilke up to the present time has not taken advantage of it. I refer to the moment when the Elegies, having appeared over the span of a decade, were being arranged by the poet into a poetic cycle and prepared for publication. It was at this moment that what was then the fifth Elegy was exchanged for one just recently written. We can read the poem that gave place to the new Elegy under the title "Gegen-strophen." Why it had to be replaced by the new poem, known as the Acrobat Elegy, is easily explained. The present fifth Elegy forms a far better stylistic unity with the other nine: we find the same extensively rolling verse formation, the same comprehensive gestures of meaning, the same artistically indirect world of images. On the other hand, the "Gegenstrophen," although quite artistically written, approaches its theme directly and, because of its antiphonal form with

< previous page

page_155 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_156

next page > Page 156

an almost strophic effect, obviously does not, from a formal point of view, belong to the cycle. So it is all the more important that this poem was once able to take the place of the fifth among the Elegies. The direct and unmistakable statement it makes gives it its compelling validity for the whole cycle. It announces a central theme of the Elegies. Oh, that you women wander about here among us in suffering, no more protected than we, and nevertheless capable, as blessed ones, of conferring blessings. It is the same theme as stated in the Sonnets to Orpheus: "Love is not something learned." The fifth Elegy, too, sounds this theme at the end when it uses the obvious structural grouping of the acrobats as an image of yearning to represent the possibility of a truly happy union of the lovers. Like all elegies. Rilke's Duino Elegies are songs of lament. What is lamented is the fact that, for lovers, true happiness is unattainable; or better, the fact that lovers, and particularly male lovers, are incapable of loving in such a way that genuine fulfillment becomes possible. But as a consequence, the theme of the Elegies becomes much more general. It concerns the weakness of the human heart, its failure to surrender completely to its feeling. The "Gegenstrophen" can lament the fact that the loving woman is, in this respect, far ahead of the man. In a similar way, the Elegies begin with those who "infinitely" love, those who are abandoned and yet continue to love. But the space the Elegies measure out is much more extensive. There is a connection between the experience of love and that of death. The demands of both are obviously so great that the human heart cannot help but be aware of its own failure in meeting them. It is particularly with respect to those who die young that the one who laments becomes aware of the weakness of his heart. What he obviously cannot do is accept the fact as it is, mourning and lamenting, without making any accusation against the cruelty of such a fate, particularly when it is the death of children and young people. What matters is "to avoid the false impression of injustice." In this way, we can more or less describe the initial experience and the extensive range of what the Elegies are speaking about. If

< previous page

page_156 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_157

next page > Page 157

we want to understand the manner of what is being said here, we must proceed from a foreunderstanding of what is being said, forced upon us by the poem itself. That is, we must acquire a horizon of understanding and interpretation within which we can recover the poetic statement with precision. First and foremost, we must ask what the Angel of the Elegies signifies. To answer this question, we really do not need the interpretation Rilke himself has given, an interpretation that in any case the poet has pushed much too far in the direction of dogmatic spiritualism. Of course, the Angel is a superhuman creature, and it is invoked as a being that in the area of feeling, surpasses us infinitely But in no way does it appear as a messenger or representative from God. And it certainly does not testify to any kind of transcendence in the religious sense. If Rilke once calls it the guarantor of the invisible, even this designation is in no sense meant theologically. The invisible is that which cannot be seen and touched and yet possesses reality. In the human heart, it is the reality of feeling that claims such absolute certainty without enjoying any support of evidence. Hence, it must assert itself against the utilitarian skepticism of a monumental realism. Now, if the insistence on the reality of what we feel is confirmed by the Angel, then that means that the conditionedness and incompleteness of our emotions, which could raise doubts about their reality, are lifted beyond any doubt in the figure of the Angel. Its feeling is unconditioned and unambiguous, whereas the human heart is capable of such feeling only in the rarest of moments. What is invoked here as the Angel, then, is a supreme possibility of the human heart itselfa possibility never fully realized, one that the heart cannot achieve because the human being is conditioned in so many ways, rendering him incapable of a clear and total surrender to his feeling. The poetic situations that deal with us and the Angel in the Elegies confirm this: "I would perish from his more powerful life"; "Our own heart, beating with such intensity, would destroy us"; "We, whenever we feel, vanish like vapor"; the Angel of the fourth Elegy whose ''play transcends far beyond us"; and then always the Angel to whom something is shown: the laborious smile of the child-acrobat, the painful toil of the acrobats' destiny, but also the great works of human art that have absorbed our emotion; and on the near side of all noble feelings, the world of things; it is always something with respect to which the human heart is wont to fail, simply because, in our lack of attention, it is overlooked. It is always

< previous page

page_157 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_158

next page > Page 158

the power and the impotency of human feeling that makes us think of the Angel as one whose feeling is not limited by the feeling of another, but rather in-gathers it in such a way that his own feeling is completely identical with it, a feeling that does not evaporate, but rather remains in itself. This is what Rilke calls Angel, because such feeling completely surpasses what is human. Women, like the ones addressed in the first of the "Gegen-strophen," are regarded by the poet as being just a bit closer to the Angel. Without doubt, Rilke was not acquainted with the angelology of the Middle Ages. As is well known, he expressly forbids us to relate his conception of the Angel to that of Christianity. Nevertheless, there is in the idea of 'angel' an ontological problem that conspicuously crops up everywhere. Medieval thought was very concerned with the fact that the angel is identical with its mission and for that reason cannot possess "time" in the human sense, that is, neither time nor eternity. 2 The Angel of the Elegies, too, is neither a human nor a divine phenomenon. It cannot appear at all unless the human heart is capable of a singleness of vision that might possibly call it forth ("you cannot walk against such a strong current"). The cry of the poetic I to the Angel is not a call that could induce someone to appear. Rather, it is the addressing and summoning of a witness, who is to confirm what is already known. For what one already knows, what one is certain of in the intimacy of the self, so that it is inseparable from that self, is precisely what Rilke calls feeling and emotion: the way one looks and the way one sees change, can disappear, etc. But feeling, the most fleeting thing of allto want to hold on to it, or even to will it all, makes no sense whatsoeverhas an unequivocal reality in which it is nothing but itself, which, as we say, gathers us in and fulfills us. What does it mean, though, when this most extreme conception of our own being is addressed as an Angel, that is, as an acting person? At this point we must turn to hermeneutic reflection and inquire how poetic discourse in general is to be understood. All poetic discourse is myth. That is, it verifies itself simply by being said. It narrates and speaks of deeds and events and finds only belief; and it finds this belief to the extent that it is we ourselves who are encountered in these deeds and sufferings of gods and great persons. Thus, the world of classical myth continues to inspire poets right up to the present day to reawaken the myths for the purpose of selfencounter here and now. Often these attempts demonstrate a highly

< previous page

page_158 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_159

next page > Page 159

cunning kind of conscious intent, particularly when the poet can count on the presence of his own poetic forerunners in the memory of the reader. In this way, the horizon of understanding into which the poet speaks is prepared in a reliable way. But even in this case, it cannot be said that classical myth possesses religious truth. And yet, it remains comprehensible, and can be raised to the level of the concept, only by the interpretation of successful poetic recreations. It was Homer who inspired Walter F. Otto decades ago to speak about the Homeric gods in the hushed tones of the initiate. He enlightened us in such a way that we not only acquired information about certain strange religious notions, but gained access to these gods through our own human experience. (And when he undertook to elucidate the figure of Dionysus, certainly not without delicacy and depth of understanding, he never got beyond Nietzsche because there was no work of poetry that could have awakened it for him.) 3 In all such cases, the principle on which understanding is based is that of reversal. What is presented as the action and suffering of others is understood as the experience of one's own suffering. Even the concept of "demythologizing," which has become so controversial in present-day theology, implies the principle of this reversal, to the extent that the meaning of religious proclamation in the New Testament is limited by this reversal to a human understanding of faith.4 We have to have this hermeneutic presupposition quite firmly in place if we want to understand the particular way Rilke writes poetry. It is no longer myth of the classical tradition that is being transmitted here (not even in its transformation by Christianity that produced such a wealth of allegorical poetry during the Baroque period). It is also even true in the case of its conscious revival, for example, in the late poetry of Hölderlin. The mythical world is now gone; what remains is the principle of poetic reversal. In the case of Rilke, it becomes the principle of mythopoietic reversal: the world of our own heart becomes, for poetic saying, objectified for us as a mythical world, that is, a world of acting beings. Whatever surpasses the range of human feeling appears as the Angel; the terrible shock over the death of young people appears as one recently diseased; the lament that fills our heart and pursues the deceased appears as a creature pursuing the one just deceased. In short, the full range of experience in the human heart is poetically liberated as the activity of one's own personal existence. The self-forgetfulness of mythical con-

< previous page

page_159 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_160

next page > Page 160

sciousness is guiding Rilke here. Because of his highly mannerist art, he succeeds, in a historical period without myth, in lifting the experiences of the human heart into the realm of the mythically poetic. The result for hermeneutics is clear. The mythological phenomenon demands, for its part, a kind of hermeneutic reversal. The poetic statement has to be translated back again. But the methodological difficulty lies in the fact that what has to be retranslated is something that has already been retranslated. If, as is usually the case, the great mythical tradition is, so to speak, bathed in the light of a new poetic revival and in this light disappears into the twilight of obscure meaning, then the mythical reality we unexpectedly encounter in Rilke's poetic discourse has in each case the exact contours of a simple mirroring of immanent experience. To reverse this mirror image and translate it back into our understanding as a legible text can no longer be accomplished as it was in periods of poetic composition in strict allegorical form, when a retranslation into the prose of reflection constantly accompanied poetic understanding. Here we find no harmonious world of mythical figures or expressly prepared comparisons that it would be the task of hermeneutics to open up to our understanding. Rather, we find a sudden and unsuspected recall of harmonies, from which there spreads out into our understanding an almost hermetically composed poetic structure. Of course, something disharmonious always remains in such understanding. But it is precisely the disharmony, sounding along with the harmonies, that allows the margins of poetic statement to be flexible. In what follows, we have chosen two Elegies by which we propose to demonstrate the principle of mythopoietic reversal. Let us begin with the fourth Elegy. The very first verse gives us an occasion for testing our principle. The address "O Trees of Life" is directed to us. It is wrong to read the second verse with the accent on "we." The stress lies on not being one. We are not one with ourselves because we do not know when our winter occurs, just like evergreens that are always green. But this is but an echo, because Trees of Life are, of course, not evergreens. The splendid integration of the first verse is based rather on the fact that self-address is here unmistakable. It is we who are being spoken of, in the mode of lament. We are not like those migratory birds who know their season, nor are we like the lions who are so at one with their imperial bearing that impotency, that is, wanting to do something of which they are incapable, never even occurs to them.

< previous page

page_160 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_161

next page > Page 161

By comparing these opposed images of unity, we consciously lament the disunity and violence of all human behavior; and for this preliminary understanding, it is clear that lovers are primarily the ones who represent human behavior here. The impotence of our heart and the limited way it engages its feeling (so that we do not even know the contours of our own feeling) cause us ever and again to retreat from our gift of surrender. Enmity is what the poet calls this overwhelming insistence on oneself that limits our surrender to another. Real surrender is achieved by opposing this self-insistence, if only for the "penstroke of a moment." What is meant here is that our insistence on the self is as constant and generally pervasive as the background against which a pen drawing is brought into relief. "Our position is made pointedly clear to us." The commentators have asked themselves who makes this clear. It is a simple case of mythopoietic reversal. It is we ourselves who are so pointedly clear with one another by preparing the moments of genuine harmony with so much resistance, inattention, and self-insistence, as if we were doing this on purpose so that our surrender will actually be noticed for what it is. Naturally, Rilke uses the indefinite pronoun instead of the pronoun we, because it signifies us in a way we cannot otherwise say, in the way we undergo experience as if we were not we. Precisely this knowledge, the fact that we undergo experience, that it happens to us, forms the metaphorical foundation of the whole following section; that is, the idea that we are sitting in front of our own heart as if it were a stage, expectantly anxious to see what is going to happen there, as if we were not we. The expectancy with which we anticipate the beginning drama stems from our realization that we can never completely merge with the feeling that fills us, that we cannot hold on to that oneness with our feeling, as can the Angel who is a tumult of emotion, the continually intensifying fulfillment of feeling. For that reason the scenery on this stage of our heart indicates farewell. By that is not meant the waning moments of love, but rather the already realized fact that we will never be mature enough to achieve oneness with our own feeling. In the mythopoietic reversal, this is demonstrated by the entrance of the dancer, who, on a stage swaying as if made only of curtains, puts on false play. The garden that promises to bloom for us is false; the unity of dance and dancer is only pretended. We can never forget the private life of the dancer, of the bourgois who makes every effort when playing his role on the stage and then sheds all restraint when he gets home. In this

< previous page

page_161 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_162

next page > Page 162

way, the dancer represents that middling superficiality of human feeling, its strained exertion and lack of natural ease. And yet, it is the poet who sits before the stage of his own heart, expecting the complete, unbroken entrance of true emotion. He never allows himself to be disconcerted in this expectance of his heart, which is always looking to find a genuine love and allconsuming devotion. He calls on witnesses to testify to the fact that it makes sense to sit before the stage of his heart and expect true and complete feeling. It is particularly his father on whom he calls. Again it will be of help if we understand mythical reversal quite precisely. Of the father who is long dead, it is said that he had equanimity as only the dead have it; and he is surrendering this equanimity for us. When reversed, we understand that the dead father is there for us in such a way that we learn to get over his loss with calm equanimity. And yet, in certain situations of life this serenity is disturbed. There are exceptional moments in life when the earlier I, the father, steps for a moment out of his serene concealment. We think of him as being there when serious and risky decisions have to be made. And when, finally, the Angel must come to manipulate the marionettes on their strings, we have before us again the description of a selfevident truth: that there are experiences and decisions of our heart in which there is no longer any arbitrariness or doing as one freely chooses, no diverging of conflicting desires, no disunity in our own heart. At this moment, it actually seems that there is present a being who transcends us and gathers us completely in. That it is at all possible to be so unequivocal with respect to oneself and one's own feeling is confirmed in what follows by two witnesses called by the poet: those who are dying and the child. The one who is dying, and consequently has come to terms with his situation, sees through the pretensions of everything around him with complete clarity. We might think of the death of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyitch: the visits of the relatives and colleagues, the fake cheerfulness and the cramped attitude of sham confidence. It is with an almost sympathetic eye that the dying man watches the dishonest efforts of the living to conceal from him that he has to die. He is already to a far greater extent one with himself And then there is the child. This witness of the proper way of being one with oneself remains present to the very end of the poem. For the child, it is possible to merge completely with the

< previous page

page_162 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_163

next page > Page 163

present moment, because of which even his toy is endowed with the same unqualified certainty. For the child, the toy means at one moment everything, and at the next moment it means nothing. The fact that there is no demand for continuity here helps us understand what constitutes the life of the child. Full presence, complete lack of past and future. In this way, the perfection of feeling is represented in the child, in undivided accord with itself This remains true right up to the exacting requirement of death. We find a chain of rhetorical questions: who shows . . .? who . . . ? who . . . ?questions that make explicit what is beyond description. For this cannot be done by just anyone. It is so utterly indescribable how a child can stand there completely at one with his own present being, an unattainable model of undivided and concentrated attention. Even the child has its destiny (it has its place in a constellation of the heavens); but at the same time, it has a proper measure of distance. What happens to him is not something that stays on his mind, either because it is resented or missed or yearned for. Rather, the child is "satisfied and delighted with everything while it lasts"a marvelous use, by the way, of the word vergnügt, in which what is sufficient and delightful are fused. The child is not attached to what happens to him. If a toy breaks or a game is disrupted, if he is suddenly called away or is otherwise troubled, how in the world does the child manage to shift so easily from the worst distress to such a blissful smile? From where does he get the strength to remain detached from whatever happens to him? The most serious test and real confirmation of this exemplary figure lies in the example of the dying child. The way in which the child knows how to give up his toy and anything else that has importance for him and quickly to find comfort remains true even to the point when, dying, he must give up life itself. A child who has to die is like a piece of gray bread that gets hard, so natural and seamless is the process. (It is possible that there is a folklorist element in the turn of phrase "Who makes a child's death," for such a plastic process, like making figures out of bread that attain their genuine expression through the process of drying, is supposed to have been present in the farming regions of Bohemia. But it seems unimportant to me whether or not Rilke is actually thinking of such a custom.) That we have conferred the proper meaning on this image is confirmed by Rilke's use of the word or. The image leaps at us: first,

< previous page

page_163 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_164

next page > Page 164

death is made, and now death is left in the round mouth of the child "like the core of a beautiful apple." What is evoked here by the poet is the peculiarly apprehensive expression assumed by the small child when a piece of food gets stuck in his throat. The point is that the child wants to retain it. He does not want to bring up what he is choking on. This is how closely connected the bitter and the sweet are for him. Both metaphors are designed to express what is for us an unimaginable unity in which a child willingly accepts his death. We can imagine death only in the form of hostile violence that we cannot affirm; hence the word murderer. If the tightly unified thematic structure of the fourth Elegy, as stated in the initial question, When will our feeling ever be whole? opened up for us the possibility of understanding by means of the principle of mythopoietic reversal, then the entire structure of the tenth Elegy, which Rilke considered his most successful, is completely dominated by this principle. Here, in our interpretation, we can move quite far toward a total retranslation. But we intend in what follows to give as succinct a presentation as possible. The theme, stated at once in the first invocation, is the significance of pain for human life and the wrong-headedness in our relationship to it. Already in the invocation of the proem, we encounter a marvelous mythopoietic reversal: the nights are characterized as inconsolable sisters, that is, they are received by the speaking I in a brotherly-sisterly embrace, as if they could not be comforted, but were surrendering themselves entirely to pain. Of course, it is the human being who, in the night, completely surrenders to his pain because there is no longer any place to flee where he might find distraction. The fear of the night experienced by a person pursued by distress or pain is a basic motif of Rilke's, particularly in the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the first work of the poet to reach the same artistic niveau as the late works. Rilke calls us squanderers of pain; that is, we are not being economical with what we constantly need and what is absolutely necessary for us. This is not the place to consider, as such, the theme of pain and its difference from joy. But everyone knows that pain forces us to look within, and precisely for that reason has a deepening effect. A face transfigured by joy is certainly something wonderful, but only pain sets its mark on the face. That points to the fact that pain belongs intimately to life, to consciousness, and to the

< previous page

page_164 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_165

next page > Page 165

knowledge we have of ourselves. The constant presence of pain makes itself heard right into the word-sounds themselves in the line "Place, settlement, camp, soil, dwelling," which enunciates an ever moredeeply resounding and thus an ever more-substantial presence. Instead, we see how small a space we grant to pain in our human existence. This becomes visible in the whole fakeness of the cemetery at the edge of town, and again it is in the presence of the Angel, the being whose feeling is complete, who knows no disruption in its emotion, that all this so-called suffering would disappear (its feet would destroy it "without a trace"). This is the reason for the bitter formula of the comfort market "where in the funeral establishment the symbols of suffering are, as it were, replaced by money. We need but think of the Greek funeral steles, which are being exhibited in ever greater numbers in the National Museum in Athens, to realize by this contrast that the monuments in our cemeteries are actually "the draining effusion from the casting-mold of emptiness.'' Just as suffering here leads a sham, isolated existence on the margins of life, so real life for human beings is a kind of continual bazaar, a chase after happiness and the illusion of freedom that suppress any thought of suffering. We do not need to describe life in such an amusement park in any detail. It is, of course, clear what it is that has real importance in this sham life: success and money Human life takes on an aura of seriousness only when the question of money is involved. This is evoked in this instance by the phrase for grown-ups. Money is something one does not talk about (just like sex); and yet it is precisely money that is the focus of all the hubbub. There is a fence around this amusement park, and on the fenceboards there hang placards advertising a beer called deathless. So we are once again made acutely aware that the meaning of the whole park is to pretend that death does not exist. When it is said that we chew fresh distractions with our beer, that means that we are numbing any thought of death by plunging into distractions. We encounter genuine feelings only when we leave behind us the showy tinsel of the bazaar. Children at play, lovers lost in contemplation of one another, dogs finally released for once from continual human imprisonment. From here the young boy is drawn onward. The stress lies on the young boy. The poem wishes to say that boys are not immediately as reasonable as grown-ups. They still squander their feelings; they are still capable of not being able to

< previous page

page_165 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_166

next page > Page 166

come to terms with things, to admit that something is wrong and one ought not be satisfied with it as it is. For them, money does not yet have such fascination, and for that reason there is for them still the possibility of lament. Again it is an example of mythopoietic reversal when the boy follows the lament as if attracted by her. He pursues her, touched by something that charms him, until finally he turns back to the serious reality of life. He does not care to reflect any longer in fruitless melancholy on the absurdity of life, and so he abandons the lament. And then we are told about those quite different people, those who died young, as if this were but a continuation of the theme in a unified narration. These do not turn around, but rather continue to follow the lament. We understand nothing here if we do not see that it is not the dead who follow the lament, but rather that the lamentation of those who are still alive is following the dead, and above all, the newly deceased. Here lamentation is, as it were, still legitimate, so that no one can be blamed if he acknowledges the existence of the lament. Now, the poet constructs the mythical world of the laments, the place where the dead are received. And we ought not right away to turn into the distorting mode of a frosty allegory something that should charm us as a whole rather than excite our search for comparisons in the detail. It is of course clear that we are speaking here of the lament who is concerned with this dead boy; and this in such a way that the dead boy appears as the subject of the narration by being with the lament who is concerned with him, If the lament behaves differently toward girls from the way she does toward boys, then we get a glimpse of the essential differences in the way man and woman are related to lament. When the lament goes with the boy without speaking, then a part of the reason is that the boy does not surrender so easily to the lament as does the girl. This is the way we should see it. The poet follows the dead boy into the kingdom of the laments. What the poet shows, first of all, is that the lament has lost her place in our world. The laments are impoverished. "At one time we were rich." It is an older lament who knows about this. This too has its human dimension. The young lament is replaced by the older one; and the latter points further up into the mountains where her home is. But these mountains are no longer those of lament, but of suffering; that is, of a silent lament, sledged out or, like anger, turned

< previous page

page_166 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_167

next page > Page 167

to cinder. What lies behind this is, so to speak, the whole inner dimension of pain that leads from the superficiality of an openly vocal lament to the most intimate reality of a suffering that is totally one with the human being. The older lament who still knows something about the legitimacy of pain and lament in human life, leads the dead boy through, as it were, the archeology of the land of suffering. She shows him the decayed remains of the splendid imperial order of suffering and lament. Ethnology and the history of religion permit us to fill this out at once with details. Even in our own time we still find the role of lament in those regions that are still bound to peasant customs: the women of lament and all the rites of lamentation that are connected with the funeral cult. The considerable poetic power of these verses conjures up for us a landscape of the laments in which tears are lifted up as tall tear trees and whole fields of melancholy display their bloom, plants with rare foliage that somewhere decorate the windowsills of our homes, that is, only graze occasionally the margins of our lives. And even when the dead boy is shown the pasturing animals of sorrow, this should not be interpreted by finding some allegorical comparison. But it is important that we feel how the silhouette of a posturing herd in the evening light draws us below and disseminates sorrow. Finally the night arrives, and what is now depicted has something Egyptian about it. But of course, we are not to suppose that this landscape of lamentation is actually Egypt. What is shown here does not lie on the Nile. There is an echo of Egypt here because this is the culture in which the dead have the greatest presence. What are we to think, however, when another sphinx rises up here in the moonlight whom the dead boy gazes at in astonishment, just as Rilke in a wonderful letter 5 once described his own experience of the Egyptian Sphinx? By the countenance of the silent chamber is surely meant the burial place of the pharaohs on top of which is built this giant body with the human face. We can share with the poet the breath-taking emotion that emerges from the massive proportion of this stony countenance, when the human face so well known to us in its living, moving, and changing aspect, now bathed in the light of eternity, rises up before the spectator. How breathtaking that this fleeting human existence should have any weight at all on the scale of the stars. But what does all this mean? It will help to understand if we

< previous page

page_167 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_168

next page > Page 168

look at the structural arrangement of the entire section. The monument itself, a crowned head, is the final stage in the process of a rising intensity. The majesty of Death, being lord of all things, here represents the greatest of all pains and the greatest of all losses and for that reason can give to the lament for death its peculiar rank. It is here that lament has its actual origin. Thus, the poetic description of the encounter between the dead boy and death is determined by the incomprehensibility of death. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The fact that the dead boy, dizzy with early death, is unable to grasp fully the majestic monument, stands for the incomprehension that an early death means for us who are still living. We simply do not know how to make sense of it. Nothing of this becomes explicit in the mythical self-forgetfulness that the poet maintains throughout the entire description of an extensive journey through the land of the Laments. All that remains is a description of what is seen. It is only at the sudden flight of the owl that we actually become aware of the magnitude of the royal countenance of the Sphinx. To perceive the contours of this fantastic phenomenon, we need to enlarge one page of our usual quarto to the size of a folio by twice unfolding it. If we glance a bit higherwe are talking now about the beginning of the next strophewe will catch sight of the stars over this land of suffering. The commentators, particularly Steiner most recently, have made a considerable effort to interpret several of these constellations. But it is really quite questionable whether such a task should be undertaken at all. It is much more important here to think of the poetic function of such exactness, as recent literary semantics is beginning to realize. In the same way that we are there recognizing these "signs of lying," so here we see the signs of a whole dimension of pain that we have denied. Of course, there is no doubt that each individual interpretation must strictly observe the obvious fact that these stars are stars of the land of suffering. The symbols have to have something to do with suffering; and our task, it seems to me, is to be sensitive to all these constellations rising together, on the basis of the content of profound suffering connected with the individual symbols. Of course, a constellation can also mirror the world of suffering in the reversal, as, for example in the happiness of the Cradle or in the blessed union of man and animal in the Horseman. One of the Sonnets to Orpheus also speaks of this. But in the latter

< previous page

page_168 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_169

next page > Page 169

case, the blessed union is only a fleeting moment, and the disintegration of unity can already be tragically felt on the return home, when cradle and table, horse and rider part. If we want to describe in general the direction of these star symbols, then the most important hermeneutic hint is provided by the growing intensity of the depiction. Suddenly this rising intensity becomes clear in the M, signifying "the Mothers." We simply can no longer miss the fact that the constellation of the Mothers, which spreads out over the whole southern sky, represents the most profound experience of suffering and lament. It is the suffering of mothers. In this way, for each of the constellations of the land of suffering there are several things we could say to awaken echoes and resonances; but I do not think the poet means for us to try to determine their origin when the general direction toward an understanding of them is clearly indicated. Let us now follow the conclusion of the poem; that is, let us complete the journey that the dead boy is making with the lament, and from whom he finally parts to proceed alone into the mountains of primal suffering. This journey of the dead boy through the landscape of the laments signifies, in mythopoietic reversal, the one who is engulfed by the sorrow for a dead boy, and experiences, through the blessing of pain, the wisdom of those ancient cultures where lament was cherished. And if, at the end of the journey, the lament is forced to stop, able only from afar to point out the source of joy gleaming faintly in the light of the moon, then there responds within us a sudden insight, the realization that, at the end of the path of sorrow, whoever is in sorrow will leap with joy. The lament must abandon the dead boy at the foot of the mountains of suffering. When the laments are silent, then the lament and the dead boy are no longer together. She no longer accompanies him. That is, he reached the point where he now belongs to those whose loss we have learned to bear. The sorrow, borne by relatives and friends, finally grows silent and is, as it were, turned to stone in the heart. That is why this dead boy now winds his way alone into the mountains. Now he belongs to those infinitely dead who require no memorial, and certainly no lament. But precisely those who are so infinitely dead ought to "awaken in us a parable" that points explicitly to the fact that there is something here to be understood. The long journey of the lament with the dead boy is not without meaning and purpose. It leads to a realization, and it is to this realization that

< previous page

page_169 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_170

next page > Page 170

the whole poetic appeal of the Elegies gives voice: "that I, at some time after attaining the terrifying insight, will burst into the song of joy and praise in the presence of consenting Angels." Consent is the key word that links the tenth Elegy to the first (the false appearance of injustice). The poet is making a comparison here; and whenever there is a comparison, we certainly have the right to understand what the comparison means. The catkins of the bare hazel bush appear before the foliage greens. The branches are still without leaf. But a hazel bush, which also bears female blooms, can never fertilize itself. Thus, this hazel is a symbol for something that does not bloom for itself, but rather spends itself in selfless abandon. In this, it resembles the fruitful Spring rain that also does not intend the fecundity it spreads abroad. And now, the poem tells us that we should also regard the early deceased in this way. When we feel emotion stirring in us, then it is no longer the welling-up of accusation that a life here was not brought to its proper conclusion and that an expectation of happiness with which every life begins was disappointed. What fills us with emotion ought rather to be that, contrary to our expectations about happiness, happiness can also be found in one who does not attain his own personal fulfillment. And that is a consent that means more than simply coming to terms with the death of a young person. This is made crystal clear for us in the example of the dying child who, in its harmonious childlike existence, has lived this consent as an example for us. Mythopoietic reversal, which we have used as a hermeneutic key, has in Rilke's poetry, as we have shown, an object of a special kind. Here myth is not a myth; that is, not a traditional story being poetically renewed. Also, what happens here is not a poetisization of the world. On the contrary, precisely the unpoetic aspect of our world is the subject of the poetic statement. Where is there a poem written in the grand style that could dare to use a verse like that of the post office on Sunday, which is said to be "shut"? But that is exactly the point. From the experience of his own heart, the poet declares this real world to be full of wonders, precisely a world in which myth no longer has a binding force and in which the lament of the elegy can forcibly express what is perverse and fake. The overwhelming experience, which resists the spirit of the times, allows him to transcend himself and speak about and in the presence

< previous page

page_170 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_171

next page > Page 171

of the Angela Mythopoiie of his own heart. I have described as mythopoietic reversal a procedure by which the critic can retranslate into his own conceptual categories whatever is poetically reflected in this way. Of course, there is the everpresent danger that such a procedure can become rigidly academic. It would certainly be an example of professorial pedantry if we tried to concoct the principle of mythopoietic reversal in every corner, instead of simply observing it where it occurs. The explicit consciousness of it can have the task of submitting us to a kind of hermeneutic purification only by disavowing the method of scientific alienation that deals with poetry just as it deals with any other object of knowledge. But that means we must recover, as meaningful and eloquent, a text that previously appeared to be unfamiliar and strange. All interpretation must end by bringing the sounding board into vibration, which, in turn, will cause the poetic melody to reach our ear with greater intensity. Whatever serves this interpretative intention must in the end be left behind. A poem whose conceptual horizon has been explicitly explored must one day be read in such a way that all explanations simply melt away in the clear light of what the poem itself says. But in very general terms what we have called the principle of poetic reversal is valid for all poetry. There must always be the possibility of a retranslation so that what is present in the verses also becomes present for us. In this sense, the word Parousia is not only a technical term for theology, but also a hermeneutic one. Parousia means nothing more than presenceand presence through the word, only through the word, and in the word, is what we call a poem.

< previous page

page_171 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_173

next page > Page 173

Notes Translator's Introduction 1. See my "The Ontological Context of Gadamer's 'Fusion': Boehme, Heidegger, and Non-Duality," Man and World 18 (1985): 405422. 2. See Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), note 18, p. 234. Goethe and Philosophy 1. Schiller's letter to Goethe, August 23, 1794. 2. Compare Ferdinand Weinhandl, Die Metaphysik Goethes [Goethe's Metaphysics] (Berlin, 1932). On the Course of Human Spiritual Development 1. See my essay "Prometheus und die Tragödie der Kultur" [Prometheus and the Tragedy of Culture]. 2. See E. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance [Individual and Cosmos in the Philosophy of the Renaissance] (1927), p. 98 ff. 3. See O. Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol von Shaftesbury bis Goethe [The Symbol of Prometheus from Shaftesbury to Goethe] (1910).

< previous page

page_173 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_174

next page > Page 174

4. Goethe im Spätwerk [Goethe's Late Works], pp. 46 f. 5. Two further works devoted to Goethe's Magic Flute have appeared, both independent of, and at about the same time as, my study One by Oskar Seidlin in 1943 is now available in Essays in German and Comparative Literature (1961), pp. 45 f. The other is by Arthur Henkel in Zeitschrift fur Deutsche Philologie 71 (195152): 6469. The work of Seidlin examines the connection between this short work and the rest of Goethe's production, particularly its relation to Faust II. Henkel's short contribution emphasizes the antimagical, moral-humane character of Goethe's work, which I have also underscored in Goethe's reception and continuation of Schikaneder's plot. 6. See Max Morris, Goethe-Studien [Goethe Studies], vol. 1, pp. 310 ff. 7. In the meantime, Schikaneder's libretto has been viewed in a more positive light in the literature on Mozart. The theory that Schikaneder had changed his plan while working on the libretto for fear of doubling, which then in turn caused the rupture in the characters of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, has now been rejected. See E. von Komorzynski. "Die Zauberflöte, Entstehung und Bedeutung des Kunstwerks" [The Magic Flute, the Origin and Significance of the Work], Neues Mozart-Jahrbuch 1 (1941); and F. Schnapp, "Die Fabel von der Zauberflöte" [The Plot of the Magic Flute], Musica 1 (1947): 171 ff. The interpretation just given is quite in line with the results of the recent investigations on the sources. 8. See Siegfried Morenz, "Die Zauberflöte im Lichte der Altertumswissenschaft" [The Magic Flute in the Light of the Science of Antiquities]. Forschungen und Fortschritte 2123, nos. 2224 (November 1947). The historical-religious analysis, advertised by Siegfried Morenz in the essay just cited appeared in 1952, published by J. Trier and H. Grundmann as issue of the Münstersche Forschungen. The essay is a learned and instructive classification of the Freemasonry in the Zauberflöte as an aspect of the Egyptomania that has been enormously influential since Hellenism. The valuable material on individual aspects is concerned principally with the initiation. There is no reference to Goethe's sequel. Hölderin and Antiquity 1. In the preface published by him as the fourth volume of his edition, p. xii. 2. Volume 4, pp. 186 ff. (All quotations are taken from the first historical-critical edition, begun by von Hellingrath.) [In the meantime we can compare them with the great Stuttgart Edition for which we are indebted to Friedrich Beissner.]

< previous page

page_174 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_175

next page > Page 175

3. See, for example, vol. 3, p. 463. 4. See vol. 5, p. 335. In the first printing of this essay I falsely cited this passage as proof that Hölderlin took the Greek conception of art as model. I should have followed Beissner's interpretation of "gegen" (Hölderlin's Translations from the Greek, p. 168). Not only does linguistic usage demand that "gegen" here signifies direction, but also in its context the passage from the letter confirms that Hölderlin thought he had achieved Greek simplicity by the very fact that he had achieved real freedom from the Greek letter. He wants to indicate this goal with the expression gegen die exzentrische Begeisterung [toward eccentric enthusiasm]. 5. See the beginning of "Germanien," vol. 4, p. 181. 6. What was said then remains correct, even after the great Stuttgart Edition presents the tradition more exactly. In the final analysis, the second version of the hymn that, precisely as far as content is concerned, still needs considerable decoding, seems to have a different ending. But from verse 54 on, it seems even to have a different theme. 7. Compare the three repetitions of "It is written" in the text of the Gospel. 8. On the word Spuren (traces) compare the "traces of ancient discipline" in the first Pindar fragment (vol. 5, p. 271). 9. Compare Romano Guardini, Hölderlin, pp. 557 f. 10. Compare Max Kommerell, Geist und Buchstabe in der Dichtung [Spirit and Letter in Literature], p. 287. 11. There seems to be a contradiction between this attempt to interpret the inequality of the Unique One and the "worldly" gods and a passage of the other Christ hymn, "Versöhnender . . .," where it is stated of course with reference to Christ, but in an even more general sense: "For ever greater is his realm, like the God of Gods, he himself must also be one of the others" (vv. 89 f). This, stated in such general terms, seems to annul the primacy of the Unique One. But the question is whether it is not precisely the Christian promise that, maintained in gratitude, makes this proposition true even for the other gods. Compare the role of the Comforter in "Brot und Wein'' and also here in an earlier sketch: "No one, like you, has validity in the place of all the others" (vol. 4, p. 335). F. Beissner, Friedensfeier, p. 36, points to the fact that a variant of the passage "übrigen alle" (all the others) reads Menschen [human beings]. Precisely that confirms Christ's distinction, but understood of course as being within the divinity of all of them. In the meantime, through the discovery of the "Friedensfeier," the hymn has found a highly significant parallel to the extent that also there the figure of Christ is particularly emphasized and yet, despite the emphasis, is articulated into the general worship of the gods. It is probably recognized

< previous page

page_175 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_176

next page > Page 176

today that Christ in the "Friedensfeier" is not to be understood as the "Fürst des Festes" [Prince of the feast]. 12. "Patmos," fragments of a later version, vol. 4, p. 229. 13. Anmerkungen zur "Antigonä" [Notes to Antigone], 3, vol. 5, p. 257. Hölderin and the Future 1. F. Beissner repeatedly rejects the foregoing interpretation: St. A. 2.2 pp. 621 and 825; likewise Friedensfeier 41. But just look at the reasons. What hermeneutic naiveté to base one's views on the letter of Boehlendorf instead of acknowledging the content of the poem as first appeal. "It is Orcus, Elysium" has to be understood as an exact parallel to "It is the fruit of Herperia." This is definite. This is the result from whatever point of view we look: from the beginning, from the source, or from Greece. And what an unpoetic misunderstanding of the word Kolonie, doubtless because of its association with heat, thirst, and tropical helmet. In Friedensfeier 40 and 2.2 p. 825, Beissner seems even to misread "im Anfang" as "Anfangs." 2. According to K. Reinhardt an invention first found in Aeschylus (Tradition und Geist [Tradition and Spirit], p. 207). 3. See my study, "Prometheus und die Tragödie der Kultur" [Prometheus and the Tragedy of Culture]. Poetry and Punctuation 1. See Wahrheit und Methode [Truth and Method], where I have attempted to give a more complete argument for this thesis also. 2. In the meantime, I am grateful to W. Brocker for pointing out the following verses by Rilke: When is the time which will lessen these things? I waited; yet never did a stone burst asunder. (While looking at the ruins of a Southern French castle 1909; Zinn, vol. 2, p. 374) Mythopoietic Reversal in Rilke's Duino Elegies 1. No attention whatsoever has been paid to the points I made twelve years ago in my criticism of Guardini, as the example of Steiner clearly demonstrates.

< previous page

page_176 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_177

next page > Page 177

2. See Thomas Aquinas, De instantibus (Baeumker, Impossibilia des Siger von Brabant, pp. 160 ff.) 3. Walter F. Otto, Die Götter Griechenlands [The Gods of Greece] (1929) and Dionysos (1933). 4. Of course, R. Bultmann defines myth and mythical world-view precisely as the opposite of the Kerygma, which is "understood" in faith. But that is a questionable dependence on the world-view of "science," which cannot limit the hermeneutical principle. 5. Now printed in J. Steiner's book, in the commentary on verse 77ff

< previous page

page_177 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_179

next page > Page 179

Index A Aeschylus, xii, 33, 37, 105 Aesthetic relativism, 149 Amphitryon, xi, 119-29 Andreas, Lou, 143 Angelology, 158 Aristotle, 6 B Bach, Johann Sebastian, 109-17 Passion According to St. Matthew, 113, 114 Beethoven, Ludwig, van, 111-13 Bellerophon, 99 Boehme, Jacob, xvii Börne, Ludwig, 22 Bruckner, Anton, 113 C Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 24, 141 Caputo, viii Christianity, angels in, 158 as cultural heritage, xviii-xix, 120 hermeneutics of, 153-54 myth in, 159 Rilke's relation to, 151 Classicism, 68, 111 D Dante Alighieri, 24, 111

Demiurge, 136 Derrida, Jacques, ix Dialogue, hermeneutics and, viii Dilthey, Wilhelm, 6 Dionysus, 75-76, 159 E Eckermann, Johann Peter, 26 Eckhart, Meister, xvii Education (Bildung), viii-ix Elegy, definition of, 147 Enlightenment, 4 Existentialism, vii-viii F Faust, xiv, 27, 56, 59, 65 Fichte, Johann, 1, 13, 71 Idealism of, 70

< previous page

page_179 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_180

next page > Page 180

Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 112 Freemasonry, xvi, 48-49, 55, 61 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, ix-x on education, viii-ix on Prometheus myth, xiii-xv, 28, 33-46, 99, 105 on religion, x-xi Wahrheit und Methode, viii-ix, xxiii George, Stefan, 21, 89, 133 Gnosticism, xxi, 136, 143 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Bach and, 111-13, 116 as critic of Idealism, 16 Gadamer's approach to, xiii-xiv Hölderlin and, 67, 88-91 Kantianism of, xiv marriage of, 26 natural method of, 7 naturalness of language, 24-25 Nature and, 5 Prometheus myth, 33-46 rejection of speculation, 2 Schiller and, 3-4, 9-12 Collected Works, 31, 46 Dichtung und Warheit, 23, 34, 36, 39 Faust, xvi, 27, 56, 59, 65 From My LifeTruth and Poetry, 2, 23 "Ganymed," xiii, xv Magic Flute, Second Part, xvi-xvii, 32, 46-55 "The Only Artist," 5

Pandora, 25, 32, 38, 43 Pandora's Return, 41 "Prometheus," xiii, xv Sorrows of Young Werther, 34 Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, 56 West-East Divan, 25, 28, 29 Gregorian chant, 113 Guardini, Romano, xi, xx, 120, 139-51, 153n. H Habermas, Jürgen, ix Hapsburg Dynasty, xvi, 48 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 14-16, 29 Bach and, 111 Rilke and, 151 Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 116 Logic, 116 Phenomenology of Mind, 15 Heidegger, Martin, xiii Heine, Heinrich, 22 Hellingrath, Norbert von, 68, 88 Henkel, Authur, 119 Hercules, 75-76, 99 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 16, 18, 24, 92 Hermeneutics, xii, 143, 153-71 See also Interpretation dialogue and, viii philosophical, vii Hesiod, 33, 42, 44, 99 Hölderlin, Friedrich, xiii, xvii-xx, 22, 87-108, 120, 159 and antiquity, 67-86 Goethe and, 88-91

Greek translations of, 96 historical consciousness of, 91 Novalis and, 88, 92 religion and, 71 Rilke and, 89 Schiller and, 88-91 "Am Quell der Donau," 83, 84 "An die Deutschen," 97 "Angle from Which We Ought to View Antiquity," 71 "Archipelagus," 70 "Brot und Wein," 70, 76, 77, 81-83, 91-92, 96

< previous page

page_180 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_181

next page > Page 181

"Der Einzige," 69, 71, 78, 79, 81, 85 "Der Frieden," 103 "Der Gesang der Deutschen," 97 "Die Mutter Erde," 83 "Der Rhein," 86 "Die Wanderung," 80 "Germanien," 74, 81, 82 "Hymn to the Rhine," 103 Hyperion, 69, 70, 88 "Nature and Art or Saturn and Jupiter," 104-5 "The Night," 92 Notes to Antigone, 72 Notes to Oedipus, 72 "Patmos," 76, 78, 80, 82-85, 97 "Unter den Alpen gesungen," 84 "Versöhnender," 73, 77, 84 Homer, xii, 111, 159 I Idealism, 1, 90 Fichte and, 70 Goethe and, 16 Identity, philosophy of, 13-14 Interpretation. See also Hermeneutics poetic, 153-54 punctuation and, 133-34 J Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 5, 34 Jaspers, Karl, 23, 24

K Kant, Immanuel, 1, 7, 29 anthropology of, 4 Critique of Judgment, 8, 9 Kassner, Rudolf, 143 Kierkegaard, Søren, 23, 24 Kleist, Heinrich von, x-xi, 22, 68 Amphitryon, xi, 119-29 punctuation of, 133 theology of, 125, 128 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 24 Kommerell, Max, 21, 119 L Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 6, 115-16 Monodology, 115 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 34, 111 Luther, Martin, 111, 113-15 M Magic Flute, Goethe's sequel to, xvi-xvii, 32, 46-45 Mozart's, xv-xvi, 46-48 Mann, Thomas, 119 Mendelssohn, Felix, 113 Mendelssohn, Moses, 34 Mentzel, Wofgang, 22 Modernism, Rilke and, 141, 143 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), Amphitryon, xi, 119-29 Mörike, Eduard Friedrich, 145 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 46-48 Müller, Adam, 120 Mythopoietic reversal, 153-71

N Napoleon Bonaparte, 26 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 16-18, 67, 159 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Hölderlin and, 88 Hymns to the Night, 92 O Otto, Walter F., 159 P Pantheism, 115, 119-20, 127 Paul, Jean, 68 Pietism, 114-15

< previous page

page_181 If you like this book, buy it!

next page >

< previous page

page_182 Page 182

Pindar, 68, 85, 142 Plato, 17-18, 149 Protagoras, 18, 37 Plautus, 120 Poetic reversal, 171 Poetry, and punctuation, 131-37 scansion of, 134-35 Prodigal Son, 141 Prometheus, xiii-xv, 28, 33-46, 99, 105 Protestantism, 17, 113 hermeneutics of, 153-54 Punctuation, poetry and, 131-37 R Reformation, 113 See also Protestantism Relativism, aesthetic, 149 Revolution of 1830, 22 Rilke, Rainer Maria, xx-xxii, 22, 117 Guardini on, 139-51 Hegel and, 151 Hölderin and, 89 love and death theme, 150-51 Modernism and, 141, 143 puncutation of, 131-37 relation to Christianity, 151 use of myth, xxi Acrobat Elegy, 155-56 Duino Elegies, xx-xxii, 132, 137, 153-71 "Gegen-strophen," 155-56, 158

Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 137, 145, 164 Sonnets to Orpheus, 131, 141, 156, 168 Romanticism, xvii-xviii, 68, 115-16, 120 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37 S Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1, 14 Schikaneder, E., xvi, 47-49, 56 Schiller, Friedrich, 3-4, 24, 27, 66, 67 Bach and, 111-12 Goethe and, 9-12 Hölderlin and, 88-91 Kantianism of, xiv Die Räuber, 8 Schütz, Heinrich, 111 Shakespeare, William, 111 Socrates, 18 Sophists, 17-18 Sophocles, 72, 85, 111 Spinoza, Baruch, 5-7 Staiger, E., 155 Steiner, Jakob, 153n., 154 Straube, Karl, 110 T Terrasson, Abbé, Sethos, 50 Tolstoy, Leo, 162 V Vergnügt, 163 Vulpius, Christiane, 26 W Weimar, Bach and, 109-17

Wieland, Christoph Martin, Beiträge zur geheimen Geschichte der Menschlichen Vernunft, 37-38 Traumgespräch mit Prometheus, 38 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 67 Z Zeller, Eduard, 8 Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 112-13, 116

< previous page

page_182 If you like this book, buy it!