A EUROPEAN EVENT. PART II.

...It is time now to quote in full the previously mentioned Nietzsche’s exuberant praise of Goethe, in ##49-51 of his Götzen-Dämmerung:

“Goethe (was) not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance; a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: sensibility, idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal, and revolutionary (the latter merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also from Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life, but put himself into the midst of it; he was not fainthearted, but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with a most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, Goethe’s antipode); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself.

In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist. He said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect---and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum, called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in every bodily matter, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance:  not from weakness, but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even from what the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden, unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit, who has become free, stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole. He does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus.

One might say that, in a certain sense, the nineteenth century also strove for all what Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual. How is it that the overall result is no Goethe, but a chaos, a nihilistic sigh, an utter bewilderment, an instinct of weariness, continually driving--- in practice--- toward a recourse to the eighteenth century? (For example, as a romanticism of feeling, as an altruism and hyper-sentimentality, as feminism in taste, as socialism in politics.) Isn’t the nineteenth century, especially at its close, merely an intensified, brutalized eighteenth century, that is, a century of decadence?--- So that Goethe would have been--- not merely for Germany, but for all of Europe--- a mere interlude, a beautiful “in vain“? But one misunderstands great human beings if one views them from the miserable perspective of some public use. That one cannot put them to any use, that in itself may belong to greatness.

Goethe is the last German for whom I feel any reverence: he would have felt three things which I feel--- we also understand each other about the “cross.”

In another place, Nietzsche places Goethe alongside Napoleon:

The two great tentative ones, made to overcome the eighteenth century: Napoleon, by awakening again the man, the soldier, and the great fight for power-conceiving Europe as a political unit; Goethe, by imagining a European culture that would harvest the full inheritance of attained humanity. (Wille zur Macht #104.)

There are some eighty meaningful references to Goethe in Nietzsche’s works. Schopenhauer has no less of them and they are no less exuberant, like this one for instance from his Parerga und Paralipomena, where he compares Goethe to Shakespeare:

“Nature is not like those bad poets, who, in setting a fool or a knave before us, do their work so clumsily, and with such evident design, that you might almost fancy you saw the poet standing behind each of his characters, and continually disavowing their sentiments, and telling you in a tone of warning: “This is a knave; that is a fool; do not mind what he says.” But Nature goes to work like Shakespeare and Goethe, poets who make every one of their characters— even if it is the devil himself!— appear to be quite in the right for the very moment that they come before us in their several parts; the characters are described so objectively that they excite our interest and compel us to sympathize with their point of view; for, like the works of Nature, every one of these characters is evolved as the result of some hidden law, or a principle, which makes all they say and do appear natural and therefore necessary. And you will always be the prey or the plaything of the devils and fools in this world, if you expect to see them going about with horns or jangling their bells.” Schopenhauer’s last phrase is particularly remarkable, as he puts a moral foundation under Goethe’s, for one, representation of the devil in a dangerously attractive light; this is not an original insight, but I applaud Schopenhauer for reiterating this point, which can never be overstated.

Talking about Mephistopheles, it is perhaps proper to start the list of some of my favorite Goethe dictums with this one, also quoted by Nietzsche, in his Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben. (The attribution of these words to the devil, as in Nietzsche, is of course necessary.)

Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust says: “whatever has a beginning deserves to have an undoing; it would be better if nothing began at all.” The phrase is philosophically immensely tempting for contemplation.

To be continued...