The Phenomenologist of the Enlightenment: World-Weariness and the Spirit that Affirms in Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the greatest German writers and poets of the classical age, defining an epoch. He lived between 1749 and 1832, born in Frankfurt and died in Weimar. He was educated at home until the age of 16, when he entered the University of Leipzig to study law. However, his true passion was for literature and poetry, and he soon began to devote himself to writing and reading voraciously. He was particularly interested in the works of Shakespeare and the French Enlightenment writers, and he began to develop his own distinctive literary style that combined elements of Romanticism and Classicism. He was a contemporary of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Napoleon and Voltaire and influenced world events in his day, and the revolutions of the following century. His vivid Psychological portraiture and philosophic aptness inspired Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and generations of artists after him. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche lauds:

Goethe stood above the Germans in every respect and still does: he will never belong to them. How could a people ever be equal to Goethe's spirituality in well-being and well-intention! As Beethoven made music about the Germans, as Schopenhauer philosophized about the Germans, so Goethe wrote his Tasso, his Iphigenia about the Germans.

He composed hundreds of works spanning dramatic concerts, ghost stories, metaphysical novels, many comedies, physiognomic analysis (how the shape of skulls impacts personalities) of historical figures such as Homer, several translations of Voltaire into German, translations of ancient Greek philosophers into German, tragi-comic "Satyr plays", theater concerts, and of course, extensive poetry. As Hegel noted "Goethe produced works of art in all forms and genres of poetry, but the most intimate and unintentional are his first songs."

In addition to his literary contributions, Goethe also made important contributions to the fields of science and philosophy, and his ideas had a profound impact on the development of German and European intellectual history. He published extensive scientific papers on Optics and color theory, which Hegel, Schopenhauer and Feuerbach would continue. He was deeply interested in diverse fields such as botany, anatomy, geology, and optics, making significant contributions to each. His scientific investigations, such as his studies on plant morphology and his theory of color, showcased his multidisciplinary approach and his ability to synthesize knowledge from various disciplines. Goethe's protean imagination was not limited to his artistic and intellectual endeavors. Socially, he mixed with a venerable who’s who of intellectuals and artists, forming friendships and intellectual connections with prominent thinkers and artists of his time. His ability to understand and empathize with different perspectives allowed him to navigate complex social and political landscapes and fostered a spirit of collaboration and exchange.

Panpsychism, Natural Philosophy and the Development of Psychology

Goethe, whom Jung and Freud comment on extensively, exhibited a clear panpsychism inspired via Spinoza and Schelling and describes a World-Soul which proceeds and enables Qualia. Matter is never separate from mind to Goethe, and Jung quotes from Goethe heavily as an artistic reference. In his scientific and poetic writings, there are elements that resonate with panpsychism. Goethe had a mystical approach to nature, to the point he was accused of Pantheism, and believed that human nature was integrated into a holistic and interconnected world that cannot define man as merely a material animal. Romanticism and Natural philosophy both assume that systems have some kind of subjective experience that resonates with more complex forms of consciousness. This nascent Platonic dichotomy of the ‘ghost in the machine’ is seen in Faust being a magician- calling for the Spirit that Negates from a dog. This holistic perspective aligns with Panpsychism in the sense that it recognizes the presence of consciousness or subjective qualities within nature. Goethe believed that by observing and engaging with the natural world, one could attain a deeper understanding of its inherent meaning and purpose. He sought to approach nature with an empathetic and intuitive sensibility, considering plants, animals, and even inanimate objects as active participants in the grand tapestry of existence. Nietzsche mentioned this Goethean meditation on the power of nature:

…the richer man now feels himself inwardly, the more polyphonic his subject is, the more powerfully the symmetry of nature affects him; we all recognize with Goethe in nature the great means of appeasement for the modern soul, we listen to the pendulum beat of the greatest clock with a longing for peace, for becoming at home and quiet, as if we could drink this symmetry into ourselves and thereby come to the enjoyment of ourselves.

Schopenhauer mimics this statement in Parerga and Paralipomena:

Nature, on the other hand, does as Shakespeare and Goethe do, in whose works every person, even if he were the devil himself, remains right while he stands and speaks; because it is conceived so objectively that we are drawn into its interest and forced to participate in it: for it is, just like the works of nature, developed from an inner principle, by virtue of which its sayings and doings appear as natural, and therefore as necessary. - So he who expects the devils to walk in the world with horns and the fools with bells will always be their prey or their game.

Goethe is also important to understanding the Zurich circle and the development of modern Psychology. Schopenhauer takes themes in Goethe's works and develops them into concepts like the Conscious and Unconscious, which Freud developed further. Freud analyzes Goethe's works extensively, focusing on Goethe's surreal dreams, especially his dream where he saw his own death, and met his doppelganger. In his 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams, he analyzes Goethe's autobiography and the Synchronicity of his dreams and real life. In his 1939 The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion, Freud noted "Goethe, who in his genius time certainly held his stiff and pedantic father in low esteem, developed traits in his old age that belonged to the character image of his father."

The idea of the Metaphysical Ontological Primacy of Consciousness is this: the phenomenon of consciousness is 'Sui Generis': it is transcendent and essentially different from the material (neuro-chemical) context from which it arises. It is Cartesian in some ways, but is an embodied reality instead of a divide. Consciousness cannot be explained or even described by an analysis of its constituent parts. Consciousness, then, exists not as an individual phenomenon, but as a collective 'Geist' transcendent of both space and time- something Jung and Einstein would argue with the Collective Unconscious. The material universe itself exists within a field of consciousness, or is consciousness. This idea of Panpsychism Einstein and Jung chatted about has been empirically observed in the Quantum Observer's effect- we now know through Empirical Science that consciousness changes the nature of matter.

The German Idealists had a word for this: Gestalt. Gestalt is something like the transcendent nature of a thing which is more than the mere sum of its parts; the organic whole which is beyond the individual elements is composed of. Jung's "Gestaltist" view seems to maintain the idea of Consciousness and Relation being Ontologic Primes among its metaphysical premises. The relation of the individual to the whole and vice versa is critical to understanding both the part and the whole. In Hegel's Lectures on the history of Philosophy, he understands Goethe in terms of Logos-Rationality, where speech begets reality:

Goethe therefore rightly says somewhere: "What is formed always becomes matter itself." The matter that is formed, that has form, is again matter for a new form. The spirit goes into itself and makes itself an object; and the direction of his thinking towards it gives him form and determination of thought. This concept, in which he has grasped himself and which he is, this his formation, this his being, severed from him anew, he makes an object for himself again, turns his activity towards it anew.

In their disputes, Jung and Freud argued with each other in Goethean terminology. In Modern Man, Jung urges his readers to "Renounce the essentially negative" Freudian approach to the Id, which viewed the subconscious images as repressed signs from generational trauma, but not as symbols. Jung goes for Freud's jugular here. Jung locates Freud's views of sexuality as manifestations of the pre-existing moral relativism of the Victorian age until the present, not strictly because of psychological science; "Freud is one of the Exponents of a present-day psychic predisposition that has a special history of its own". He accuses Freud of an underdeveloped spirituality and a lack of Existential processing, which expresses itself as an obsession with sex. Like a true German, he quotes Faust; "thou art conscious only of the single urge". Freud is Faust, and his Mephistopheles is the ideological pathogen of individualistic western rationalism. Freud likewise uses the art of Goethe to argue back, demonstrating the unquestioned dominance of Goethe in the intellectual landscape of the early 20th century.

In his magnum Opus The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, Freud counts Goethe among the greatest intellects of history:

The dawn shimmered through the clear windows into my home. Objects of art surrounded me; in the stylish bookcase the eternal Homer, the gigantic Dante, the incomparable Shakespeare, the glorious Goethe - the glorious, the immortal all waited for me. From the adjoining room sounded the bright voices of the awakening children joking with their mother. I felt as if I had rediscovered that idyllically sweet, peaceful and poetic, brightly spiritual life in which I had so often and deeply felt contemplative human happiness. And yet it pained me that I had not preceded my master with my resignation, but had been resigned by him.

Anti-Enlightenment Romanticism and Neo-Classical Impulses

Goethe's literary career began in earnest with the publication of his novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" in 1774. This novel, which tells the story of a young man's doomed love affair, became an instant sensation throughout Europe and made Goethe a literary celebrity. However, Goethe was not content to rest on his laurels, and he continued to produce a wide range of literary works throughout his life. He wrote plays, poems, novels, and essays, and he was particularly interested in exploring the themes of love, nature, and human consciousness.

In addition to his literary pursuits, Goethe was also deeply interested in science and philosophy. He studied anatomy, botany, and mineralogy, and he made important contributions to the fields of optics and color theory. He was particularly interested in the idea of the "Urphänomen," or the underlying essence of things, and he believed that the study of nature could help us to understand the fundamental principles of the universe. Urphänomen is a prototype of modern psychology’s concepts of archetypes in the collective unconscious.

Goethe's philosophy was deeply influenced by the works of the philosopher Immanuel Kant- both authors were publishing at the same time (in Goethe’s youth, until Kant died), and Goethe read Kant as he matured in his work. Like Kant, Goethe believed that the human mind had certain innate categories (A Priori Forms) that shape our perception of the world, and he was interested in exploring the relationship between these categories and the objects of our experience. Both were phenomenologists who understood the metaphysical problem of Enlightenment Rationalism as it developed. Both believed that the human mind was capable of grasping the underlying unity of the universe, and he sought to uncover this unity through his scientific and philosophical investigations.

Kant, Voltaire and Goethe were almost simultaneously working on correcting Newton's theories of color. In his book "Theory of Colors," Goethe argued that color was not a physical property of objects, but rather a subjective experience that depended on the observer's perception. He believed that color was an integral part of human consciousness, and he sought to understand its psychological and emotional effects.

Goethe's ideas had a profound impact on the development of German and European intellectual history. His literary works inspired a generation of Romantic poets and writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. His scientific ideas influenced the development of the field of optics, and his theory of colors was particularly influential in the field of art and design. His philosophy also had a significant impact on the development of German Idealism, particularly the work of contemporaries Friedrich Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Goethe was particularly influenced by the works of Shakespeare, which he considered to be the greatest literary works ever written. He was also influenced by the French Enlightenment thinkers, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he was deeply interested in the ideas of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He was also influenced by the works of the German mystic Jakob Böhme, and he saw himself as part of a long tradition of mystical thinkers who sought to uncover the underlying unity of the universe.

Nobel-Prize winning Herman Hesse paid homage to Goethe's great legacy in his Steppenwolf, where the protagonist has a lengthy conversation with the "old Goethe". His character notes "the bourgeois idealized Goethe, such a spiritual hero with an all too noble look, radiant with sublimity, spirit and humanity as with brilliantine and almost moved beyond his own nobility of soul!" In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche mentions Goethe over 30 times, nearly all with unbridled admiration, comparing him to Shakespeare several times. Throughout his works, Nietzsche mentions Goethe hundreds of times. In his Magnum Opus Les Miserables, Victor Hugo mentions Goethe in mythologized, romantic terms:

There are beings who do not ask for more; living who, having the azure of the sky, say: it is enough! dreamers absorbed in the prodigy, drawing from the idolatry of nature the indifference of good and evil, contemplates of the cosmos radiantly distracted from man, who do not understand that one takes care of the hunger of these, of the thirst of those, of the nakedness of the poor in winter, of the lymphatic curvature of a small backbone, of the hovel, of the attic, of the dungeon, and of the rags of the shivering girls, when one can dream under the trees; peaceful and terrible spirits, ruthlessly satisfied. Strange thing, the infinite is enough for them... God eclipses their soul. This is a family of spirits, both small and great. Horace was one of them, Goethe was one of them, La Fontaine perhaps; magnificent egoists of the infinite.

Rationalism, Newtonian Mechanics and Anthropological Telos

Plato's weak side is precisely that in which Aristotle's strength consists; and vice versa. Kant's weak side is that in which Goethe is great; and vice versa.

-Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

While Goethe was certainly rationalistic in many ways as he appreciated the power of reason and logic, he was critical of an overly reductionist and mechanistic understanding of the world that characterized some aspects of rationalism. Goethe believed that reason alone could not fully capture the richness and complexity of human experience and the natural world. He advocated for a holistic approach that encompassed both rationality and intuition, valuing the subjective and emotional aspects of human perception and understanding. He was a contemporary of Voltaire and Kant (in Goethe’s youth), and digested these debates as they happened. Hence, we do not have a mature analysis of either Voltaire or Kant. Newtonian physics were just being received by European society at the time (Voltaire published translations of Newton in French for the first time) and intellectuals of the day were arguing about the implications. In the Scarlett Dawn, Nietzsche wrote:

...The naturalists: they fought against Newton's and Voltaire's spirit and, like Goethe and Schopenhauer, sought to restore the idea of a deified or demonized nature and its universal ethical and symbolic significance.

Goethe rejected strict Cartesian Dualism, but so did Descartes, who wrote extensively about the interconnectedness of all things. Goethe criticized what he perceived to be Descartes' mechanistic worldview, which reduced nature to a collection of isolated mechanical parts governed by deterministic laws. Goethe emphasized the dynamic and organic nature of the natural world, focusing on the interplay of forces, forms, and qualities, although he did hold to Cartesius' believe in the Gestalt reality of consciousness. With Newtonian physics, he also criticized its tendency to become reductionistic, explaining phenomena through mathematical formulas and laws, often overlooking the qualitative aspects and subjective experiences associated with them. In many ways, Goethe is a Phenomenologist. In a letter from Schiller to Goethe dated Jan 19, 1798, he writes:

Only with rationalism does the scientific phenomenon and the error arise. In this field, the forces of thought begin their play, and arbitrariness enters with the freedom of these forces, which so readily substitute themselves for the object.

Goethe was an expert on the rationalist Voltaire and admired his arguments for democracy and rationality, and actively translated several of his works (and Diderot’s) into German. He had very positive words for Voltaire in his letters:

In Voltaire, the highest writer conceivable among the French, the one most in keeping with the nation. The qualities that are demanded of an intellectual man, that are admired in him, are manifold, and the demands of the French are in this respect, if not greater, yet more manifold than those of other nations. Depth, genius, perception, sublimity, nature, talent, merit, nobility, spirit, beautiful spirit, good spirit, feeling, sensibility, taste, good taste, understanding, correctness, decorum, tone, good tone, court tone, variety, abundance, richness, fruitfulness, warmth, magic, grace, gracefulness, pleasingness, lightness, vivacity, refinement, brilliant, saillantes, petillantes, piquant, delicate, ingenious, style, versification, harmony, purity, correction, elegance, perfection.

Of all these qualities and expressions of mind, perhaps only the first and the last, the depth in the layout and the perfection in the execution, can be disputed to Voltairen. All that, by the way, of abilities and skills in a brilliant way fills the breadth of the world, he has possessed and thereby extended his fame over the earth.

Goethe did not share Voltaire’s strict material rationalism and denial of any supernatural or preternatural realities. One chilling supernatural story Goethe retells in his autobiographical “On my life: Poetry and Truth” is meeting his Doppelganger. Schopenhauer, who was fascinated by paranormal phenomenon, wrote about this famous scene in his Attempt on Spirit-Seeing and what is connected with it:

Even Goethe tells that he saw himself, on horseback and in a dress, in which he really rode 8 years later, just there. ("Aus meinem Leben" 11. Buch.) This apparition had, casually said, actually the purpose to comfort him; by letting him see himself, how he, the beloved, from whom he had just taken a very painful farewell, after 8 years to visit again, came riding the opposite way: it thus lifted the veil of the future for him for a moment, in order to announce to him, in his sorrow, the reunion. Apparitions of this kind are no longer mere hallucinations, but visions. For they either represent something real or refer to future, real events. Therefore, in the waking state they are what in sleep the fatidical dreams are, which, as said above, most often refer to the own, especially the unfavorable, state of health of the dreamer; while the mere hallucinations correspond to the ordinary, insignificant dreams.

In his Lectures on Religion, Hegel sees theological concepts in Goethe’s Xenia:

If one assumes such ends to be a first thing, that means exist for the satisfaction of these ends, and that it is God who causes these means to come into being for such ends, such a consideration soon seems inadequate to what God is. These ends, in so far as they are divided, specialised, become something insignificant in themselves, for which we have no respect, cannot imagine that they are direct objects of God's will and wisdom. All this is summed up in a Xenia by Goethe: there the praise of the Creator is put into one's mouth, that God created the cork tree in order to have stoppers.

Goethe and Hegel: Mephistopheles as the inverted World-Spirit

Goethe’s relationship to Hegel the man and Hegelianism is a complex and multifaceted one, encompassing both personal and philosophical dimensions. On a personal level, Goethe and Hegel held a deep mutual respect for each other's intellectual prowess and creative endeavors. Hegel, a renowned philosopher, recognized Goethe as a literary genius whose works possessed profound insight into the human condition. He rarely had any critical comment on Goethe’s works. Goethe, in turn, admired Hegel's philosophical rigor and admired his ability to construct intricate systems of thought. We only have records of a handful of interactions between them, but these letters suggest a certain affinity and intellectual kinship.

Both Goethe and Hegel were Idealists. While Hegel's philosophical system is primarily associated with his concept of absolute idealism, Goethe's contributions extend beyond literature into various disciplines, including natural sciences. Hegel posited the idea that reality is inherently interconnected and constituted by dynamic processes of development and transformation, a dialectal process driven by the World-Spirit. This concept aligns with Goethe's holistic worldview, as exemplified in his exploration of the interconnectedness of nature and the harmonious interplay of different elements. Goethe's writings, such as "Faust" and "Metamorphosis of Plants," embody a dialectical understanding of nature, which echoes Hegelian dialectics.

Furthermore, both Goethe and Hegel emphasized the importance of self-realization and individual freedom. Both saw the “freedom” of man from the material world and the disjointed consciousness as the telos of humanity. Hegel's philosophy emphasizes the role of self-consciousness and the dialectical process of individuals realizing their freedom within the context of social and historical conditions. Similarly, Goethe's protagonists often embark on journeys of self-discovery, struggling with conflicts and ultimately striving for self-realization. This shared emphasis on individual development and freedom underscores their parallel concerns with the human subject and its relationship to the world. Hegel’s idea of the World-Historical individual- Faust is certainly one of these.

Goethe's contributions to aesthetics, especially in his treatise "On the Aesthetic Education of Man," delve into the role of art in shaping individual and societal consciousness but were dwarfed by Hegel’s writings. Hegel's philosophy of art, building on Kant’s aesthetic theories, seeks to understand the significance of artistic expression within the broader framework of human spirit and history. Both thinkers recognized the transformative power of art and its ability to communicate deeper truths about the human condition.

Goethe met Hegel several times but did not how big of a deal his philosophy would be. He writes in a letter to Schiller:

I spent quite pleasant hours with Schelver, Hegel and Fernow. The first one, in the botanical subject, works out so beautifully what I consider to be right that I hardly believe my own ears and eyes, because I am used to the fact that every individual, out of foolish addiction to original presumption, so readily departs from the simple path of progressive potentiation with grimacing side leaps.

With Hegel, the thought occurred to me: whether one could not create a great advantage for him through the technicality of the art of speech. He is a quite excellent man; but there is too much in the way of his utterances... What he lacks can hardly be given to him now, but this lack of presentational talent is on the whole the German national defect and compensates itself, at least to a German listener, by the German virtue of thoroughness and honest seriousness.

Schiller and Goethe had a plan to round out the Idealism of Fernow with Hegel- Goethe set them up:

I have already begun to implement your proposal to bring Fernow and Hegel together. By the way, tomorrow evening there will be a tea at my place where the most heterogeneous elements will come together.

Schiller and Goethe: The Artistic Binary system of the 18th Century

The relationship between Goethe and Schiller remains an iconic example of creative camaraderie, intellectual collaboration and ethical responsibility towards society. Goethe and Schiller first met in 1788 when the young Schiller, an aspiring playwright and poet, wrote a letter to Goethe, who was already an established and respected figure in the literary world. This corresponded extensively through letters, discussing literature, philosophy, and their respective works, sometimes sending each other drafts. As they got to know each other better, their admiration for each other's talents and intellect grew, laying the foundation for a strong bond. They finally met in 1794. They found common ground in their shared literary aspirations, deep love of the Romantic tradition, their pursuit of artistic excellence, and their commitment to advancing German literature. They engaged in intense intellectual discussions, often spending hours together exchanging ideas, critiquing each other's works, and collaborating on projects and even talking smack about Hegel, whom they both met.

Goethe being more reserved and Schiller more emotional but they complemented each other in their creative endeavors. They supported each other's work, sending drafts before publication, providing constructive feedback and glowing reviews. Their collaboration extended to joint publications, including the influential journal "Die Horen," which they co-edited, aiming to elevate German literature to new heights, and Xenian, a joint poem they published together. Their relationship went beyond mere professional collaboration. They developed a deep emotional bond, with Schiller often seeking solace and guidance from Goethe during challenging times. Goethe, in turn, provided a steady and supportive presence, offering advice and lending a sympathetic ear as you can see in their letters. Their correspondence often gets humorously specific- including Goethe's love of beet juice as a cure-all for his medical issues.

At Schiller's untimely death in 1805, Goethe honored their friendship by dedicating himself to preserving and promoting Schiller's literary legacy. He edited and published Schiller's unfinished works and ensured his contributions to German literature were recognized. Hegel, a friend of both Schiller and Goethe, write of their relationship in his Lectures on Aesthetics:

Goethe is less pathetic than Schiller and has a more intense manner of presentation; especially in lyric poetry, he remains more self-contained; his songs, as befits the Lied, let us notice what they want without being completely explicit. Schiller, on the other hand, loves to unfold his pathos expansively, with great clarity and sweep of expression.

Therefore the genius may well burst forth in youth, as was the case with Goethe and Schiller, for example, but only manhood and old age can bring the true maturity of the work of art to completion.... The wonderful poems that have come down to us under his name are attributed to the blind old man Homer, and it can also be said of Goethe that he achieved the highest in old age only after he had succeeded in freeing himself from all limiting particularities.

In contrast, Schiller and Goethe lived not only as such singers of their time, but as more comprehensive poets, and especially Goethe's songs are the most excellent, deepest and most effective that we Germans possess from recent times, because they belong entirely to him and his people and, as they grew up on native soil, now also correspond completely to the basic tone of our spirit.

Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human, writes:

Goethe tried to save himself from it by always knowing how to bind himself anew in various ways; but even the most gifted can only bring himself to perpetual experimentation once the thread of development has been broken. Schiller owes the approximate certainty of his form to the involuntarily revered, though disowned, model of French tragedy, and kept himself quite independent of Lessing (whose dramatic attempts he famously rejected).

Faust: Say to the moment: Stay! You are so beautiful!

Composed over 60 years, Faust is Goethe's magnum opus, broadly regarded as one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written. 1,200 lines of poetry that all rhythm and cover all known forms of poetry, and he masters all of them. Faust's life and struggles are an apotheosis of all human culture, in a search for fundamental meaning, internal and external. The epic story-play tells the narrative of Faust, a disillusioned scholar who makes a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, in search of unlimited knowledge and boundless experience. The play encompasses a vast range of human experiences, from love and desire to ambition and remorse, offering profound insights into the complexities of human nature. "Faust" is revered for its poetic language, philosophical depth, and its exploration of existential questions. Goethe himself regarded it as his greatest achievement, underscoring its significance in his literary legacy and its enduring influence on subsequent generations of writers and thinkers. As Freud wrote “The identification of the evil principle with the destructive instinct in Goethe's Mephistopheles has a particularly convincing effect”

This work shuns summation. It is an amalgamation of Goethe’s greatest thoughts, and the narrative is so bizarre and multi-layered it cannot be categorized. It has elements of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Voltaire’s philosophical novel Zadig. We know Goethe read Zadig, due to a letter where he talks about the "Voltairian" nature of Goethe’s Fairy Tales which is a reference to Voltaire's Science Fiction story Micomegas and his philosophical novel Zadig.

Philosophically, it reflects the oceanic philosophic projects of Kant and Hegel- an attempt to encapsulate the entire human condition. Schopenhauer's Will-to-Live and Nietzsche's Will-to-Power are extensions of Faust’s search for meaning in a barren material wasteland. Arthur Schopenhauer writes:

The vice is something else, it is not only this affirmation, - but a negation has been added ("the spirits that deny" i. e. devils - Goethe's Faust), a formal negation of the eternal, a complete denial and annihilation of the same in us. Everyone shudders at the mere thought of such a state; the despair of it is depicted in Franz Moor, Lady Macbeth, King Richard III. Virtue is affirmation of the extra-temporal being; it is, after all, the direct expression of the consciousness of such a pure affirmation.

Faust sells his soul to the devil, but not out of evil, out of World-Weariness. He is not an Atheist, but agnostic to all external realities. All that exists is within his skull. The pact with the devil states that it is undone if Faust is able to live merely in the now, and say to the moment “stay, you are so beautiful”. We notice how the devil's anti-salvation is legalistic- perhaps this is an inversion of Medieval Catholicism and Protestantism's legalistic understanding of salvation. Faust’s process of individualization is long and tiresome, as the devil takes him across all of creation. His love Gretchen is the personification naivety- perhaps referencing Rousseau's naivety. Even upon killing a man to cover his sins, Faust has no remorse, for none of it is real to him. Only, as Kierkegaard writes, upon right relationship with the “other”, does Faust’s conscious grow, and he recognizes his agency, and the imperative of action. Faust learns to bear his cross, and in doing so, brings meaning unto reality, his Solipsistic amoral worldview shattered by his responsibility for the Other. And by this relationship he is saved- not as a transaction, but a restoration of responsibility and a rejection of the Spirit that Negates. It is a Deus Invitus, an intervention of the Divine in the material. Hegel, in his Lectures on Aesthetics writes:

In the first respect, I will only remind you of the absolute philosophical tragedy, of Goethe's Faust, in which, on the one hand, the lack of satisfaction in science, on the other hand, the liveliness of world life and earthly enjoyment, in general, the tragically attempted mediation of subjective knowledge and striving with the absolute, in its essence and appearance, gives a breadth of content that no other dramatic poet has dared to encompass in one and the same work before.

To intersect the Philosophy of Goethe's friend Hegel here further, the most important line of Hegelian Metaphysics, in my opinion, also encapsulates the philosophic movement which Faust makes that aligns his internal and external worlds, escaping the alienation from reality created by material existence:

That which is most real is not that which is most material, but that which is most meaningful.

This is Faust.

The Sorrows of Young Werther: The Pitfall of Untempered Romanticism through the Inversion of the Holy

Written at the age of 24 and only 4 weeks, the sorrows of a young Werther is Geothe's Spinozian commentary on the skyla and karibus paradigm of the cruft of nature of society and the solipsistic nihilism of living according to nature. Like all romantics, and like Spinoza, Goethe finds a transcendent God imminent in the natural world. It is a novel of youthful unrequited love on the surface, but also the abstraction and mythologization of the divine feminine and the symbolic resonance. This is a classic tragedy, the clashing of the Appollarian and the Dionysian. Hegel, in Lectures on Aesthetics, writes:

Goethe, too, has taken many lyrical situations of this kind as material; indeed, in the broader sense, one could even attach the name of an occasional poem to his Werther, for through Werther Goethe has worked out his own inner turmoil and anguish of heart, the results of his own breast, into a work of art, just as the lyrical poet in general gives vent to his heart and expresses that by which he himself is afflicted as a subject. In this way, that which is at first only internally fixed is released and becomes an external object from which the human being has freed himself - as the tears facilitate, in which pain cries itself out. Goethe, as he himself says, has freed himself from the distress and affliction of the interior, which he describes, by writing Werther. However, the situation depicted here does not yet belong to this stage, since it contains the deepest opposites and allows them to develop.

This is in part a renunciation of "Empfindsamkeit", the unchecked sentimentality of 18th century. Werther has a solipsistic nihilism where all reality exists only within the conference of his skull. His negation of the world is not a religious impulse, it is not a asceticism. It is not world affirming or pious but nihilistic, solipsistic and reeks of platonic idealism. Like the Greek gods, this solipsistic self-worship ends in a beautiful destruction- narcissist, becoming a flower. Young Werther is not disgusted by the vices of the world, but by the world he essentially denies its reality.

Werther, just like Romanticism, takes the nobility of stoicism to a snarl, narcissistic and nihilistic extreme. He lives according to nature, but to the negation of society entirely, and the negation of trans personal meeting. Nietza condemned stoicism entirely for this exact same reason that, taken to its inevitable end, stoicism can only be the destruction of the Cartesian itself. Thus we need to reject it as a legitimate way to save nihilism and to bring meaning to human reality.

Young Werther has Faustian characteristics- he has doubts about the external world's worth, and at points even its existence, and struggles with the spirit that negates. Faust nearly commits suicide as well, but his hand is stayed by the sounding of the Easter bells. Werther is unable to do do- he responds to the encounter of the Holy with Nihilism, inverting the Eucharist in a Black Mass- ordering a suicide-meal of bread and wine. Werther is subsumed by the shadow of Mephistopheles. the meal that should bring life, is now inverted as the meal of death- a partaking of the devil's flesh.

In Faust, Euphorian, the archetype of Byron, learns this lesson that Werther does not live to learn- beauty is evanescent, and is toxic if it is the end-in-itself. The Eternal Feminine leads us upward.