Goethe: Life as a Work of Art

by Rüdiger Safranski

For him,

but he continued to be impressed by men who were guided by powerful religious experience: converts with no burning need to convert others to confirm their belief, pious men with no missionary zeal or dogmatic assertiveness. He admired inspired individualism

Goethe impressed by another mentor Jung-Stll

An autodidact who had worked his way up from the humblest of circumstances (his father was a charcoal burner, village schoolmaster, and tailor in Westphalia), Jung-Stilling lacked money or long-term patrons, but was inwardly buttressed by an almost childlike trust in God. He reminded Goethe of his

mentor Susanna von Klettenberg, although that well-to-do aristocrat was not as dependent on God’s help. Jung-Stilling’s trust in God helped him in ways that were sometimes so miraculous Goethe was still impressed when writing about him decades later: The elemental part of his energy was an indestructible belief in God and the unmediated help that flowed from Him, which was evidently confirmed by uninterrupted provision against and unfailing rescue from all want and every evil. For Goethe, Jung-Stilling demonstrated that trust in God could mobilize one’s own powers. In that sense, trust in God represented a kind of higher trust in oneself, one that

trust in God

involved not only the empirical self but also an elevated, enhanced self that felt secure in God. Jung-Stilling was an active, hands-on person but still resembled a sleepwalker, as Goethe writes, whom one must not call out to, lest he plunge down from the heights of belief that give his life security. For his part, Jung-Stilling depicts how Goethe made certain that the company at table would not make fun of him and his piety, although Goethe belonged to the “savages” and insouciantly lived out his “free existence.” Jung-Stilling similarly kept himself in check, avoided becoming an annoyance, and was left in peace “except that Goethe occasionally would roll his eyes

toward me.” He exercised undisputed “reign over the table without seeking it.” What was it about Jung-Stilling that so fascinated Goethe? It was not his confidence that everything in his life, both good and bad, was portioned out by God. Such divine pedagogy seemed presumptuous to Goethe, who by this time no longer believed in a God who took a personal interest in directing and overseeing one’s life. Such a conviction, he writes, was neither pleasant nor beneficial for him. It must have been something else that attracted him. He found in Jung-Stilling an intellectual experience, elevated to the realm of religion, that he calls an aperçu; a weighty concept in Goethe’s late philosophy, he defines it, in Poetry and Truth, in connection with Jung-Stilling’s character: to become aware of a great axiom, which is always the operation of an intellect imbued with genius. He continues, Such an aperçu gives its discoverer the greatest joy because it prefigures the eternal in an original way. It needs no period of time to be convincing, but springs complete and perfect from the moment. When a flash of insight, an idea, or a sudden intuition illuminates some relation until then obscure and p...

also describes as a sudden insight) as a glimpse into the total interconnectedness of nature, since this bone, which had been discovered in animals but not yet in man, served as proof of a continuous transition between man and animal, proof that nature makes no sudden leaps. Thus the intermaxillary bone becomes the object of an aperçu: a totality suddenly revealed in a single thing. Vis-à-vis the subject, the aperçu leaves the person feeling transformed, as if liberated from his isolation and elevated into an awarene...

transcendent God, as in the Christian religion, but rather owing its existence to the inspired perception of nature. Its effect is nonetheless similar to the way one can be reoriented and transformed by a relationship to God. The third aspect relates to the sudden, instantaneous nature of the entire process. All at once one sees things anew, looks at the world with new eyes and experiences a turning point in one’s life. From then on, everything is transformed. Life has been interrupted and there is a dramatic sense of before and after....

the wake of an inspiration. Goethe calls an aperçu with these three aspects—experience of a totality, transformation of the subject, and suddenness—an operation of cognitive genius. If Goethe was fascinated by Jung-Stilling—though he did not share his childlike relationship to God, his divine pedagogy—it was because he sensed the operation of cognitive genius in this pious man. Jung-Stilling had experienced a wholeness—namely, the God of the Bible: his inner man had been completely tr...

himself and soon will live through his own epoch of the cult of genius, sees in Jung-Stilling a type of religious genius. Jung-Stilling also draws life from an aperçu, which, however, has been transported from the cognitive to the religious realm. What the pious call awakening, conversion, or rebirth fascinates Goethe not because he himself is still pious but because it helps him understand the psychology of genius, to grasp what it is...

Jung-Stilling lived among his friends and acquaintances in Strasbourg as such a person, one who has experienced a transformational aperçu. He was open and talkative whenever he encountered sympathy and understanding, but withdrawn when unappreciated. If others teased him, Goethe would leap to his defense. Goethe visited him, writes Jung-Stilling (who tells his life story in the third person), “grew fond of him, became his brother and friend, and under all circumstances endeavored to show his affection to Stilling.” Turning to those who would not have expected Goethe to have s...

friend in practical matters, and when Jung-Stilling left Strasbourg suddenly in the summer of 1770 to hurry to his deathly ill fiancée in Westphalia, Goethe lent him money. When he returned, his first thought was to visit Goethe, who greeted him cordially and renewed the introduction to his circle of friends. Since the summer of 1771, in addition to Lersé and Salzmann, it now also included Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Jung-Stilling’s autobiography goes on to say that “Stilling’s enthusiasm for religion did not keep h...

Precisely because it has hardly anything informative to say about Shakespeare or his work, this speech provides insight into Goethe’s enthusiasm for the English playwright. For him, Shakespeare was a symbol of a new kind of writing and thinking. He saw in him a reflection of his own ambitions. We have within ourselves the germ of merits we can appreciate.

In constantly varied turns of phrase sprinkled with exclamation points, the speech evokes the pleasure of life and criticizes judicious folk who burden life with trouble for themselves and others. Shakespeare is mobilized against them as someone who with gigantic strides takes the measure of life’s enormous riches. Whoever follows this great wayfarer will know the world, and himself, in an enhanced form: I vividly felt my existence expanded by an eternity. Goethe was referring both to life and to art: to the fact that Shakespeare was said, for instance, to have swept aside the rule of the three unities promulgated by the French theater. The unity

of place—imprisoning timidity. The unities of action and time—onerous shackles on our imagination. The liberation from such rules will find a mighty reverberation in Götz von Berlichingen, which Goethe was already contemplating while writing this speech. It is there in the play’s saber-rattling diction. He is in a feud with traditional theater, he declares, and fulminates against French adaptations of Greek antiquity: What are you doing with that Greek armor, little Frenchman? It’s too big for you and too heavy. Against the artif...

and women. Goethe’s tutelary spirit Prometheus is already mentioned in this speech. Shakespeare vied with Prometheus, copied his humans feature by feature, but in colossal size. He praises and polemicizes in powerful, wild, and vague words. One passage characterizes Shakespeare’s dramatic art so succinctly and aptly, however, that Goethe often returned to it later: Shakespeare’s theater is a beautiful cabinet of curiosities in which the history of the world flows past our eyes along the unseen thread of time. . . . His plays all re...

collides with the necessary course of the world. Hegel could not have said it better half a century later. With this speech, Goethe wanted above all to rouse himself to creativity. It was more difficult for him to pull himself together for the examination for doctor of law that he still had not taken. I lacked real knowledge and no internal direction urged me to that subject matter. If he lacked internal direction, it would have to come from without: his father was pressing him. In the early summer of 1...

the question of whether the state was permitted to determine the religion of its subjects. Since the dissertation itself has not survived, we can only extrapolate from Poetry and Truth, where Goethe gives a twofold answer. He argues that the state may establish the mandatory public rituals of the religious communities for their respective clergy and laity but that it ought not attempt to control what each individual thinks, feels, or meditates in private. He thus grants the state dominion over external, but not intern...