The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant Daniel ...

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In euerm Schoose Aufwärts! Umfangend umfangen Aufwarts an deinen Busen, Allliebender Vater! (1919, I/2:79-80) Upwards, drawn upwards, The clouds float down, The clouds descend To my love and my longing, To me! To me! Upwards, carried in their womb, Embraced and embracing! Borne aloft to your heart, Oh father, lover of all! (2005, p. 9) Ganymed treats romantic love, love of nature and love of god. It is this last, theological level which is my present concern. Ganymede climaxes in divine love; the consummation of his existence (both its terminus and perfection) is to be absorbed back into the womb of the divine. Human desire is fulfilled in theosis. The telos of individual life occurs at the moment when the god descends, humanity ascends and the two are fused together, so that all finite individuality is dissolved. Although Goethe adds romantic and pantheistic overtones, his model is therefore a traditional Christian one: blessedness is achieved by means of a dialectic of descent and ascent. God descends to Ganymede to embrace him (emptying Himself in the process), and in
that embrace human and God ascend back in glorification. There is no moment of equality. The underlying model of Ganymed can be further determined as neoplatonic; indeed, the poem bears the imprint of the neoplatonic renaissance which was spreading through Germany at this period. 3 For both the Goethe of Ganymed and the neoplatonists of his day, proper human desire is desire for a return to unity with the One. It is no accident that later in his life ‘Goethe discovered in the thought of Plotinus something very congenial to his own’ (Beierwaltes, 1972, p. 93). 4 The Goethe of Ganymed could have agreed as early as 1774 with Plotinus’ comments concerning ‘the love innate in our souls’: Every soul is an Aphrodite… As long as the soul stays true to itself, it loves the divinity and desires to be at one with it, as a daughter loves with a noble love a noble father… Only in the world beyond does the real object of our love exist, the only one with which we can unite ourselves. (1964, VI.9.9) It is important to note that Goethe conceives the One not as transcendent to the world of sense, but (in part, at least) identical with it; yet, despite this shift in emphasis, the desire to be borne ‘upwards… embraced and embracing’ remains the same. The claim that ‘love unites beings’ (Herder, 1994, 4:407; 1993, p. 111) is, as we shall see, the premise of all neoplatonic piety of the late eighteenth century. The naturalness of this desire to return to the One is a central component of the imitatio Dei and the imago Dei, both of which Goethe here flirts with. Desire for
Page 1 and 2: The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goe
Page 3: More concretely, Goethe, Herder and
Page 7 and 8: Your own majesty On sacrificial off
Page 9 and 10: question dominant pieties’ (Goodc
Page 11 and 12: Spinoza revival; this is one of the
Page 13 and 14: The similarity to Ganymed is immedi
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Page 17 and 18: an improvement upon carnal ones pre
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Page 23 and 24: perfection’ Spinoza means the bec
Page 25 and 26: Or again, J.G. Müller reports the
Page 27 and 28: Winckelmann, Wieland and Mendelssoh
Page 29 and 30: In the lectures Kant gave on the Me
Page 31 and 32: Kant here almost falls into contrad
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Page 37 and 38: unnecessary. Dogmatic philosophy of
Page 39 and 40: Bibliography Abrams, M.H. (1971), N
Page 41 and 42: Johnson, B. A. (2010), ‘Making al
Page 43 and 44: 1 As will become clear as the essay
Page 45 and 46: 18 Of course, I am not claiming tha

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