Francis Berger
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Nietzsche Contra Goethe

7/5/2021

8 Comments

 
An interesting observation . . . 

"Nietzsche, the foe, is much nearer to Christianity than Goethe, the well-disposed, whom the Christian theme left absolutely untouched.

Goethe was indifferent to it. He is perhaps one man of the Christian period of history who passed by Christianity and suffered nothing from it.

He could arrange his interior life without Christianity. For that reason he is sometimes called the great pagan. But in Greece too he was unaware of the tragic religion of Dionysus.

It is well known that Goethe had a great fear of suffering and strove to escape it; nor was he fond of tragedy. Kleist repelled him and was very unjust to him. Sometimes his attitude to suffering conveyed the impression of cowardice although he was a strong man.

On the other hand one cannot imagine Nietzsche outside the Christian period of history, however much he may have turned his attention to ancient Greece." 

                                                                                               - Nikolai Berdyaev
                                                                                                  The Divine and The Human
8 Comments
bruce charlton
7/5/2021 23:22:18

Much truth in that. If Nietzsche had not become mentally incapable in his mid forties; I would not have been surprised if he had followed his ideas to their illogical conclusion, to their reductio ad absurdum - and became a romantic Christian. I feel as if i know Nietzsche and can identify with him.

Goethe by contrast seems to have been one of William James's Once Born, who was innately self-satisfied and self-fascinated, healthy and balanced, creative and successful. He was so full of energy and *busy* doing stuff, that I don't think he experienced that alienation, meaninglessness, purposelessness, futility - which is so often the spur for modern Men to seek God. I cannot get onto the wavelength of Goethe, cannot empathize with him - he seems almost like someone from another species.

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Francis Berger
7/6/2021 10:10:11

@ Bruce - Yes, I remember a post of yours in which you claimed that Nietzsche chose salvation when presented with the choice after his death. I fully agree with that.

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bruce charlton
7/6/2021 19:49:12

@Frank - I don't remember writing that - but it seems likely.

It's interesting to ponder on the spiritual meaning of Nietzsche's persistence as a final decade of mutism and dementia. of course, we can't know; but it might be that this was a period of extreme simplification of thinking and humbling, for Nietzsche to confront existential essentials.

William Wildblood
7/6/2021 19:43:12

How curious. I have never 'got' Goethe and assumed the fault must be mine as he's supposed to be a giant of Western civilisation. It's true I've never really explored his thought in any depth but that's because I don't find him in any way sympathetic while I do have a lot of respect for Nietzsche (even though he's hard to spell) who clearly struggled for truth. It's interesting to read Berdyaev's observations and your comments.

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Francis Berger
7/6/2021 21:51:01

@ William - Goethe was without doubt a genius, but I'll never forgive him for my having to suffer through "The Sorrows of Young Werther."

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Francis Berger
7/6/2021 21:48:37

@ Bruce - Here's the post:

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2019/08/jc-powys-gets-to-bottom-of-nietzsche.html

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David Llewelltn Dodds
7/7/2021 00:59:08

I really enjoyed S.S. Prawer's lectures putting the case that Novalis was correctively answering Goethe's Wilhelm Meister with his Romantic Christian novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, but do not know if he every published anything on this.

Most of my enjoyment of Goethe (so far) is via musical settings - especially, Schubert's terrifying 'Erlkönig', Brahms' 'Alto Rhapsody', and the last part of Mahler's Eighth Symphony, though I have also enjoyed what I've read (browsingly) of his 'Çonversations with Eckermann' - e.g., a splendid selection in Walter Jackson Bate's Criticism: The Major Texts about how Robert Burns drew on folk poetry and music to produce songs that were then taken up and became effectively folksongs.Owen Barfield brings that work to bear in 'C.S. Lewis in Conversation', and compares and contrasts Lewis and Goethe as "great men [who] have distinguished themselves in more than one genre" in 'Lewis, Truth, and Imagination', leaving me interested to see more of what he may say about Goethe.

David Llewellyn Dodds

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Serhei
7/7/2021 02:57:02

I find that Berdyaev is most easily accessible in these types of analyses of other thinkers. For example, I found his biography of Konstantin Leontiev far more engaging than anything written by Leontiev himself.

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