Goethe's Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients

Erik1 · January 14, 2015, 4:01pm

Speak of the devil, or should I say " Daemon " ? I just mentioned pattern recognition in a thread in the Off Topic section. What a synchronic oddity.

Pattern recognition without signifiers? So, what are the signifieds linking their recognition to exactly?

Orbie · January 14, 2015, 4:37pm

I no longer consider them oddity, as to what exactly they are linked to, is the anathema of the very noumena underneath the overcoming of it’s own self representation.

Orbie · January 14, 2015, 4:49pm

Which if I had a priori bothered to look into (the Aristotelian, Platonic, and Aurelius interpretations), the ontological a priori may not , could not have, or even should not have been asked. Since it has, it may prove the coincidental nature of a priori

representation, therefore. In it’s self may also be
connoted in anthropological terms extending the

mirror effect of Man ‘made’ in the image of that
noumena.

this anthropomorphism charge becomes redundant
here.

Can only refer to the song as way of apology, ‘he
ain’t heavy he is my brother’

 The surrealists win, hands down, the images do not appear as deformed, they are, therefore, changed within themselves, Dorian grey's portrait in the attick, still remains as intended, it is he, who is of fear of looking into the mirror.

but, what of that fear, where genius can not contain?
Where the return , not dreaded now? may turn pleasantly into something else, sorrowfully, a tryst on magic mountain may absolve or relegate it into an abysmal decompression? Oh Gods, whom Olympic Heights did not tremble upon the dizzying heights,
can Your ring of fire be ever set free, before, the final event, or, must She languor , in it, before the last veil, whence Jason may return, to release her?
Your stanzas following that desire, may release that
power, and to do that knowingly, is to be condemned eternally, to return, to it.

Orbie · January 14, 2015, 6:10pm

… (… … .) (… … …)

Erik1 · January 14, 2015, 10:20pm

Herder, Goethe, and the Historical Theory of Genius:

Although there is no evidence to suggest that Goethe had been exposed
to the thought of Spinoza before 1773, and despite the fact that,
according to Robert T. Clark, Herder’s first serious mention of Spinoza
occurs as late as 1775 (four years after he completed his Abhandlung über
den Ursprung der Sprache), Goethe’s comments appear to concur with
Spinoza’s contention that God and nature are effectively identical. In fact,
this passage appears to demonstrate quite clearly that Goethe was already
something of a pantheist during his time in Strasbourg — that is, if one is
prepared to accept the retrospective testimony that he offers in Dichtung
und Wahrheit, published between 1811 and 1833.
When considered in relation to the spatial dynamics of the daemonic
as a conduit between the earthly and the divine, the issue of Goethe’s
exposure to Spinozism gives rise to some important questions. Did
Goethe believe that the divine manifests itself in and through the natural,
and that the task of the poet or genius is to give voice to this immanent
divinity? Or did he rather hold that God is beyond or above the world,
and that the genius must, as it were, bridge the chasm between heaven
and earth, bringing the divine light down to humanity? These questions
are perhaps best answered when the full extent of Herder’s influence
upon the young Goethe is investigated. In Dichtung und Wahrheit, an
older, wiser and more circumspect Goethe describes his meeting with
Herder as having yielded weighty consequences for the trajectory of his
life, while at the same time making note of the “abstoßende Puls” of
Herder’s propensity for sarcasm and bitterness (FA 1,14:439). But when
the letters that the twenty-two-year-old Goethe wrote to Herder (five
years his senior) in 1771 are considered, the picture is much clearer:
“Herder, Herder. Bleiben Sie mir, was Sie mir sind. Binn ich bestimmt
Ihr Planet zu seyn so will ich’s sein, es gern, es treu seyn. Ein freundlicher
Mond der Erde.”If Goethe saw himself as Herder’s satellite in 1771, then those works
by Herder that convinced Goethe to adopt such a role must be investigated.
The tendency toward immanence in Herder’s thought has already
been seen in his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, a text with
which the young Goethe was acquainted. But Herder had also developed
a decidedly immanent and historical concept of genius in the 1760’s, before
his first meeting with Goethe in 1770. In this connection, two texts
are particularly noteworthy: Herder’s Fragmente einer Abhandlung über
die Ode (Fragments of a Treatise on the Ode, 1765) and his Über die
neuere deutsche Literatur. Fragmente (Fragments on Recent German Literature,
1765–67).
Written in 1764, Herder’s Fragmente einer Abhandlung über die Ode
contains many of the ideas that he began to instill in the young Goethe
during their first meetings in Strasbourg in 1770. The ode, argues
Herder, is the most primitive, natural, and pure form of poetry known to
humankind. Springing from a divine inspiration that “raset trunken den
Weg des Affekts,” the ode appears to flow from Kräfte that are both
natural and holy (HW 1:80). Herder tells us that the “Geist der Ode ist
ein Feuer des Herrn” (HW 1:79), while at the same time maintaining that
it emerges from a mysterious, apparently human Kraft that he calls Affekt,
a term that is perhaps best translated as emotion or feeling:

[size=85]Der Affekt, der im Anfange stumm, inwendig eingeschlossen, den
ganzen Körper erstarrete, und in einem dunkeln Gefühl brausete,
durchsteigt allmählig alle kleine Bewegungen, bis er sich in
kennbaren Zeichen predigt. Er rollt durch die Mienen und
unartikulierte Töne zu der Vernunft herab, wo er sich erst der
Sprache bemächtigt: und auch hier durch die genausten Merkmale
der Absteigerung sich endlich in eine Klarheit verliert, die ihm schon
sein Selbstgefühl frei läßt. . . . In ihm [Affekt] empfindet man die
sinnlichgrößte Einheit, ohne sie mit der Übereinstimmung des
Verstandes vergleichen zu können. (HW 1:88–90)[/size]

This discussion of Affekt seems to confirm Jochen Schmidt’s view that
Herder’s theory of poetic inspiration was essentially organic.55 In spatial
terms, Affekt appears to be a Kraft that originates from deep within the
human subject, a subject that partakes in a close relationship with his or
her natural surroundings. As Affekt rises to the surface of one’s conscious
awareness, its natural force is inevitably diminished, or at the very least
transformed, by the demand for logical, linguistic representation. Herder
argues that the ode is the literary form that best approximates the surging,
natural force of Affekt.
While this discussion of Affekt brings to light Herder’s comparatively
vague and rudimentary account of the psychology of poetic creativity, it
also involves an implicit history of the stages of a culture’s literary development.
According to Herder, the ode is one of the most ancient forms
of poetic expression. As a culture reaches maturity, the natural, primitive,
almost animal characteristics of the ode are gradually replaced by more rational
forms of expression, since

[size=85]die Poesie stets sinken muß von der goldnen Höhe ihres
Ursprunges. . . . Je mehr sich die Gegenstände erweitern, die
menschlichen Geisteskräfte sich entwickeln, desto mehr ersterben die
Fähigkeiten der sinnlichen Tierseele. Die Ausbreitung der
Wissenschaften verengert die Künste, die Ausbildung der Poetik die
Poesie; endlich haben wir Regeln, statt poetischer Empfindungen;
wir borgen Reste aus den Alten und die Dichtkunst ist tot.[/size]
(HW 1:85)

Herder laments the German preoccupation with classical themes and
motifs. In looking obsessively to the past, Herder implies that German literature
neglects its present and its future. For Herder, this state of affairs
can only be remedied by a figure capable of renewing German literature
by writing exclusively German odes:

[size=85]Wenn im Morgenländer der Sohn der Götter, im Griechenland der
freie Held; im Römer der bürgerliche Soldat — was schläft im
Deutschen? . . . Metamorphosen eines Deutschen sollten nicht
Ovidisch sein; so wenig als der Held Homers Aeneas wurde. —
Shakespeares Schriften und die nordische Edda, der Barden und
Skaldrer Gesänge müssen unsere Poesie bestimmen: vielleicht
würden wir alsdenn auch Originalstücke von Oden haben, ohne
daß sie durch eine antike Stellung sich einen Wert geben dörfen.[/size]
(HW 1:85–86)

Erik1 · January 16, 2015, 9:15pm

In the sixty-third letter of the “Sechste Sammlung,” Herder sees the
human individual as being akin to a mirror in which the various individual
Kräfte of nature are brought together, ordered, and valued, and in which
nature as a totality reflects upon itself. In this sense, nature sees through
human eyes, thinks behind the human brow, feels in the human breast,
and works with human hands (HW 7:363). Nature is thus akin to a great
“Künstler”: it underpins all human creative activity, and it expresses itself
in the artistic productions of human beings (HW 7:363–64). For Herder,
ancient Greek art constitutes the most authentic and primordial expression
of this relationship between human Kunst and the Kräfte of nature.
This valorization of classical culture is closely bound up with a polemic directed
against those elements of Christianity that associate Greek art with
Satanism and evil Dämonen. The prejudices of these Christian “Barbaren,”
proclaims Herder, prevent them from recognizing the true daemon resident
in Greek art: the “Dämon der Menschennatur,” which expresses
“das Ideal der Menschenbildung in ihren reinsten Formen” (HW 7:365).
For Herder, the Dämon represents that aspect of humanity through
which the pantheistic Kräfte of nature come to expression. It is for this
reason that he often uses the terms Dämon and dämonisch as synonyms
for genius throughout the Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität.47 This is
not to suggest, however, that Herder is calling for a regression or reversion
to primitive levels of expression. On the contrary, the Dämon embodies
for Herder the human capacity for Bildung or development,
since it is through harnessing the natural Kräfte immanent within each
individual that the full potential of humanity is realized. Thus, while
the aesthetics of the ancient world represent a high-point in human history,
Herder believes that similar artistic achievements are also possible
within the context of modernity. Consequently, he observes that
“nicht in Athen und Rom allein wurden dämonische, göttliche Männer
geboren” (HW 7:519)

Herder elaborates upon the connections between the modern concept
of genius and the classical concept of the daemon in the following
passage from his Kalligone, written between 1799 and 1800. The ancients,
writes Herder,

[size=85]sprachen vom Genie weniger, ehrten aber und kultivierten es
vielleicht mehr als wir. Die höhere Macht, die einen Menschen
zu Hervorbringung seines Werks belebet, das wir als unnachahmlich,
als unerreichbar erkennen, aber mächtig oder sanft auf uns
wirkend fühlen, diese auszeichnende Himmelsgabe nannten sie Geist,
Genius. Ein mit uns geborner Geist, δαίμων, [daimon] vis animi
divinior, von dem sie Kultur, Kunst, Fleiß so wenig ausschlossen,
das sie vielmehr Ihn als Vater, Stifter, Beleber und Schutzgott
aller Kultur und Menschenbelebung anerkannten, priesen, verehrten.
(HW 8:835)[/size]

Here the classical daemon is described, after the manner of Plato and
Hamann, as a Himmelsgabe that is born with each individual. Yet only a
few paragraphs later, this Himmelsgabe is associated by Herder with the
pantheistic “Naturgeist” (HW 8:837). Eventually, a kind of compromise
is reached, and genius becomes “ein höherer, himmlischer Geist, wirkend
unter Gesetzen der Natur” (HW 8:838).

jonquil · January 16, 2015, 10:09pm

Was Goethe a Rosicrucian, or did he just use Rosicrucian symbols and ideas in some of his writing?

Erik1 · January 17, 2015, 2:44pm

I’m not sure, if he was. But he did seem to be inspired by Rosicrucianism in much of his work, without a doubt.

jonquil · January 17, 2015, 6:52pm

Erik_:

jonquil:

Erik_:

This thread is going to be about a philosophical text on the concept of the daemonic. The title of the text is Goethe’s concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients by Angus Nicholls. It’s an excellent book, because it’s not merely about Goethe’s concept of the daemon, but pretty much the entire history of it. The concept of the daemon originated in ancient Greece. It’s a nuanced philosophical/religious concept, but I believe it’s safe to say that, in general, it is defined as a spiritual mediator or sensibility between two realities, e.g., the divine realm and the Earthly realm.

Was Goethe a Rosicrucian, or did he just use Rosicrucian symbols and ideas in some of his writing?

I’m not sure, if he was. But he did seem to be inspired by Rosicrucianism in much of his work, without a doubt.

Yeah, I looked widely on the internet and he was influenced by Rosicrucianism; but there is nothing that says he was one.

I guess it’s time to get a good bio of Goethe.

Thanks anyway.

Erik1 · January 17, 2015, 9:48pm

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1yvWX4BOc8[/youtube]

Erik1 · January 18, 2015, 2:53pm

The Romantic return to nature does not necessarily involve a surrender of
human rationality and consciousness — a return to primordial unconsciousness.
Rather, it involves a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung or sublation,
through which the other of nature (consciousness, and more specifically,
reason) becomes reintegrated with nature, a reintegration that leads to
nature being reaffirmed on a higher level. Through this process, humankind
aims towards a cultural idea of nature: a conception of nature that
has been exposed to a process of conscious, rational reflection, and then
subsequently reconceived as a cultural, poetic ideal. This credo is of
course nowhere more clearly expressed than in Schiller’s essay “Über naïve
und sentimentalische Dichtung” (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,
1795), in which Schiller asks:

[size=85]Was hätte . . . eine unscheinbare Blume, eine Quelle, ein bemooster
Stein, das Gezwitscher der Vögel, das Summen der Bienen etc. für
sich selbst so gefälliges für uns? Was könnte ihm gar einen Anspruch
auf unsere Liebe geben? Es sind nicht diese Gegenstände, es ist eine
durch sie dargestellte Idee, was wir in ihnen lieben. Wir lieben in
ihnen das stille schaffende Leben, das ruhige Wirken aus sich selbst,
das Dasein nach eignen Gesetzen, die innere Notwendigkeit, die
ewige Einheit mit sich selbst. Sie sind, was wir waren; sie sind, was
wir wieder werden sollen. Wir waren Natur, wie sie, und unsere
Kultur soll uns, auf dem Wege der Vernunft und der Freiheit, zur
Natur zurückführen. (SW 8:707–8)[/size]

A corollary of the process outlined by Schiller is that the concept of the
human is also naturalized; although humans are not necessarily identical
with, or indistinguishable from, nature, they nevertheless emanate from
and dwell within the natural world. Nature is thus within the human and
constitutes at least partially what it means to be human; even though human
consciousness, the very precondition of our ability to conceive of a
concept called nature, in some way separates or differentiates humans
from their natural surroundings.
Romanticism does not descend inexorably into irrationalism as long
as it recognizes boundaries and limits: in particular, the boundary that divides
human consciousness from the external world and that therefore
constitutes the very ground of human subjectivity — the ego or self. Indeed,
as Jerome J. McGann observes in The Romantic Ideology, Romantic
poetry is sometimes capable of mounting “an implicit — sometimes even
an explicit — critical position toward its subject matter.”33 When applied
specifically to Goethe, these statements require a good deal of argument
and elucidation. In this connection, chapters 4, 5, and 6 of this study will
attempt to demonstrate that Goethe can be seen to offer a simultaneous
depiction and critique of the model of unlimited subjective longing that
prevailed in the earliest phases of the Sturm und Drang movement, a
mode of subjective longing also referred to by Paul De Man in his discussion
of Romanticism as a kind of radical “subjective idealism.” Here we
need to pay attention to the logical connection between Abrams’s broad
definition of Romanticism as the secularization of religious ideas, and
De Man’s later and more specific suggestion that Romanticism (in both
Germany and England) may constitute a subjective idealism. In his essay
“The Rhetoric of Temporality,” De Man observes that in Romantic poetry
the relationship between subject and object referred to by Abrams is
often displaced by an unlimited mode of subjectivity that completely appropriates
and internalizes external objects. In this way, the dialectic between
subject and object is transformed, and priority passes from the
realm of external objects to the internal world of the subject, creating
“something that resembles radical idealism.”

Erik1 · January 19, 2015, 7:22pm

For Hegel, Romantic art retreats into the realm of the idea, of inwardness,
whereas classical art concerns itself primarily with external and
objective forms. Hegel derives this distinction from Schiller, whom he acknowledges
as an important precursor in the field of aesthetics.40 In
Schiller’s essay “Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung,” the naïve resembles
Hegel’s notion of classical, and the Sentimental is something like
the Romantic. In naïve poetry, nature functions as an undivided unity, in
the sense that the naïve poet dwells within nature intuitively and unconsciously:
he does not abstract an idea of nature from natural phenomena,
rather he effectively is nature, or at least a medium through which nature
expresses itself in an unmediated fashion. This conception of the naïve
poet is very close indeed to the notion of genius propagated by Herder.
In fact Schiller confirms this by stating that “Naïv muß jedes wahre Genie
sein, oder es ist keines” (SW 8:718).
So who are these naïve poets? Schiller, like Herder, calls them the ancients,
specifically mentioning figures like Homer, while also conceding
that Shakespeare is the best example of a naïve poet among the moderns.
The sentimental poet, however, is fundamentally different. Unlike the naïve
poet, he does not enjoy a kind of primordial oneness with nature.
Rather he reflects upon and celebrates nature as a concept, and longs for
it as for a lost mother. The sentimental poet is characteristically elegiac.
He composes elegies about nature that, for the very reason that they conceptualize
nature as an abstract idea, always fall short of being nature.
Forever divided from nature, the sentimental poet is characteristically
modern. His feeling for nature is, says Schiller, like the “Empfindung des
Kranken für die Gesundheit” (SW 8:727), and in the next chapter of this
study I will examine his apotheosis in the figure of Werther — the sentimental
individual par excellence.

Erik1 · February 7, 2015, 1:18am

Jonquil,

Hello, my friend.

I discovered that he was a freemason. In regards to being a Rosicrucian, I still don’t know. But yeah, as prior mentioned, he was part of a masonic lodge in Germany.

The_Artful_Pauper · February 7, 2015, 11:40am

Definitely. Have you read Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship? The title character joins a secret society in the narrative. It’s definitely worth reading if you’re interested in the history of literature and/or Goethe. A description in the novel of the titular character and a band of his friends walking through the hills was very remniscent of the hippies to me, though over 200 years earlier, nearly 300…

The continuation (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years) is more symbolic and a more disjointed narrative, also with more Christian symbolism. I enjoyed the Apprenticeship much more.

Erik1 · February 7, 2015, 2:53pm

I haven’t read that yet, but def. plan to eventually. I’m reading a book on Weimar Classicism at the moment and that’s how I discovered he was a mason.