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Herder's Early Neoplatonism
- from Part II - Critical Essays
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- By Ulrich Gaier, He studied German, English, and French languages and literatures in Tübingen and Paris
- Edited by John K. Noyes
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- Book:
- Herder's Essay on Being
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 13 April 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2018, pp 162-182
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Summary
NEOPLATONIC PHILOSOPHY was transmitted without interruption from its founder Plotinus (ca. 203–69 CE) into what is generally refered to as the age of Goethe (ca. 1750–1850). In this era, Herder is its most important mediator. I shall show here that, from his earliest writings on, Herder thinks in the categories and structures of Neoplatonism. In several publications I have traced the influence this had on Goethe and the students of Kant and Fichte. My point of departure was the fact that, up until Schleiermacher's translation, Plato was known in the Germanspeaking countries by way of the Neoplatonic translation into Latin and commentary of Marsilio Ficino (first published 1484). In addition, Hamann, Herder, Goethe, Hardenberg, and other contemporaries are known to have studied Plotinus and Proclus.
“Imagine my luck. Have obtained a magnificent edition of Plato for 31 fl. and the best of Proclus’ and Plotinus’ theol. works. Text and translations,” Johann Georg Hamann reported joyfully on December 19, 1761. He immediately began a systematic study of the Neoplatonically interpreted dialogues of Plato. Herder, a student of Kant since 1762, met Hamann in the beginning of 1764; inspired by Hamann, Herder wrote the Essay on Being, in which he challenged Kant's attempt at an ontological proof of God and arrived at a result that Kant himself did not apply until 1781. Herder presented a counter-argument that clearly took its bearings from Plotinus. The master was not amused: “Kant too appears utterly withdrawn [retiré] towards me,” Herder wrote. In the course of his life Herder acquired a complete Platonic-Neoplatonic library.
Goethe, who became acquainted with Neoplatonic philosophy through Hamann, whose works he collected, and through Herder, developed his “private religion” in 1770–71, as he described in retrospect, “Neo-Platonism was its basis; Hermeticism, mysticism, and cabalism also contributed something, and so I built myself a very strange-looking world.” Later he returned to Plotinus repeatedly. In 1805 he translated a part of the Enneads, which was of importance for his aesthetics, and referred to Plotinus in the introduction to the didactic part of Zur Farbenlehre (Color Theory, 1810), to the “words of an old mystic writer, which may be thus rendered, ‘If the eye were not [sunlike] [sonnenhaft], how could we perceive light? If God's own strength lived not in us, how could we delight in Divine things?’”
4 - ‘Schwankende Gestalten’: virtuality in Goethe's Faust
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- By Ulrich Gaier, University of Konstanz, Germany
- Edited by Hans Schulte, John Noyes, University of Toronto, Pia Kleber, University of Toronto
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- Book:
- Goethe's <I>Faust</I>
- Published online:
- 01 June 2011
- Print publication:
- 05 May 2011, pp 54-67
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Summary
Ask Goethe whether you should put Faust on the stage: he will tell you flatly ‘No!’ He never supported efforts to do so, even though readers and theatre people urged him to stage the piece. When the actor Pius Alexander Wolff and Goethe's adlatus Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer planned a representation in Weimar around 1810, Goethe was angry, saying that if he had wanted, he could have staged it himself. Later he described his attitude towards it as ‘passive, if not suffering’. Finally he consented to draw sketches for some scenes in Part i and revise the stage version, adding lines here and there in order to stress the operatic character which Wolff had intended (FT 582–90). When, in 1829, Weimar and Leipzig rehearsed for a representation of a revised version of Part i, Goethe contributed a chorus for the ‘Study 2’ scene and a final chorus for the ‘Prison’ scene (FT 591 ff.), again to enhance the operatic character which he always had in mind. We think of the multitude of musical inlays in the text, but also of his remark that only Mozart could have set the play to music, and that after his death only Meyerbeer was capable of rendering its more terrifying aspects. He consented to train the actor LaRoche to portray Mephistopheles; indeed, LaRoche confessed that each gesture, each step, each grimace and each word came from Goethe.
Helena, Then Hell: Faust as Review and Anticipation of Modern Times
- from Special Section on Goethe and the Postclassical: Literature, Science, Art, and Philosophy, 1805–1815
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- By Ulrich Gaier, University of Constance
- Edited by Daniel Purdy
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 17
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 14 March 2018
- Print publication:
- 15 January 2010, pp 3-20
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GOETHE IS USUALLY NOT RECOGNIZED as an historian although, with Dichtung und Wahrheit and with Geschichte der Farbenlehre, he wrote eminent works of history that far exceed the compass of an autobiography or the chronology of a special branch of optics. When he tried to talk his friend Zelter into writing a history of music, Goethe wrote in 1815: “müßtest Du bei einer bedeutenden Periode anfangen, und vor- und rückwärts arbeiten; das Wahre kann bloß durch seine Geschichte erhoben und erhalten, das Falsche bloß durch seine Geschichte erniedrigt und zerstreut werden.” In a number of his plays, he uses Herder's theory of intertextuality Vom neuern Gebrauch der Mythologie, taking up figures, stories, and problems of the sixteenth century like Götz von Berlichingen, Egmont, Tasso, and Faust, and finishing with the passionate cry for a future in which the problems that cause Götz’, Egmont's, Gretchen's death or Tasso's isolation are solved. These, then, are the questions that the contemporary recipient has to ask himself: would these figures be able to live according to their “prätendierte Freiheit” today? This approach is eminently historical but not in the sense that a historian of the time like Gatterer or Schlözer would have acknowledged as historiography. Goethe consciously establishes a systemic correlation for instance between the introduction of Roman Law and the abolition of the traditional privileges of knighthood in Götz’ time, and the burning question of the 1770s whether a general book of law should be introduced or whether regional traditions of jurisdiction should be preserved. History, here, is not any more magistra vitae but a critique of present times, and present times, inversely, create an understanding for the relevance of historical events and processes: between the contemporary recipient and history, Goethe establishes an organic system of reciprocation that, as a structure, he holds up until his last years. He adopted the approach of conceiving organic systems from Johann Gottfried Herder who in turn had dynamized Johann Heinrich Lambert's “Systematology” of 1764 for his philosophy of language and culture. I will show in this paper that Goethe used this systems approach not only for history but for his theory of colors, for aesthetics, poetry, and even in politics. Faust, as an eminent work of history, and in it, 3,000 years old, Helena, will provide a frame for some excursions into the systems aspect of the other fields just mentioned.
7 - Myth, Mythology, New Mythology
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- By Ulrich Gaier
- Edited by Hans Adler, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wulf Koepke, Texas A & M University
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- Book:
- A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 28 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2009, pp 165-188
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CONTRARY TO THE WIDESPREAD prejudices that the eighteenth century, being a period of rational enlightenment, was an “extremely barren epoch for research in mythology” and that the call for New Mythology toward the end of the century signaled an anti-rational criticism of enlightenment, 2 myth plays a central role as early as in the works of Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), protagonists of German Enlightenment philosophy. They represent, to a certain extent, the two traditions of the mythical mode of thinking, which can be linked, respectively, to Plato (427–347 B.C.) and Aristotle (384– 322 B.C.). In addition to the epistemological, aesthetic, and anthropological aspects dealt with by these philosophers, we must also delve into the historical and semiotic aspects unfolded, for instance, by Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), William Warburton (1698–1779), and Etienne Bonnot de Mably de Condillac (1714–1780). Herder, who was familiar with these philosophers, synthesized and transformed their teachings into highly powerful ideas — for instance, Volk, nation, and humanity — that strongly influenced the following two centuries. This essay examines these three traditions — Platonic, Aristotelian, and historical — one by one in order to show how Herder makes use of them.
In the eighteenth century, the concept of myth did not have the metaphysical and religious weight that some of the recent mythologists, such as Kurt Hübner, envisage, nor was it the term laden with psychoanalytic lore packed onto it by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), and others. For a long time, terminology followed the Latin tradition in the same manner as the Greek gods appeared in their Latin replicas. So, the term was not “Mythos,” or “myth,” but “Fabel,” or “fable,” which not only referred to Aesopian apologues but, according to Aristotle's use of mythos in his Poetics, to literary subject matter in general, so that the literary critic Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766), for instance, defined fable as an invention that the poet could use for an apologue, a comedy, a tragedy, or an epic poem. Benjamin Hederich, on the other hand, in his Gründliches mythologisches Lexikon, cites the Greek term mythos but translates it as “Fabel,” fable.
Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff and the Humanists
- Ulrich Gaier
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 83 / Issue 2 / May 1968
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 December 2020, pp. 266-270
- Print publication:
- May 1968
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Brant's Humanistic friends viewed the Narrenschiff (1494) as a satire in the Roman tradition which marked the beginning of a literary Renaissance in the German vernacular. That contemporary interpretation of the work justifies a comparison of the Narrenschiff with Erasmus' Encomium Moriae, “the most important remaining problem in Brant research” (Zeydel). The two works are formally comparable since both use rhetorical forms (e.g., oralio) as a structural basis for their satiric intent. Since the two satires also coincide on many points of content, the “Erasmian duplicity” seems the only obstacle to a complete juxtaposition. This duplicity, however, is a necessary consequence of Erasmus' use of prosopopoiia and is not characteristic of his frame of mind, as can be shown in his firm reliance on divine wisdom. In this he coincides again with Brant's attitude in the Narrenschiff. Thus, the difference between the two works is not one in kind or outlook but one mainly determined by the different audiences addressed.