Goethe and the Sublime by John Matthew Koster A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German Literature, Culture and Theory Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto © Copyright by John Matthew Koster 2013 Goethe and the Sublime John Matthew Koster Doctor of Philosophy Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto 2013 Abstract The dissertation situates the Goethean sublime in an obscured countermovement of resistance to the aestheticization the concept underwent in the 18th century. Before the encounter with the English aesthetic concept of the sublime, the German notion of das Erhabene (the sublime) named not a category of aesthetic experience, but a social affect. In contrast to the Sublime of Edmund Burke's theory, which explicitly excludes melancholy from the sources of the Sublime, das Erhabene is an affect related to the self-overcoming of melancholic subjectivity. As the aestheticized notion of the sublime displaced das Erhabene, Goethe became one of the most radical innovators of the aesthetics of the sublime. But as is demonstrated in chapters on The Sorrows of Young Werther, Elective Affinities, Faust and Wilhelm Meister, he did so with the aim of recovering the displaced meaning of das Erhabene as social affect. Goethe's sublime aims to show at every turn that the so-called "aesthetic experience" of the sublime is really displaced social affect. His treatment of the sublime therefore constitutes a radical critique of the establishment of aesthetics as an independent sphere of inquiry. There is for Goethe no way to understand aesthetic experience independently of its social context. By reconnecting the sublime it to the original social meaning of das Erhabene, Goethe recovers the aesthetics of the sublime ii as a means of mediating and facilitating the movement of subjectivity from frustrated stasis to divine creativity; i.e., from exclusion to participation in the material creation of reality. iii Acknowledgments I am indebted to the following institutions for supporting the writing of this thesis: the Province of Ontario, the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies, the Joint Institute for German and European Studies, and the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures. I am also grateful for the help and support of Ms. Monika Lang, Ms. Gayle Grisdale and Mr. Dale Gebhardt of the German Department, all of whom, on numerous occasions, went beyond duty to help rescue me from near disasters. Mr. Amos Friedmann of Loveland High School was my first, and still unsurpassed, teacher of the German language. My debt to him is both real and mythic: he gave me the keys to the worlds I now inhabit. The late Beate Konietzny and her family–Ralf and Stefan–opened their world to me and helped make it possible for me to adopt German as a second first language. I would also like to thank Angelica Fenner, Markus Stock and Christine Lehleiter, who have been generous listeners and supporters as well as challenging interlocutors during my time in Toronto. My understanding of how natural scientists think has benefited greatly from conversations with Sina Fazelpour. Most of what I understand about literary Romanticism I owe in one way or another to conversations with my friend David Bowen, at whose coat-tails I'll keep nipping until one of us is granted his sky-burial. It was my great fortune to spend the last six-and-a-half years reading with two of the most critical minds working in North American German Studies today, my supervisors Willi Goetschel and John Noyes. I can only hope that the intellectual debt I owe to their work (both printed and unprinted) is sufficiently legible in the substance of my thesis. I am grateful especially for the patience with which they allowed me to take on a project that some teachers might have condemned as too broad or ambitious in scope. Finally, I thank my parents, John and Maria, for having books, for valuing reading and story- telling, and for teaching me to believe in the beautiful lie that I could accomplish anything I truly wanted. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v Introduction: "A rose by any other name..." viii Chapter 1: From das Erhabene to the Sublime 1 1.1 Melancholy Renaissance 1 1.2 Enlightenment: Lost in Translation 5 1.3 Johann Jakob Bodmer 7 1.4 Edmund Burke 11 1.5 Moses Mendelssohn 16 1.6 Johann Wolfgang Goethe 19 1.7 Herder's Sublime Melancholy 21 1.8 Subjectivity and the Sublime 38 Chapter 2: The Duality of Nature in Die Leiden des jungen Werther 41 2.1 Early Aesthetic Agon 41 2.2 Werther and the Janus of Nature 49 2.3 Wertherian Synesthesia 53 2.4 The Birth of Mephisto from the Spirit of Young Werther 69 2.5 Scavenger Sublime: Harzreise im Winter 71 v Chapter 3: Dialectics of Strategy. Qual der Wahlverwandtschaften 81 3.1 Strategy 81 3.2 Biopolitical Strategy in Athens 82 3.3 Shakespeare and the Critique of Theatre 92 3.4 What does Goethe Want? 106 3.5 Strategy and Truth 112 Chapter 4: Faust als Puppenspiel. The Weight of the Word 117 4.1 Pupal Beginnings 117 4.2 Mixed Metaphors 119 4.3 Sublime of Bildung: Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig 122 4.4 "Nach Golde drängt, / Am Golde hängt / Doch alles." 127 4.5 "So herrsche denn Eros der alles begonnen!" 130 4.6 Beauty. "Was hilft der Augen schärfster Blitz!" 138 Chapter 5: Wilhelm Meister's Sublime Journey 149 5.1 Eros and Entsagung: "Wer ist der Verräter?" 149 5.2 After the World: "Im Schatten eines mächtigen Felsen..." 157 5.3 Narrative Mechanics and Human Meaning 159 5.4 The Beautiful and the Sublime 162 5.5 The Aesthetic Mediation of Life 168 5.6 Sublime Enjoyment 175 vi 5.7 Happiness 178 5.8 Conclusion 184 Abbreviations 186 Works Cited 187 vii Introduction "A rose by any other name..." The literature on Goethe is vast. This quantitative problem is not specific to Goethe: every scholar is faced with the problem of selecting what is relevant from existing secondary literature. Since reading everything is not an option, scholars looks for ways of narrowing down the field of what counts as relevant to their particular line of inquiry. Of course, there are many ways to do this: the simplest way in the age of Google being to follow key words. But it immediately becomes clear how limiting this is. How can I be sure, in the age of Google, that what I call Nature or the Sublime is the same thing somebody else calls by the same name? But this isn't just a postmodern, Google-age question; it is a modern one which Goethe is keenly aware of. The answer is that there is no way to be sure–and for Goethe, arriving at this uncertainty means we have reached the Urphänomen, or the point at which it makes more sense to stop trying to be sure. This is precisely the same discursive problem we find at the heart of the sublime. Since the experience of the sublime in itself is never present within discourse, how can anyone be sure that they are talking about the same thing, the same experience? Of course they cannot, and this is a theoretical problem that runs all the way through the discourse of the sublime from Longinus to Žižek. But recognition of this problem–merely theoretical acknowledgement of it–has not stopped or held back the productivity of the sublime. Despite this epistemological limit, the aesthetic sublime is as productive as ever. What makes it productive is the dream that the epistemological problem can be solved–that is, the dream that the aesthetic struggle can come to an end in a final reconciliation. Paradoxically, this wish to settle the question of the sublime drives production viii ever further in the direction of phenomenological descriptions that attempt to represent what is, by definition, unrepresentable. This is the historical problem which my research into the scholarly literature on both Goethe and on the sublime presented to me. Given this situation, I began to wonder whether the sublime might be explainable in a Freudian way, as a symptom of literary production under modern and, increasingly, under industrial conditions. If I could see the sublime as a symptom, I could then see how far a Freudian methodology would take me. So I set about trying to untangle and follow the symptom formation–that is, the discourse on the sublime–back to the scene of an original displacement. What I found was that, strangely enough, the sublime and das Erhabene were originally such different notions that mere conceptual comparison or contrast could not quite get at what had happened. I found that concomitantly with the establishment of aesthetics as an independent sphere of inquiry, the German notion of das Erhabene as social affect was displaced by the English aesthetic concept of the sublime. This English concept had, at least in its leading theoretical elaborations, very different contours than das Erhabene. Not only was it thoroughly rhetorical and instrumental, and supported by a reified materialism, it explicitly excluded from the Sublime the experience of melancholy, a crucial association of das Erhabene which the Enlightenment had inherited from Florentine humanism. My argument is that das Erhabene, or at least its most fundamental content (that it is a social affect), was repressed when it was displaced by the aestheticized concept of the sublime. Further, I maintain that Goethe was hyper-aware of this displacement, and its problematicity is one of the reasons he shows so much aversion to theoretical discourses on aesthetics.