A Critical Relation: On Géza von Molnár's Goethe Scholarship

Abstract

PETER FENVES A Critical Relation: On Géza von Molnar's Goethe Scholarship Géza Von Molnár, who was born in Leipzig (August 1932) and died in Evanston (July 2001), changed the way in which both scholars and lay readers conceive of the complicated relation between Goethe's poetry and Kantian critique. Two sharply contrasting conceptions of this relation are broadly discernible: a majority of scholars contend—or simply accept without question the supposed fact—that Goethe generally dismisses Critical Philosophy and rejects in particular its moral doctrine; according to a minority opinion, by contrast, Goethe's aesthetic practices correspond at certain points to Kantian lines of thought. In an influential study of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirer eloquently expresses the latter view: "A miracle marks the preliminary history of systematic aesthetics. Not only is a new philosophical discipline worked out and mastered according to a rigorous logical method but at the end of this development comes a new form of artistic creation as well. Kant's philosophy and Goethe's poetry form the intellectual goal toward which this movement prophetically beckons. . . . That such a 'pre-established harmony' was possible in German intellectual history has always been regarded as a most remarkable coincidence."1 Much of von Molnár's work over the last two decades can be understood to dispute this last claim—not the contention that Goethe's poetry and Kant's critical philosophy represent the culmination of the European Enlightenment (for he would have heartily agreed on this point) but, rather, the claim that the relation between Goethe and Kant is somehow "preestablished . " The notion of "pre-established harmony" is decidedly precritical , and any celebration of miracles is wholly anti-critical. Von Molnár undertook exact philological research to demonstrate that Kant's Critiques exercised—to use scholastic language—"real influence" over Goethe's poetry, especially in the context of his conceptualization oÃ- Faust. And this influence was powerful. Because of von Molnár's painstaking research, claims of conceptual affinity between Goethe and Kant need no longer take refuge in quasi-religious terminology; instead, they can be formulated, analyzed , and evaluated in a genuinely critical manner. By establishing that Goethe Yearbook XI (2002) 28 Peter Fenves Goethe's response to Kant's Critiques is both largely positive and highly productive, von Molnár's scholarship does not simply substantiate the viewpoint represented by Cassirer's study; it also—and far more importantly —refutes the wide-spread assumption that Goethe pays scant attention to the critical project and rejects root and branch its conception of morality, the foundation of which is the unimpeachable reality of human freedom. Beginning with an essay published in 1979, "Die Fragwürdigkeit des Fragezeichens: Einige Ãœberlegungen zur Paktszene," von Molnár published some ten essays and an independent monograph on the relation between Goethe's work and the Critical Philosophy of Kant and Fichte.21979 also marks the year in which von Molnár first visited Goethe's library in Weimar in order to inspect its copies of the first and third Critiques. This confluence of dates is not merely fortuitous, for the initial impetus behind von Molnár's effort to chart Goethe's response to Critical Philosophy—the inkling that inspired the entire project, so to speak—can be found in the hitherto unexplored correspondence between two accounts of wagering: the famous pact scene in Faust, on the one hand, and the largely overlooked exposition of betting buried in one of the concluding sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, on the other.3 In both places wagering is intimately related to Glauben—and indeed, as von Molnár insists, to Vernunftglauben , which is to say, human reason as a whole and therefore the very image of what it means to be human. Von Molnár discovered, moreover, that Goethe had heavily marked the relevant section of the first Critique, which indicates that he took seriously Kant's reflections and gives good reason to conclude that these reflections guided the otherwise unprecedented conception of wagering that sets the action of Faust into motion. The very few scholars who had interested themselves in Goethe's reading of Kant—von Molnár...