Error and Mastery in the goethean Bildung and their outcomes

Abstract

From the Promethean inspiration of Sturm und Drang to the allegorical apotheosis of Faust II, Goethe‟s trajectory makes a continuous effort to save and reframe the poetic naivety before the historical demand of an unheard-of antagonism and individual self-sufficiency, bestowing legitimacy to his innate feeling of existence as „zweite Natur‟. Such ambivalence induced even Goethe‟s benevolent critics to face his Bildung projectas a preliminary and controversial moment, of which the excessively individualist accent would later be definitely superseded by the dedication to natural sciences and to the moral of resignation. This article aims to show how the Goethean Bildung, correctly understood as „education for the error‟, institutes a relation of interdependent and complementary continuity between error and mastery, which the German poet unfolds and devotes in three of his fundamental convictions: that of the deviations and deformations as being constitutive possibilities of the laws of Nature of their legitimate formative procedure; that of the superior poetic creation as an „elevation to the heights of the spirit and turning the intentions of Nature efficient‟; and the primacy of the „poets-imitators‟ over priests and philosophers in the appropriation of tradition under the auspices of a „pure characteristic personification‟