Abstract
Goethe, the complete artist, is our antipode: an example for others. Aliento incompletion, that modern concept of perfection, he refused comprehensionof others’ dangers; as for his own, he assimilated them so wellthat he never suffered from them. His brilliant destiny discourages us;after having sifted him in vain in an attempt to discover sublime or sordidsecrets, we give ourselves up to Rilke’s phrase: ‘I have no organ forGoethe’.1Goethe constructed his spiritual world with an unrivalled openness tothe natural cycle of creation and destruction, the cultural accomplishmentsof different eras and places, the wisdom stretching beyond thewhirlwinds of history. Being an ‘explosive liberator’ of all living formsof nature and culture, Goethe found the Enlightenment’s idea of historyas a self-contained, linear advancement of the human mind to be a constrictingnotion, one that downplayed the role of humans in God’s workand presented an unacceptable erasure of interpersonal relationships andreality ...
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