Nietzsche's Goethe: In Sickness and in Health

Abstract

This article re-evaluates Nietzsche's view of Goethe by analysing the function and significance of the term 'Goethe' in Nietzsche's writings. While Nietzsche's attitude to Goethe is indisputably complex, it is argued here that the image of Goethe presented in Nietzsche's writings is the exception which proves the rule that his engagements with historical figures are characterized by deliberate ambivalence or by violent shifts in attitude. While Nietzsche's view of Goethe is not wholly uncritical, the double-edgedness which marks Nietzsche's intellectual (and emotional) encounters with other outstanding figures in Western culture is largely absent from his engagement with Goethe. Throughout Nietzsche's writings, Goethe is associated in invariably positive ways with diagnoses of cultural health and sickness, notably with Nietzsche's assessments of Greek antiquity, 'Erziehung', Classicism and Romanticism, Christianity, Wagner, decadence, the 'German question', Napoleon, 'Lebensbejahung', and the symbolic figure of Dionysos. Increasingly and obsessively, however, Goethe comes to be linked in Nietzsche's mind with exemplary physical and mental health, to the extent that he presents Goethe as both a promise of the posited 'Übermensch' and as an idealized self-projection or self-affirmation.