The Promethean in Goethe’s Poetry

Heinrich Füger, “Prometheus Brings Fire to Mankind,” 1817

1,839 words

Follows “Goethe’s Prometheus”

Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu genießen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich!

Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!

This work revolves around the self-affirmation of the subject, the Ich,[1] which is considered the driving force behind art, literature, and overarching idealistic systems.[2] “Prometheus” presents a different type of hero compared to those of its time. Goethe is impressed not by the traditional hero who usurps the place of the gods, but by the one who regards the gods with disdain, a man subject to human tragedies,[3] surpassing the known ways of thinking and feeling of the Sturm und Drang movement. Goethe’s admiration for the Greeks is notable in the early stages of his work, where his physical being is liberated from inhibitions and his moral being is liberated from pietistic constraints.

In “Prometheus,” Goethe expresses and embodies the essence of the Aufklärung, where the poetic and the conceptual cannot be separated. In this Aufklärung ideal, man constitutes a unity of creative impulse — instinctive, emotive, aesthetic, and cognitive needs, indivisible. He manifests as a spiritualized body, a corporealized soul, rebelling against the secularism of pure reason — in stark opposition to his contemporaries — declaring rationality and subtlety inseparable, as both are modes of confronting the same reality by the same spirit. Man is the alpha and omega, the beginning and end of every work, the executing arm of divinity, the only possible executor. The aim is not to dethrone Zeus, but to show noble arrogance by challenging the declining god in the new era, where men definitively supplant the gods, evoking the process of development of Greek humanism.

At this point, the European character of Goethe’s “Prometheus” is implicitly noted, in conflict with the gods of heaven. He is a Prometheus without discernment, a Prometheus who does not constrain his blasphemy to earth: he alone, in communion with nature, the universe, and the cosmos, rebels against heaven. This stands in contrast with Marx’s Prometheus, a Prometheus with human self-awareness, a Prometheus who condemns not only the gods of heaven but also those of the earth, distinguishing between false gods and true gods, where the false ones are those who do not recognize human self-awareness as the supreme divinity, while the true ones do.[4] A human, all too human Prometheus.

To Prometheus, the insolent titan who dares to challenge these decadent and selfish divinities, usurpers of the divine power, concepts such as democracy, civil rights, and various proletarian struggles become insignificant. He, the rebellious titan with a monstrous personality who has created men in his image, concerns himself with greatness, with being happy, with suffering; probably also with loving and hating. This is the holographic greatness of the One, of this pantheistic imperialism of feeling a portion and yet all of the divine essence in every being, and thereby setting fire to the temple of self-paid authority. A titan who pursues self-realization, which is nothing but the affirmation of himself and his power.

The years of full adaptation to the organic experienced by Goethe, along with effort and work, led him along a vertical path in a struggle that persisted on all levels, an individuality marked by the impulse towards the heights demanded by the Eternal Feminine: the supreme transformation of the principle of wisdom, in disdain of empty utilitarian pragmatism; adaptation becomes one of the essential laws of duration, continuity, progress, and life itself.

Heil den unbekannten
Höhern Wesen
Die wir ahnen!
Ihnen gleiche der Mensch!
Sein Beispiel lehr uns
Jene glauben

Hail the unknown
Higher beings,
Of our belief!
That we should be like them!
Their examples teach us
That we might believe in them

Thus, instead of pursuing an unlimited infinity, Goethe discovers the greatness of limitation, a realization that equals man to the gods themselves, embodying his new ideal — the evolution of the Promethean — in the poem “Das Göttliche” (“The Divine”).

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Prometheus, like man, is begotten by the infinite; he is the eternal manifested, materialized, personified; he is the bearer of the infinite, of creative power, the bearer of light. He is therefore also Lucifer, with whom, syncretically, he shares a rebellious spirituality, a tormented mind — as, probably, Nietzsche and Goethe themselves were — tormented by demons. A legion of them: demons of pride, of ambition; by demons of creative, but also destructive action; by demons inciting the most atrocious blasphemies, of rebellion. Could the creative power of the tormented mind be denied?

Speaking of the demon: Goethe is accompanied by this — or by one — throughout his life. It is not a guardian angel, although it is with him and manifests itself throughout his life, in its different stages. It is like a pure energy double, an instinctive spirit that has been born parallel to him, a doppelgänger. The doppelgänger has no effect on human life during childhood. The effects are felt in the limitations and hindrances of inhuman feelings when making one’s own decisions.[5] The energy of this daimon is not Apollonian, it is not conscious: it is Dionysian, it is pure impulse, it is a superior mandate of hidden natural laws, of mystery, of this “essence” that is part of one and all.

The Dionysian frenzy of rebellion is not everything in “Prometheus” (that is, man): every determination is negation, so that limits, borders, shape man; it is for this reason that power and beauty reside in their own particularity, but are transmitted. Goethe, who once — like Prometheus, son of Titan — considered it more noble not to bend as a man before the “eternal iron laws,” to steal fire from heaven, and to challenge the gods, at the pinnacle of his experience and wisdom bowed before the Divine Will in an act of acceptance, of resignation: rebellion is no longer his leitmotif, but rather servile devotion to society. The knowledge of the gods leads him to discover the “limits of the human.”

Edel sei der Mensch,
hilfreich und gut,
denn das allein
unterscheidet ihn
von allen Wesen
die wir kennen

Let man be noble,
Helpful and good!
Because that alone
Distinguishes him
From all beings
That we know.

Goethe had spoken of man’s loneliness and then of his borders, but the “Limits of the Human” were never the “Limits of the Vulgar,” of this lumpen that would have little or nothing to do with the “Divine.” Man is the material manifestation of the spiritual because he is the bearer of the ancient father: Uralten.

The image of a terrible Cosmocrator — full of vitality, strength, vigor — and of this self-organizing principle of Nature, full of Will to Power, is quite far from the image of the contemplative Christ reigning in glory and majesty over the Universe: although the magnificent is achieved, the eternal piety[6] and contemplation are inseparable from this Christ, antithesis of the European spiritual storm unleashed upon the Judeo-Christian Hellenic values,[7] one of the reasons for the break between Wagner and Nietzsche.

His ideal of human fulfillment changes, and if the Gesang der Parzen, who govern and cut the thread of the being’s destiny, made the mandate to men to fear the gods,[8] then the spirit of man must rebel against fear, and be noble, fruitful, and loving towards the gods — that is, to recognize human smallness in the face of the infinite greatness of Divinity. The fire previously stolen from Heaven is returned by Goethe in “Limits of Humanity,” now calmed of the rebellion of his youth and surrendered to the Highness and striving at last to reconcile spiritual and personal harmony. Something incomprehensible for some more fervent followers of the Promethean-Dionysian part of his work, Goethe’s oeuvre ends up bowing to prudence and renouncing that Luciferian romanticism that once led him to defy the Gods and bring Fire to men.

Notes

[1] “Ich dich ehren? Wofür? . . . dein nicht zu achten, Wie ich!”

[2] 2. I. Fernández,“Schiller y Goethe frente a los dioses: del Olimpo al Hades,” Espéculo Revista de estudios literarios, no. 48, 2011.

[3] L. Rensoli, “Tres aristas de lo humano en la poesía de Goethe,” Anales del Seminario de Metafísica, no. 31, pp. 157-183.

[4] F. Hinkelammert, “Prometeo, el discernimiento de los dioses y la ética del sujeto. Reflexiones sobre un mito fundante de la Modernidad,” Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, vol. 10, no. 31, pp. 9-36.

[5] For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is essentially innocent. He condemns the centuries of humanistic monotheism that precede the birth of the Übermensch and, even more fervently, the Socratic vision of tragedy, which serves as a breeding ground for the consolidation of Christian values. This inclusive but expansionist monotheism, whose morality of the untermensch has taken the Dionysian instinct (the unrestrained energy that catalyzes reproduction) and reduced it to lasciviousness, imbuing it with a negative character in terms of morality, evolves in vulgar — though Apollonian — forms of ideologies. Instead of fostering organic individuation, these ideologies promote a totalitarian, egalitarian individualism devoid of any connection with the soul of the world, the Weltseele, presented more clearly in Eins und Alles.

This clash transcends morality and any kind of context that one might want to assign it in the narrow modern vision. It is worth noting all those representatives of the morality of decadence that Nietzsche never hesitated to identify and, at the same time, condemn (where not even his friend and close associate Richard Wagner could escape the accusing pen of the native of Röcken), since its very nature is earthy, unrestrained energy — the blonde beast, not alien to its time, although it may be foreign to the society of that time, where hopes were placed in Progress and Democracy as new messianisms for a new world.

[6] The Dionysian pathos is opposed to Christian compassion: While in the latter, participation in suffering leaves intact the individuality of the one who feels pity, the former unleashes itself through the breaking of individuation, and then the frenzy of Dionysus lives directly, and not from the outside, the unity between man and animal. (Colli, G. 1978, Dopo Nietzsche, Biblioteca Adelphi)

[7] From the very outset, Christianity was essentially and pervasively the feeling of disgust and weariness which life felt for life, a feeling which merely disguised, hid, and decked itself out in its belief in “another” or “better” life: hatred of the “world,” a curse on the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a Beyond invented in order better to defame the Here-and-Now, fundamentally a desire for nothingness, for the end, for rest, for the “Sabbath of Sabbaths.” (F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Raymond, G. & R. Speirs (eds.), 1999; translated by Ronald Speirs.

[8] Es fürchte die Götter
Das Menſchengeſchlecht!
Sie halten die Herrſchaft
In ewigen Händen,
Und können ſie brauchen
Wie’s ihnen gefällt.

Oh, fear the immortals,
Ye children of men!
Eternal dominion
They hold in their hands.
And o’er their wide empire
Wield absolute sway

— Excerpt from Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris