title: Work

On Myth Studies in Contemporary

German Social Thought
author: Blumenberg, Hans.
publisher: MIT Press
isbn10 | asin: 0262521334
print isbn13: 9780262521338
ebook isbn13: 9780585328225
language: English
subject History--Philosophy, Civilization--
Philosophy, Myth.
publication date: 1985
lcc: D16.8.B6313 1985eb
ddc: 901
subject: History--Philosophy, Civilization--
Philosophy, Myth.
 Page i

Work on Myth



title: Work On Myth Studies in Contemporary

German Social Thought
author: Blumenberg, Hans.
publisher: MIT Press
isbn10 | asin: 0262521334
print isbn13: 9780262521338
ebook isbn13: 9780585328225
language: English
subject History--Philosophy, Civilization--
Philosophy, Myth.
publication date: 1985
lcc: D16.8.B6313 1985eb
ddc: 901
subject: History--Philosophy, Civilization--
Philosophy, Myth.
 Page ii

Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought

Thomas McCarthy, general editor
Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms
Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic
Perspective
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth
Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical
Theory
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science
Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles
Jürgen Habermas, editor, Observations on "The Spiritual Situation of the Age"
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State
Helmut Peukert, Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a
Theology of Communicative Action
Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of
Right
Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and
Structuralist Theories of History
Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl,
Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber

 Page iii

Work on Myth
Hans Blumenberg
translated by Robert M. Wallace

 Page iv

Second Printing, 1990

This translation copyright © 1985 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This work originally appeared in German as Arbeit am Mythos, © 1979 by
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Federal Republic of Germany.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or
information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Publication of this volume has been aided by a grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities.
Printed and bound in the United States of America by Maple-Vail, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Blumenberg, Hans.
Work on myth.
(Studies in contemporary German social thought)
Translation of: Arbeit am Mythos.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. HistoryPhilosophy. 2. CivilizationPhilosophy.
3. Myth. I. Title. II. Series.
D16.8.B6313 1985 901 85-118
ISBN 0-262-02215-X

 Page v

CONTENTS

Translator's Introduction vii

Part I
Archaic Division of Powers
1
After the Absolutism of Reality 3
2
The Name Breaks into the Chaos of the Unnamed 34
3
'Significance' 59
4
Procedural Regulations 113
Part II
Stories Become History
1
The Distortion of Temporal Perspective 149
2
Fundamental Myths and Art Myths 174
3
Myths and Dogmas 215
4
To Bring Myth to an End 263
Part III
The Theft of Fire Ceases to Be Sacrilege
1
The Reception of the Sources Produces the Sources of the
Reception 299

 Page vi

2
Sophists and Cynics: Antithetical Aspects of the Prometheus
Material 328
3
Return from Existential Groundlessness 350
4
Aesthetic Brightening Up 377
Part IV
Against a God, Only a God
Introduction 399
1
"Priming Powder for an Explosion" 403
2
A Conflict between Gods 430
3
Prometheus Becomes Napoleon, Napoleon Prometheus 465
4
Ways of Reading the "Extraordinary Saying" 523
Part V
The Titan in His Century
1
Passage through the Philosophy of History 561
2
On the Rock of Mute Solitude Again 595
3
To Bring to an End, If Not Myth, Then at Least One Myth 627
Notes 639
Name Index 679

 Page vii

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
1
Our Antithetical Attitudes to Myth
In Work on Myth Hans Blumenberg addresses a question that has bothered
European thinkers since at least the late seventeenth century, namely, why, with
the triumphant advance of secular, scientific rationality, have the old myths not
simply evaporated into thin air? a How is it that they have maintained and even
increased their hold on (at least) our literary imaginations? The Enlightenment in
general followed Descartes in categorizing myths among the "prejudices" that
had to be swept away in order to make room for the methodical development and
application of scientific knowledge. Romanticism, particularly in Germany,
reacted against this jettisoning of tradition, and against the unsatisfying
incompleteness and tentativeness of science, by calling either for a "new
mythology" or (more often) for a return to our old, inherited myths. An
appreciation and employment of mythical themes, which could (with some
effort) be interpreted as indicating the possible return of an encompassing
mythical world view, had in fact been evident even in the midst of the ''scientific
revolution" of the seventeenth centurywitness writers like Racine and Miltonand
this has continued right into the twentieth century, with Joyce, Valéry, Kafka,
Thomas Mann, and many others. But theorists are still not sure what to make of
it. Our usual interpretations of science, whether rationalist, empiricist, positivist,
or whatever, are all still very much in the Enlightenment tradition, and imply a
role for myth in the modern age which is restricted exclusively to the aesthetic
imagi-

 Page viii

nation and is assumed to have no bearing on the preeminent role of scientific

rationality in our serious, practical lives. On the other hand, those who concern
themselves extensively with myth, such as literary scholars, anthropologists, and
psychologists, often tend toward the other, Romantic extremeinterpreting myth's
modern survival as evidence of its being, in one way or another, inherent in
human nature and even, given its seemingly greater antiquity and ubiquity, of its
being more fundamental to human nature than our ("surface") rationality.
Blumenberg undertakes precisely to overcome this antithesis, to extract the truth
from the Enlightenment and from Romanticism by showing that scientific
rationality and ongoing "work" on our inherited myths are not only not
incompatible but are both indispensable aspects of the comprehensive effort that
makes human existence possible.

2
A Non-Romantic Alternative to the Enlightenment's Conception of the Relation
between Rationality and Myth: The Overcoming of the Absolutism of Reality
The last German philosopher to address these questions at length was Ernst
Cassirer. b Cassirer was a leading heir of Kant, whose philosophy can be seen as
the culmination (in the realm of theory) of the Enlightenment; but Cassirer's
wide reading in the Romantic writers and in ethnology, his reading of Freud, and
finally his agonizing observation of the role played by "myths" (of the "Führer"
and the "master race,'' for example) in Nazism led him to treat the subject more
seriously and more systematically than any philosopher had done before him.
With his theory of "symbolic forms," he tried to do justice to myth's internal
coherence and power by giving it a status equal to that of knowledge, language,
art, and religion, as a fundamental human activity and construction that could not
be dismissed (in the eighteenth-century manner) as mere fable, mental cobwebs,
or "prejudice."
While Blumenberg honors Cassirer's work on this problem (as on others),c he
has one fundamental criticism of Cassirer's theory: That he did not manage to
overcome the unstated assumption that once science emerges, myth, despite its
supposedly autonomous dignity as a "symbolic form," is fundamentally obsolete;
that once the step "from mythos to logos" has been taken, it can only be perverse
to, as it were, turn back. If the relation of myth to science is conceived in this

 Page ix

wayas it probably is by most of us who are neither programmatic Romantics nor

specialized students of myththen (a) the "primitive" people for whom myth is
still a living reality have to be seen as being largely, if not entirely, deprived of
an essential symbolic form (logos, or science), one that is preferable to the
distinctive one that they do enjoy; (b) the mythical patterns that Freud
discovered in the unconscious are, at most, relics of a (personal and perhaps
historical) childhood that we have left behind us; (c) the role of myth in modern
literature is, at most, that of an object of aesthetic experience, having no bearing
on the practical business of life; and (d) Nazism's relation to myth is that of an
incomprehensible reversion, the reversion before which Cassirer, in The Myth of
the State, stood aghast.
Is this the only rational way to interpret these phenomena? Is there any
alternative to Cassirer's Enlightenment schema of the replacement of myth by
science, other than a Romantic synthesis of the two, which would amount to a
denial of the autonomy of science as a "symbolic form" (thus casting doubt on
the Romantics' commitment to rationality)? Blumenberg proposes that instead of
always interpreting myth in terms of what it (supposedly) came beforeits
terminus ad quem, science, the arrival of which appears to make it obsoletewe
should try interpreting it in terms of its terminus a quo, its point of departure.
That point of departure is the problem that myth seeks to solve, which is the
source of its real (and lasting) importance, regardless of what (if anything)
comes 'after' it.*
What is that problem? Blumenberg calls it the "absolutism of reality." This
phrase designates a situation in which "man comes close to not having control of
the conditions of his existence and, what is more important, believes that he
simply lacks control of them." d This is to be understood as a "limit concept,''
which, while it may never have been fully realized, is a necessary extrapolation,
a "limiting case" that makes sense of what we do observe in myth and in the rest
of human history. In particular, it is consistent, Blumenberg says, with current
theories of the origin of manof what happened when our ancestors adopted an
upright, bipedal posture; were displaced from the sheltering
* Throughout this book, single quotation marks have been used exclusively as 'scare quotes,' to
draw attention to special uses of terms or to emphasize (as in this case) the problematic status, in
the discussion, of the concepts referred to by the words in question. The only exception to this rule
is a quotation within a quotation (i.e., within a set of double quotes), which requires single
 quotation marks for contrast.

 Page x

forest into the open savanna; and found that their instincts did not tell them how
to cope with this new situation. Blumenberg argues that the dramatically
enlarged horizon of what they could perceive (and within which they could be
perceived) would be, for them, a situation of great ambiguity, one in which some
of their central instinctssuch as fleeing from immediate danger, an instinct that
had served to clarify many situations for them in the forestwould be of little
help. Our ancestors "came close to not having control of the conditions of their
existence" because they had becomeas we remaina species without a clearly
defined biological niche. If this situation was not dealt with in some radically
new waythat is, if the "limiting case" of the absolutism of reality was realized (or
if we thought it was realized) for any length of timeit would produce the mental
state that Blumenberg calls Angst, which is normally translated as ''anxiety" but
would be better rendered by the psychiatrist's paraphrase, "intense fear or dread
lacking an unambiguous cause or a specific threat"; and the resulting behavior
would be panic, paralysis, or both.
Thus the "absolutism of reality" is a fundamental threat, implicit in our
biological nature and its relation to our natural environment, to our capacity for
survival. Our response to this challenge has been the development of cultureof,
essentially, the same "symbolic forms" that Cassirer described. But where
Cassirer saw those "symbolic forms" as a spontaneous expression of man's
(apparently "given," unproblematic) "nature" as the "animal symbolicum,"
Blumenberg sees them as a solution to a problem that is inherent in man's
biological nature. Man, as it were, makes himself an animal symbolicum in order
to make up for his lack of biologically adaptive instincts: his "nature" (in
Cassirer's sense) is in fact his solution to the life-threatening problem posed for
him by his biological nature.
What precisely is the role of myth in relation to this problem? It is to overcome
(or perhaps to forestall) the Angst that the problem produces (or could produce),
by "rationalizing" it into plain fear of specific, named agencies, more or less
personalized powers, whom we can address and (to that extent) deal with. It is
important that these powers, which are often theriomorphic in the early stages,
are plural, so that each has only a limited domainthere is a "separation of
powers" among them, so that none of them can present the kind of all-
encompassing threat that Angst portends. The other important fact

 Page xi

is that they were more horrible, and less predictable, "in the beginning." The
succession of generations on OlympusZeus the lawgiver supplanting the lawless
Titans, and so onillustrates this fact (as do the accomplishments of heroes like
Perseus and Hercules). But, again, the continuing polytheistic "separation of
powers" prevents the new "supreme god'' from causing a relapse into Angst.
"The consolidation of the state that the world has arrived at, as a 'cosmos,' and
the restriction of every absolutism that arises in this process are interwoven as
anti-thetical motives in myth. . . . Zeus had not been able to conquer without
assistance either the Titans or the giants whose bodies were partly snakes; and
every assistance means a sort of constitutionalization of his power." e
Blumenberg devotes several chapters to an examination of the ways in which
myth serves to reduce the absolutism of reality, creating a "breathing space" in
which men can also deal with the practical side of the challenge of survival by
(among other things) cultivating the rational comprehension and control of
specific natural phenomenain which we have made so much progress in the last
few centuries. But such comprehension and control cannot take the place
ofcannot perform the function ofthe old stories. Knowledge is always only
partial; the absolutism of reality was (or is, or would be) total, and requires
something other than knowledge alone to overcome it, to put it behind us. And if
someone were to say that it is "no longer a problem" for usthat is, that our lack
of a biological niche, our deficit of instinct, is no longer a problem for us (so that
we no longer have any need of myth) this would amount to the assertion that we
are definitively free of our biological origins, which is a proposition that we can
hardly expect to be able to demonstrate.
This account of the function of myth is not only persuasive in itself, as
Blumenberg expounds and illustrates it, but also has the crucial advantage over
the schema of the step forward "from mythos to logos" that it does not assume
the operation of an overall goal in the history of human consciousnessthe end
state of the scientific rationality that we now enjoy. Instead of such a teleology,
which has only escaped the criticism of the modern empiricist and positivist
critics of teleology (as it escapes Cassirer's) because it is buried so deeply in
their own thinking, Blumenberg proposes an interpretation of human "symbolic
forms" as factors that all contribute, simultaneously, to the single comprehensive
endeavor of making human existence possible by

 Page xii

overcoming the problem of our biological nonadaption, our constitutional deficit

of instinct. The only goal that is operative in this process is that of overcoming
the immediate, all-encompassing problemand that is an endeavor to which man
addresses himself in every possible way at once.
In addition to this 'methodological' advantage, Blumenberg's account yields a
more balanced view of each of the specific problem areasnamely, "primitive"
cultures, psychoanalysis, literature, and Nazismthat I listed above in
summarizing Cassirer. (a) In connection with the relation between "primitive"
and modern cultures, it corrects the ethnocentric implication of the "from mythos
to logos'' schema that there was a stage in the development of human
consciousness in which rationality was largely absent (a "prelogical mentality,"
as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called it). Rationality and myth are both indispensable to
human survival, from the start. (Presumably this need not prevent the balance
between our respective needs for them from shifting, to the extent that, through
experience and knowledge, we achieve a command of reality that makes its
possible "absolutism" a less pressing concern. On the other hand, it is also
possible that experience of inherent limits to such a command could intensify the
relevance of Angst once more.) (b) As in the history of the species, so also in the
development of individuals there is probably no point of demarcation at which
rationality takes over (or should take over) completely from more 'childish,'
'prerational' modes of thought involving, for example, fantasy. "Flight behind an
image"a phrase used by Goethe to describe one of his own characteristic
procedures, which Blumenberg examines in detail in part IV of this bookmay be
a necessary recourse at any age in the face of issues that rationality cannot yet, or
perhaps can never, handle. An example of the latter may be the issue of self-
knowledge and identity, in which the element ofirreducibly "brute"inheritance
may be, for the individual, an "absolute reality" in the sense that a conceptual
grasp of it does not even potentially enable him to change it. In this case, it may
be that the quasi-mythical patterns that Freud found in dreams and elsewhere can
partake of the same functional legitimacy as Goethe's "images," though this does
not entail regarding them as eternal, cosmic 'givens' in the manner of, for
example, Jung. Nor does it mean that the functioning of the images must be (or
even can be) naive and unreflected. As Blumenberg says, we only know myth in
and through our "work on" itan expression

 Page xiii

that intentionally avoids distinguishing between imaginative and conceptual-

analytical "work." Blumenberg argues that right from the beginning of our
recorded tradition, our dealings with myth have been self-conscious,
'commenting on' it (as in Homer's ironical humor about the gods) as well as
handing it on. But this need not prevent its images from functioning in our lives,
in circumstances where nothing else will serve. (c) What I have just been saying
makes it clear that, from Blumenberg's perspective, the literary treatment of
myth cannot be segregated as a 'merely aesthetic' matter with no bearing on the
practical business of life. Neither, on the other hand, will literature derive all of
its punch from a 'given' stock of mythical images that it receives from preliterate
strata of consciousness or history, and merely repackages. Some of the
interesting active relations between myth and literature that become possible in
this new perspective are outlined in sections 6 and 7, below. (d) Finally, if myth
does not 'precede' (and is not rendered obsolete by) rationality, then the Nazis'
apparent use of myth ceases to be the great inexplicable reversion that it seemed
to Cassirer, though again it need not be a simple continuation, either. (This can
hardly be the type of myth that is indispensable to human survival.) In this type
of case especially, if myth does not 'belong to' a past epoch, it is all the more
important to define and understand what real myth is, and to distinguish it from
other nonrational phenomena, including dogma, ideology, and pseudomyths.
Let us return to the fundamental schema. It should not be assumed that
Blumenberg's critique of the notion of the historical passage "from mythos to
logos" means that there are no important developments in human consciousness
that can be localized as subsequent to 'the beginnings.' There are, literally,
"epoch-making" developments, such as the emergence of the category of dogma,
in the course of the development of monotheistic religion, or the emergence of
modern "human self-assertion," as Blumenberg calls it, with its concepts of the
self, matter, method, and progress. (The former is examined in part II, chapter 1,
of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and in part II, chapters 2 and 3, of the
present book; the later is the main subject of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.)
But an epoch is not a 'stage' on the way to another one, or a goal toward which
previous epochs were directed, the attainment of which makes them 'obsolete.'
There is no ladder of epochs (each perhaps with a corresponding "symbolic
form") such as philosophers of history since the eighteenth century have

 Page xiv

wanted to establish. And this applies equally to the 'superepochs' of myth and
logos that have been, as it were, the last recourse of teleological philosophy of
history. The unity of human history is not that of a teleological sequence but that
of the working through of solutions to one original all-encompassing problem,
the problem of the "absolutism of reality." The solutionsthe "symbolic forms"
are not ultimately identical with one another (as Romantics would like myth and
rationality, poetry and physics, to be), but neither are they in competition with
one another. They perform different, equally essential functions in dealing with
man's fundamental problem.

3
The Philosophical Anthropology Underlying Blumenberg's Alternative to the
Enlightenment Conception
Before proceeding to Blumenberg's alternative to the (broadly) Romantic
conception of the nature and process of myth itself, I want to examine from
another point of view the "philosophical anthropology" that I outlined in the
previous section, and to relate it to the basic concepts of The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age.
Readers will be struck, on the first page of Work on Myth, by Blumenberg's
comparison of his idea of the "absolutism of reality" to "the old status naturalis
of philosophical theories of culture and the state." He does not elaborate on the
comparison in this book, but in a paper entitled "Anthropology's Approach to
Rhetoric's Orientation to Action," first published in 1971, he provides relevant
detail on the subject and at the same time illuminates the difference between his
and Cassirer's concepts of "nature." Blumenberg is criticizing Cassirer for not
trying to explain why the "symbolic forms'' are posited, leaving us to assume
instead that man, as the animal symbolicum, simply expresses his 'nature' in
them, as his (apparently) 'free' creations. "But," Blumenberg objects,
to the extent that philosophy is a process of dismantling things that are taken for granted, a
'philosophical' anthropology has to address the question whether man's physical existence is not
itself a result that follows from the accomplishments that are ascribed to him as belonging to his
'nature.' The first proposition of a philosophical anthropology would then be: It cannot be taken for
granted that man is able to exist. The prototype for such a line of thought can be found in the
modern theory of the social contract that deduces the necessity

 Page xv

of establishing man's 'civil' [bürgerlich: i.e., political as opposed to natural] condition from its
finding that his 'natural' condition contradicts the conditions of the possibility of physical existence.
For Hobbes the state is the first artifact, which does not enrich (in the direction of a 'world of
culture') the environment in which man lives, but rather eliminates its lethal antagonism [the "war
of all against all"]. The philosophical significance of this theory is not primarily that it explains the
appearance of an institution like the state (still less that it explains the appearance of the
absolutist state), but rather that it converts the supposed definition of man's nature as that of a
zoon politikon ["political animal"Aristotle] into a functional description. I see no other
scientific course for an anthropology except, in an analogous manner, to destroy [or "deconstruct":
destruieren] what is supposedly 'natural' and convict it of its 'artificiality' in the functional
system of the elementary human accomplishment called 'life.' f

Evidently, then, the status naturalis to which Blumenberg compares the

"absolutism of reality" is not primarily Locke's or Rousseau's "state of nature,"
for example, but rather Hobbes'sa condition that, while it is 'natural' in the sense
of being animal-like ("brutish," as Hobbes put it), contradicts man's natural
desire for survival, so thatlike the ''absolutism of reality" it cannot last. But,
fleeting though it is (or was, or would have been), it is this state that explains
Hobbesian man's willingness to enter the "contract" that creates a sovereign who
will (supposedly) ensure his survival. Similarly, Blumenbergian man creates his
"symbolic forms" in order to overcome his equally self-contradictory natural
state as a creature lacking the instincts to fit it into a "niche" in nature of the kind
that every other (surviving) creature has. And while these symbolic forms are
'natural' in the sense that they are (or are supposed to be) common to all men
whom we will ever encounter, so that we habitually think of them as aspects of
'human nature,' they are 'artificial' in the more fundamental sense that we can
only understand why they exist by interpreting them, not as 'givens,' but as
solutions to an antecedent problem and by interpreting human life, not as a result
of a good fit between man's instincts and his environment, but rather as the
evidence of an accomplishmentas far as we know, a unique accomplishmentthat
sets man apart from other species.
Thus man's uniqueness is not in something that he is (in his "essence" or nature,
as, for example, the zoon politikon or the animal symbolicum)

 Page xvi

but in what he does in order to deal with the problem of what he isin order to
make himself biologically viable. In this case, as Blumenberg says, it makes
sense to try to interpret each of man's characteristic expressions in terms of its
contribution toits "function" withinthis comprehensive undertaking. And
Blumenberg does so with myth, with (as it seems to me) striking results, in this
book.
To assess this philosophical anthropology as thoroughly as it deservesin relation
to the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition in which Cassirer's philosophy of man still
stands; to the modern social contract thinkers, a tradition with which it has sharp
differences as well as similarities (Hobbes, for example had no use for myth,
except perhaps as a source of allegorical illustrations of rational truths); to the
tortures of modern thought about man induced by modern science and
epistemology, since Descartes; and to other recent efforts to deal with these
matters gwould take much more space than I have here. What I do want to do,
before going on to myth itself, is to comment briefly on the relation between this
model and the central ideas of Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
The concept that links the two books at the most fundamental level is that of
function. We can appreciate how central this concept is to the explanatory
accomplishment of the model of the "absolutism of reality" by zeroing in more
closely on just what that explanatory accomplishment is.
Blumenberg (like the social contract thinkers before him) repeatedly expresses
skepticism about the possibility of ever knowing how his subject (here, myths;
there, the state, or society) in fact originated"Here the rule is: Ignorabimus [We
will not know]."h He mentions many of the popular theories of the origin of
myths (the astronomical school; the ritual or history-of-religion approach;
Freud's and Jung's psychoanalytical theories) and discusses some of them
(Freud's, in particular) at considerable length, but in each case he makes it clear
that his interest is primarily in the attitude of the theoretician in question (as an
instance of a type of "work on myth"), and that he doubts whether any rationally
defensible decision between the alternative theories will ever be possible. As the
text on the dust jacket of the original German edition (which, by its style, is
dearly the work of the author) says, "The book proceeds from the cautious
assumption that one may learn to see more if one leaves the great questions
alone, without disdaining them. For that reason, the problem of the origin

 Page xvii

of mythswhich has been the subject of many futile effortsis bracketed out, as is
their association with the unconscious (as a disguised form of the old 'innate
ideas')."
But isn't the model of myth as a means of overcoming the "absolutism of reality"
a theory of the origin of myth? How can Blumenberg claim that he is bracketing
out this question when he devotes his first chapter to a dramatically new answer
to it? Obviously, in a sense the "absolutism of reality" model is such an answer,
but not in the same way as the other theories we are familiar with. Those theories
are, in general, mutually incompatible. Myths that reflect the dynamics of our
internal psychic organization, or our childhood traumas, cannot at the same time
embody an analysis of astronomical and calendrical regularities, or reflect a
combination of rituals stemming from cults that were superimposed on one
another as a result of some long-forgotten conquest. Sources of these kinds are
simply too heterogeneous to be compatible as explanations of the same myths.
But none of them is necessarily incompatible with the "absolutism of reality"
model. This model says nothing about the source of the contents of myths; it
only says that their ultimate function, wherever their contents may come from, is
to put behind us the Angst that would be inspired by an overpowering reality.
You might say that it is a theory of the origin of myth (in the singular), rather
than of myths (in the plural). It describes the one vital accomplishment of all
myths, as opposed to the possible additional specific accomplishments of
individual myths. What is remarkable, though, is how the very specific quality of
each of the many individual myths that Blumenberg discusses in the bookfrom
Medusa through Abraham and Isaac to Faustseems to be illuminated by this
'functional' approach in a way that few of them have been by the popular
theories of 'the origins.' It seems that when one looks for the ultimate human
function of myth, one may indeed "see more'' than when one merely sees myth
as a reflection of other realities in and around man.
In any case, it is interesting to observe that this distinction between content (or
"substance") and function is also a key one in Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the
Modern Age. i A central problem in that book was to explain how innocent
modern ideas like that of cooperative human progress could have been inflated
into irrational conceptions like that of an inevitable progress supposedly present
in history as a whole. To explain processes of this sort, Blumenberg
hypothesized a structure

 Page xviii

of formally identical "positions" in human consciousness, a structure that

endures through changes of epoch (though not necessarily forever) and that we
feel compelled to fill (to "reoccupy") with whatever content is available in a new
epoch. j In the case of "progress," the "position'' established by the story of God's
dealings with the world (from Creation to Last Judgment)the position of a
knowledge of the pattern of history as a wholewas "reoccupied," Blumenberg
argued, by the new idea of progress, with the result that that idea was distorted,
almost beyond recognition, in the way we are familiar with from the famous
philosophies of history. Contrary to the "secularization" theory, which saw in
those philosophies a constant "substance" (namely, eschatology) in "secularized"
form, Blumenberg saw a legitimate new idea being forced into a constant,
inherited function. And he applied this model of functional "positions" to many
other phenomena as well, in the transition from the ancient to the medieval as
well as from the medieval to the modern epoch.
The fundamental category of explanation has thus remained the same, but its
application in the new book yields a distinctly different picture from the one that
we know from the first book. In the case of myth, unlike that of 'progress,' for
example, it appears that its function may be not only a neglected and
illuminating aspect but also the only knowable aspect that it possesses for usto
the extent that the great diversity of (and the contradictions between) the
accounts of the derivation of its "substance" that have been proposed inclines us
toward the skepticism about such accounts that Blumenberg advocates.
Consequently, myth cannot appear, as in the earlier model, as a distorted form of
something else that has been forced to perform a function that does not
authentically belong to it. There can be no implication, such as seemed clearly
present in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, that by distinguishing the
authentic content from the superimposed function we can clarify the real
commitments of an age (whether our own or a previous one). Myth's function is
its 'true reality,' or as near as we can ever expect to get to such a reality.
Nor is it only that myth originates in preliterate, undocumented times, into which
we can only extrapolate backward in the manner of the social contract theorists,
that prevents us from distinguishing its 'reality' from its function. If Blumenherg
is right to abandon the idea of an epoch-making step forward "from mythos to
logos," then myths differ from the phenomena that he analyzed in The Legitimacy

 Page xix

of the Modern Age by not "belonging to" an epoch at all: by being, as it were,
underlying "constants" in our entire tradition. This is possible because the
function of myth relates not to a framework of mental "positions," which
expands (and sometimes contracts) in the course of history, but to a single, all-
encompassing human achievementthe "elementary human accomplishment'' of
life. This new philosophical anthropology puts the epochs of our tradition into an
entirely new perspective, which contrasts sharply with the earlier book's more
narrowly focused "historicism," with its scrupulous attention to each epoch's
independent claims and premises and its abstention from broad, "metaphysical"
categories. Not that that scrupulous attention is missing here: None of the
distinctions drawn in the earlier book has been obscured, and much fine detail
has been added. But the model of life as the elementary human accomplishment
and the functional explanation of all of man's "symbolic forms" subsumes the
earlier model of the structure of "positions" so decisively, and unifies the
phenomena of human history and consciousness so radically, that it requires an
effort to remember that we are still, fundamentally, in the realm of empirical
historical-hermeneutic science here, rather than metaphysics. A thorough
analysis of the relation between the basic ideas of the two books would be a
fascinating and a rewarding project, but is more than I can attempt here.

4
A Non-"Enlightenment" Alternative to the Romantic Conception of Myth: The
"Darwinism of Words"
After thus providing an alternative to our dominant, 'Enlightenment" conception
of the relation between myth and scientific rationality, Blumenberg presents a
theory that provides an alternative to our dominant conception of the nature and
process of myth itself. The Enlightenment and those who adhere to its attitudes
generally do not take myth seriously enough to attempt a theory of it, so it turns
out that many (if not all) of the prominent theories of myth have (whether
consciously or not) a good deal in common with Romanticism. German
Romantic theoreticians like Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel, who were
impressed by the survival of the Greek, Hindu, Norse, and Celtic mythsdespite
the introduction, in the meantime, of writing, monotheistic religion, and
'enlightenment'and by the apparent ubiquity of myth in the world's cultures, saw
myth as a kind of primeval,

 Page xx

"original" endowment of, if not a revelation granted to, mankind. The modern
disciplines that study myth, including literary studies, anthropology, and
psychology, may not use such suggestive language, but they do rely on a similar
fundamental schema when they study the way a given "stock" of myths is ''used"
in literature; or the way certain universal "structures" may underlie the diversity
of myths in different cultures; or the way certain universal experiences in the
childhood of the individual or of mankind function in the unconscious and
consequently in mythin every case assuming that the "pregnance" (in the Gestalt
psychologists' sense), k the sharp definition and the compelling power of the
mythical motif, is fully present from the beginning, that myth itself has no
history. In contrast to this, Blumenberg reminds us that the mature mythology
that we know from Homer, Hesiod, the Ramayana, from our informants in
"primitive" cultures, and so on, must be imagined as the product of thousands of
years of oral storytelling, in the course of which vastly greater quantifies of
stories, figures, and variations on earlier stories and figures were tested on
audiences upon whose active approval the storyteller's success, perhaps even his
livelihood, dependedand that as a result of such "testing" most of these were
discarded as not having the impact that the surviving material has. In other
words, the stock of myth that has come down to us is the product, not of a
reverent process of handing down (such as comes into play with written texts,
and above all with Scriptures), but rather of an unsparing process of "natural
selection," which Blumenberg in fact entitles the "Darwinism of words." In this
process the compelling power of mythical material was brought out, was
"optimized," by the combined "work" (productive and destructive) of storytellers
and their audiences. And it is this process, rather than any innate and original
human endowment, that explains the 'pregnance' and the durability of what has
survived it. Like evolution, the genesis of myths is not something that We can
observe directly; in fact, the epistemological situation is even worse with them,
in that we have no 'fossils' illustrating stages in that genesis. But, also as in
evolution, if we allow this difficulty to prevent us from constructing a
hypothetical mechanism, we will be left with either total ignorance or an
assumption of simultaneous creation or (essentially Platonic) preformation.
"Selection" is the only theory that gives the understanding a handle on an actual
process, hypothetical though it will no doubt always remain.

 Page xxi

It is certainly a novel idea as applied to myth. Scholars who study myth in oral
cultures have not speculated much on any diachronic process by which its
patterns may have developed. They have, of course, initially been concerned
with the 'simultaneous' array of myths, which is what the evidence confronts
them with directly; and their well-known genetic hypotheses have all been in
terms of extramythical realities (astronomical, psychological, ritual, or whatever)
thought to be 'reflected' in this array. Rather than a process of development, then,
taking place over time, their theories have presented an essentially static
pictureconsistent, as I said, with the basic Romantic schema according to which
each myth is assumed always to have had the 'pregnance' that it exhibits now.
Those scholars, on the other hand, such as Milrnan Parry and A. B. Lord, who
have studied the mechanisms by which "oral literature" is made
transmissiblewhich must ultimately have a great deal to do with the process of
increasing 'pregnance,' through the interaction of "singers" and audiences, that
Blumenberg hypothesizeshave in fact been more struck by the sheer survival of
an oral epic, as such, than by the question of how its contents reached the level
of power and memorability that they exhibit when they reach us; so that again
their models have been essentially static, rather than dynamic.
Nor is there a close relationship between Blumenberg's "Darwinism of words"
and previous applications or the idea of evolution within the sphere of human
history. Unlike the "social Darwinism" of Darwin's Descent of Man and other
turn-of-the-century writings, the "Darwinism of words" does not describe the
survival or "selection" of human individuals or populations. And more recent
attempts to discern an evolutionary process among social systems l do not often
get into clear focus the relation between the operation of evolution on physical
bodies and its operation on cultural constructs, as Blumenberg does in the
following formulation (which also explains why ''social Darwinism" does not
describe man's experience as a whole):
The organic system resulting from the mechanism of evolution becomes 'man' by evading the
pressure of that mechanism, which it does by setting against it something like a phantom body. This
is the sphere of his culture, his institutionsand also his myths. . . . The conditions of selection no
longer reach and have an effect upon man as a physical system to the extent that he has
learned to subject his artifacts and instruments,

 Page xxii

instead of himself, to the process of adaptation. . . . It is to these, rather than to their

producer, that the 'survival of the fittest' applies. m

This striking point ties in neatly with Blumenberg's philosophical anthropology,

where culture appeared as man's unique solution to his biological predicament of
lacking instincts to fit him into an ecological niche. Now we see that this
"solution" protects usagain uniquelyfrom the operation of the normal biological
process of selection, by undergoing a similar process in our stead.
From the same passage from which I have just been quoting, we learn that
"theory and technology" are among the cultural phenomena that are subjected to
this process of selection. It is probably most obvious in this case how such
selection can servevia the development of the "forces of production" and of
capacities for prediction and preventionto protect human beings from the direct
operation of Darwinian selection on themselves. Blumenberg asserts, in
factwhile making the necessary reservations about ''inconsistencies in the system
of the objectifications produced by selection . . . which impair the overall
result"that "by this criterion there has been and there is objective progress. . . .
History, whatever else it may be, is also a process of optimization."n And this
"objective progress" occurs not only in theory (i.e., in science) and in
technology, or in them and, by an odd combination, in myth as well, but also in
the whole sphere of "modes of behavior and thought structures" that Blumenberg
summarizes under the term institutions.
The term institution is used here in the special sense given it by the recently
deceased German philosopher-anthropologist Arnold Gehlen.o It designates a
mode of behavior or thought structure that has not been rationally or
purposefully constructed (as "institutions," in one common sense, are thought of
as being or having been), but rather is simply inherited and taken for granted,
without any explicit justification, as "the way we do things" or the way we think.
(One major sense of the Latin root, institutio "custom," expresses this idea.)
Blumenberg contrasts the rich variety of 'institutions'social, cultural, and
mythicalthat have been produced by millenniums of "selection" with the
(comparatively, at least) unfulfilled promises of Romanticism's favorite agency
of production: the imagination.
When it was announced from the walls during May 1968 in Paris that the imagination should and
now would come to power, it was im-

 Page xxiii
mediately clear to the late grandchildren of aesthetic Idealism that this guaranteed that everything
would become different and thus better. No one thought they needed to askno one would have been
permitted to askwhat the imagination had to offer, what it had ever offered. We can confidently
invert Baudelaire's statement that the imagination created the world, asserting that it could never
have accomplished it. . . . The example of the literary genre of 'utopia,' with its (reluctantly
admitted) poverty, demonstrates what the imagination's capacity to pursue and break through the
opening created by negation really amounts to. . . . No imagination could have invented what
ethnology and cultural anthropology have collected in the way of regulations of existence, world
interpretations, forms of life, classifications, ornaments, and insignia. All of this is the product of a
process of selection that has been at work for a long time. . . . The Neptunism of selection always
has a head start, in relation to the Vulcanism that Idealist aesthetics expects of the imagination, as a
result of having shaped the latter's elementary possibilities. p

This critique of the claims made for the human imagination by a certain kind of
radicalism is a valuable complement to Blumenberg's earlier criticism of the idea
of myth as an original human endowment or revelation. For, despite the apparent
conflict between the two ideas as possible explanations of myth (original
'revelation' versus original 'poetry'), they are in fact both cornerstones of
Romanticism, which probably secretly hopes, by uniting them, to unite myth
with poetry, the 'origins' with the present, and 'reality' with the imaginationthus
overcoming the aggravating contingency of our experience of history. By
providing an alternative account of the phenomena of myth and art, of the
durability of inherited cultures, and of cultural diversity, that give each of these
key Romantic ideas their plausibility, the "Darwinism of words" helps to
overcome, from the Romantic side, the Enlightenment-versus-Romantic
antinomy of attitudes that is so pervasive in our thinkingjust as the "absolutism
of reality" model helps to overcome it from the side of the Enlightenment.

5
Why This Theory Is Not Obseurantist or Antirational
One may nevertheless wonder whether, despite the "objective progress" that he
credits it with producing, Blumenberg's "Darwinism of words" does not really
imply a new kind of obscurantist traditionalism.

 Page xxiv

If myths and other "institutions" are the products of so many ages of optimizing
"selection," and if the imagination is unable to compete with them by projecting
new patterns having a comparable power, does this not mean that traditional
waysor, at any rate, whatever ways are generated by the process of "selection,"
as opposed to any conscious and purposive constructive effort on our partare
always the best ways? Arnold Gehlen certainly conveyed the impression that this
was his viewthat the modern dismantling of traditional customs and attitudes,
while perhaps inevitable, was overall a loss without a corresponding gain. In
Blumenberg's case, if the "objective progress'' that does occur comes about, as it
were, behind our backs, unintentionally, as a result of a blind process of
"selection," it would seem that the only active role that might be left to
rationality would be that of generating theories or techniques (whose fate would
be decided not by rationality itself but by "selection"), while in the area of
human interrelations it might have no role at all. We would be facing perhaps the
most sophisticated form of anti-Enlightenment obscurantism yet seen. Is this
actually what Blumenberg is arguing for?
Before answering this question, it may be well to extend it by raising an even
broader question about theories that advocate tolerance of myth, a question that
is seldom raised in humanistic discussions of the subject but that certainly ought
to be faced. One way to bring this question into focus is to compare Cassirer's
earlier and later books on myth. In the 1920s Cassirer followed the Romantics
and the ethnologists a long way toward granting myth equal dignity with
rationality and seeking to understand it sympathetically, "from inside," as a
coherent way of being in the worldeven though he never really abandoned the
Enlightenment philosophy of history according to which myth is ultimately, and
necessarily, replaced by logos. In The Myth of the State (1946), on the other
hand, the emphasis is ultimately very much on this philosophy of history, and on
the awful anomaly by whichin the years since Cassirer's first work on this
subjectthe Nazis had apparently resurrected myth in full seriousness, outside the
harmless domain of literature, and with dreadful results for millions of people.
Myth was now something that "lurks in the dark and waits for its hour and
opportunity," which arrives when an apparently rational social organization is
weakened and "no longer able to combat the demonic mythical powers." q

 Page xxv

Is this an appropriate description of what happened in Germany in the 1920s and

1930s? It is easy to see how it would seem so to one whose life and world were
completely disrupted by the events of the period. And even in retrospect, it often
seems as though no amount of economic, social, or political analysis of
conditions in Germany prior to the Nazi takeover quite suffices to explain it or
what followed it. Certainly everyone would agree that "irrational" factors of
some sort played a major role.
But can such factors properly be identified with "myth"? Cassirer thought the
distinctive characteristic of what he called the Nazi myths was that unlike
traditional myths, they were "manufactured," "myth made according to plan.'' r
Clearly these were not myths in the sense that Romanticism understood
mytheither as inherited and primordial or as products of the free, poetic
imagination. But Cassirer, attracted though he was to the Romantic theory of
myth (and, unlike quite a few writers, he refused to hold the Romantics
responsible for the later "rehabilitation and glorification of myth in modem
politics"),s did not really believe in that theory. And his own writings on myth
were, ultimately, more eclectic and descriptive than they were sharply definitive.
The result was that, while he had no trouble recognizing Nazi "science" and
"philosophy" as bogus, he had no criterion by which to categorize their "myths"
as equally bogus. So, when he sought to put his finger on what had made the
phenomenon of Nazism possible, "myth" was (as it has been for many others) a
tempting candidate. Seemingly more concrete than sheer "irrationality," but
setting up a sharper contrast to rationality than is present in such familiar
phenomena as ideology, propaganda, uneven historical development, or the state
(whose relation to myth Cassirer did not manage to clarify), "myth" was a
category that seemed to express the apocalyptic quality of what Nazism had
brought about.
His analysis found widespread acceptance. Indeed, many readers must have
found it rather unsurprising. For (and this is what I wanted to bring out with this
digression) there is a very familiar "commonsense" version of rationalism that
follows Cassirer's example here in categorizing whatever is resistant to
rationality as "myth," much as Descartes once spoke of "prejudice," or Bacon of
"idols,"the only difference being that "myth" lends itself more readily to
demonization than prejudice or "idols" didno doubt because, since an epoch of
our past history is associated with it, its 'reappearance' has the dan-

 Page xxvi

gerous flavor of atavism. In periods when rationality seems especially

threatened, it is easy to picture myth as a sort of Manichean antagonist, which
rationality must always combat. To the extent that rationality is in an ongoing
crisis, such a view will be even more persuasive.
And yet it is itself quite mythical in character. The idea of a force or agency that
is antagonistic to rationality has the narrative character that is natural to a
confrontation of hypostatized 'powers.' This explains Cassirer's use of lurid
metaphors (myth "lurks in the dark," and so on) and his failure to examine the
supposed confrontation of myth and rationality concretely. Indeed, it explains
the way we all keep this idea 'in the back of our minds,' as a sort of
unacknowledged myth of last resort.
If the demonization of myth is precisely thata mythicization of the difference
between myth and rationalitythen the other side of the coin is that myths, in the
narrower sense of the pregnant stories and images that we inherit from a
preliterate past, are in fact different from the emotionally loaded images and
slogans of modern racism, charismatic leadership, and so on. What exactly is the
difference? The distinctive quality of genuine myths, which the modem
"manufactured" oneshowever great their emotional appeal may bemust always
lack, is the 'significance' (see part I, chapter 3) or 'pregnance' that is produced by
the process of "selection," through millenniums of storytelling, that Blumenberg
entities the "Darwinism of words." This quality cannot be reproduced by ''new
myths," whether they are benevolently or diabolically constructed. When Nazi
"philosophers" talked about "the myth of the twentieth century" and the like, we
have to understand that they were attempting, illegitimately, to appropriate the
dignity of myth, just as (often at the same time) they illegitimately invoked the
dignity of science for their racist doctrines. If we can keep this fact in focus, we
may even be able to invoke genuine myth on 'our side' in the struggle against
irrational doctrines and movements, as Thomas Mann, for example, tried to do.
Certainly our modest capacity for rationality can use all the help it can get.
Indeed, a certain modesty on the part of rationality may be the most important
moral of this whole story, t If Cassirer had not followed most of his preceptors,
since the seventeenth century, in assuming that the appearance of rationality in
the form of philosophy and science removed any need for myth, he might have
been less surprised at the uneven development of effective rationality in his
homelandat

 Page xxvii

what Blumenberg has described as "the striking nonsimultaneities in what is

chronologically simultaneous . . . the fundamental delay of enlightenment." u A
rationality that is supposed to meet man's every need can easily disappoint its
advocates as well as those to whom it is advocated. It seems likely that it is an
unspoken disappointment of this sort that explains the presence in our minds of
the "myth of last resort" that I have been discussing, which blames the failures of
rationality on a dangerous and implacable opponent called ''myth."
Having said this much about the tendency to set myth up as the great bogeymana
tendency that is in the back of enough minds to need to be confrontedI will now
return to the previous question of whether the "Darwinism of words" implies (if
not a pact with the devil, at least) an obscurantist traditionalism,v If a "selection"
process among mental constructs produces not only striking stories and figures
but, more generally, valuable "institutions," with the variety and persuasiveness
of which the mere imagination of individuals cannot compete, does this mean
that conscious and intentional departures from traditional ways are, in general,
unjustified? What is the role of rationality in such a situationif it has any role at
all? Once again, myth seems to threaten to be incompatible with rationality.
The passage in which Blumenberg confronts this issue is one of the most
fascinating passages in the book. The key sentences are these: "What the heading
of 'institutions' covers is, above all, a distribution of burdens of proof. Where an
institution exists, the question of its rational foundation is not, of itself, urgent,
and the burden of proof always lies on the person who objects to the
arrangement that it carries with it."w The basis of this presumption in favor of
the institution is, of course, that, like a product of organic evolution, it is not
only "something that has at least proved itself over long periods of time, that has
been refined as the product of countless rounds of selection, but also something
that did not at least immediately lead into fatal dead ends, that did not operate as
a liability detracting from success in life."
But how did the distribution of "burdens of proof" get involved here? Shouldn't
the "burden" be on rationality in generalon science, in the widest senseto
establish rational modes of behavior and thought structures, of which individuals
who want to be rational can avail themselves? How is it that "the person who
objects" suddenly carries all the onus of responsibility here?

 Page xxviii

The answer is twofold. First, as Blumenberg writes, "enlightenment"because it

rejects dogma, revelation, and 'authority' in general as sources of justified
belief"allows thought to be legitimated only by the fact that everyone does it
himself and for himself. . . . " That is, it is not good enough to accept modes of
behavior or thought structures as endorsed by Science, even if it were possible
for Science to produce a finished set of such modes and structures for us to
adopt. We are only rational if, as far as possible, we think through for ourselves
the reasons for what we do and think. It is only the fact that people in general do
that, or can do that, that gives science the authority it has in our culture as the
sum (potentially, despite all the distortions due to inevitable specialization,
professionalization, and so on) of the active rationality of all of us.
But, second, it is manifestly not possible for each person to work out a rational
justification, from scratch, of every mode of behavior or thought structure that he
needs to employ in order to live his actual life. Even for our collective
rationality, as science, we now generally recognize that such an
undertakingthough we are engaged in itis not one that can be completed (as
Descartes, for example, seems to have thought it could be). All the more so for
each of us individually.
So the "meager finitude of the life that the thinker-for-himself has disposition
over" means that he simply has to take some things for granted. Thoroughly and
explicitly rational "decision-making" is not possible in every case. And that, of
course, is where "institutions" come in. Blumenberg acknowledges the danger
that goes along with them: "Every economy of ideas for which no rational
foundation is given becomes suspect when it presents itself as the demand for
submission to something for which no rational foundation can be given, and thus
becomes the center of new anxieties''a result that would contradict the inherent
purpose of myth (namely, the overcoming of the ultimate anxiety caused by the
"absolutism of reality"), but is very possible if the relation of myth (and of
"institutions" in general) to rationality is not clearly understood. On the other
hand, there is also reason to distrust rationality, which
is all too ready to engage in destruction when it fails to recognize the rationality of things for which
no rational foundation is given and believes that it can afford to allow itself to get carried away by
the process of establishing rational foundations. Descartes thought that

 Page xxix
the best way to build dries rationally was to begin by razing the old cities. Not even World War II
yielded proof of this prospect for rationality, There are moments in which the outcomes of centuries
and millenniums are thoughtlessly sacrificed. What had been held fast and passed on by a loyalty
shielded from all reflection becomes a source of offense and is gotten rid of. But one does not have
to be conservative to see that the demand for 'critical' destruction and then for a final rational
foundation leads to burdens of proof that, if they were really accepted and undertaken with the
seriousness with which they are asserted and demanded, would no longer leave any room for what
is supposed to be gained in the process. . . . So the selection of constants over long periods of time
is in fact a condition of the possibility of running the risks of 'trial and error' in parts of one's
behavior. . . .

This is not a "counsel of despair" for rationality. It is simply the rational way to
deal with the antinomy between the endless nature of the process of rational
inquiry and the finite nature of our lives, which makes it "rational not to be
rational to the utmost extent," and to want to see good arguments for abandoning
practices that, even if the reasons for them are not obvious, have so far 'stood the
test of time.'
At the same time, Blumenberg really is open to such arguments. Unlike Hobbes
and Gehlen, who are both persuaded that the only rational thing to do is submit
to an inherited something that they believe serves to solve man's fundamental
problem (to the "sovereign," or to primordial human "institutions"), x
Blumenberg is quite prepared to be persuaded that a particular human
''institution" is not at present functional. But the burden of proof is, as we said,
on the critic, not on the "institution" and those who abide by it.
When this account of the matter is understood, it becomes dear that this book is
not a Romantic brief for myth and tradition against rationality and
Enlightenment, any more than it is the reverse of that. Instead, it presents a
dearly worked-out proposal for overcoming that unnecessary and debilitating
conflict in our understanding of ourselves and our history.

6
Some Concrete Applications
The book contains a great deal more than the philosophical analysis I have
sketched. It contains a detailed discussion of monotheism and

 Page xxx

the category of dogma as they emerge from and differentiate themselves from
polytheism and mytha discussion that casts new light on the Bible, on
Gnosticism (a historically crucial intermediate case), on Christianity, and on
'nonreligious' phenomena such as utopianism and what Sorel called social myths.
If the tenets of faith are not "mere myth," as our 'Manichaean' myth of the
agency antagonistic to rationality would describe them, and if it is not helpful to
call them "mere" dogma, either, what exactly are they? And what is the
quasireligious attitude that is shared by adherents of such "invisible gods" y as
the Revolution, or Being? Blumenberg brings out the outlines of a 'dogmatic'
attitude to (what it regards as the one, all-important) truth, an attitude that he
does not present as a bugaboo, but as one of a small number of very persuasive
attitudes to reality and truth that we are acquainted with. Christians (like
utopians and others) may perhaps feel that his analysis is mistaken, but they will
have to admit that few philosophers who are not professing Christians have
treated Christianity as seriously and as thoughtfully as Blumenberg does in this
book and in his two previous major works.
Finally, the book examines many detailed examples of the "work on myth" that
continues in modem literature. One of the remarkable facts brought out in this
connection is that the durability of individual myths (which led Romanticism to
think of them as atemporal, primeval) is not incompatible with their acquiring
wholly new and unsuspected aspects.
Time does not wear away instances of pregnance; it brings things out in themthough one may not
add that these things were 'in them' all along. That holds, in the case of myth, least of all for
extensions. When Albert Camus said of Sisyphus that one should imagine him as being happy, the
change of 'sign' was an increase in the visibility of the myth's potential. When Paul Valéry
'corrected' the Faust story by suggesting that the only way we could picture the one who had once
been tempted, now, was as himself tempting Mephistopheles, something became perceptible that
simply could not have been made up and added on, but instead was irresistibly drawing near as the
classical demon figure grew increasingly inferior.z

These examples and many others from our recorded "work on myth" give us
glimpses of the nature of the unrecorded "work of myth" that the hypotheses of
the "absolutism of reality" and the ''Darwinism of

 Page xxxi

words" seek to characterize, and at the same time add to our understanding of the
('postmythical') epochs and authors who produced them.
The second half of the book is an extended case study of "work on myth," the
case being the Prometheus myth, from its earliest recorded appearances, in
Hesiod and Aeschylus, to the twentieth-century versions of Gide and Kafka. In
contrast to the apparently simple recorded history of the myth of Sisyphus, for
example, that of Prometheus presents an incredible variety of aspects and
interpretations in the course of these two and a half millenniums. The one writer
whom Blumenberg singles out for particularly extended treatment in this context
is Goethe, to whom part IV is devoted. Readers familiar with Goethe will not be
surprised at the importance he is given here. Several facts make this natural, if
not inevitable: his historical situation, between the German (and French)
Enlightenment and Romanticism (he joined neither 'party'); his manifestly
contrived and artificial position in society, as court genius in Weimar, which
made the role of ideas in his existence both more crucial and more visible than it
is in most lives; and his combination of aesthetic 'polytheism' and Spinozist
scientific pantheism, that is, of 'mythical' and 'modern' patterns of thought, a
duality that reappears in his combination of imaginative work on myth
(especially the series of revisions of the Prometheus theme, from his youthful
"Prometheus" ode of 1773, to Pandora, in 1808, and beyond it as well) and
conceptual work (documented mainly in his Conversations and his
autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit)both types of work being vital to his
ability to function not only as an artist but also as a human being. Nearly every
German philosopher deals with Goethe in one way or another, often at length;
Cassirer, Karl Löwith, and (in the German "cultural sphere," though not a
German) Georg Lukács are some prominent examples. It is doubtful that any of
them has gotten into the texture of his life and works in anything like the way
Blumenberg does in part IV of this book. At the same time, Blumenberg is able
to bring Goethe's 'world view'including some of its most potent and paradoxical
components, such as the combination of polytheism and Spinozism, the concept
of the ''demonic," the dictum "Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse," and the
relationship to Napoleoninto a focus that appears to be unique in the literature on
Goethe. Thus we see in fascinating detail how an appreciation of work on
"images," as Goethe called them, which sees

 Page xxxii

it neither as a substitute for nor as unrelated to the conceptual work of

rationality, can help us to understand what makes possible the life and
productivity of an individual, just as much as those of the human species.

7
"Bringing Myth to an End," and Human Autonomy
In conclusion I want to examine another concept of Blumenberg's, one that may
at first seem somewhat paradoxical in relation to what I have said so far. aa This
is the idea of "bringing myth to an end," which provides the title of part II,
chapter 4. Seeing this title in this book, one might expect to find a critique of the
Enlightenment idea that myth can be, or has long since been, brought to an end
with the emergence of philosophy or science. But this is not at all what one does
find. The discussion does not center on any of the typical representatives of this
thesis, from Descartes to the present, but rather on the series of versions of the
Faust storyby Lessing, Goethe, Butor, and Valéryand on a series of modern
'philosophers' myths' beginning with what Blumenberg calls the "fundamental
myth of German Idealism" (that is, principally, of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel).
He sees these' authors (both the writers and the philosophers) as attempting to
bring myth to an end by means of itself, rather than by offering a substitute for it.
The Idealists, for whom "I, the eternal subject, am the bearer of this universe,
whose whole existence is nothing but a relationship to me," as Schopenhauer
puts it, are offering a "last myth,'' a final myth that is so comprehensive in its
implications that it leaves no room for other mythical figures about whom other
stories could be told.bb Valéry's Mon Faust, on the other handlike Gide's and
Kafka's versions of Prometheus (which are discussed in part V, chapter 3)is an
attempt to bring myth to an end by the indirect means of bringing one particular
great myth to an end. This would be accomplished by progressively deforming
the story, by ignoring or reversing what had seemed to be its fundamental
patterns (as in the reversal of tempter and tempted in Valéry's Faust), to such an
extent that it is only barely recognizable as the same myth, at which point (if one
were completely successful) the telling and retelling that is the life of the story
would have to come to an end.
What do these things mean? They have to be understood, Blumenberg says, in
relation to a projected goal that is the precise opposite

 Page xxxiii

of the hypothetical initial "absolutism of reality" that gave rise to myth in the
first place. The absolutism of reality is the problem that myth helps to solve. If
myth were brought to an end, we would have arrived at the definitive solution of
that problem, which would presumably mean the subject's complete disposition
over realitythe "absolutism of the subject," in factin which there could no longer
be any need for myth. The Idealists are, in effect, baldly stating that we are in
that situation and, in fact, that we always have been. To make their assertion
plausible, they put it in the form of a story about the subject and 'its' worlda story
that is presented as "philosophy" rather than as myth, so as not to call attention
to what it has in common with the phenomena of human dependency that it is
trying to bring to an end. Valéry, Gide, and Kafka, on the other hand, seek (in
effect) to demonstrate that we have arrived at that situation, by bringing one
great myth to a standstill. For, presumably, if a writer's magic were powerful
enough to ''bring to an end" one of the most stubbornly persistent mental
constructs we possess, one that no individual brought into existence in the first
place, then the writer (or we) would be beyond needing such constructs any
longer.
The challenge of bringing myth to an end in either of these ways is, Blumenberg
says, one of the greatest stimuli to modern literary and philosophical dealings
with myth. In literature, it has produced some of the most fascinating works of
this century. In philosophyGerman philosophy, in particularit has produced a
long and sometimes bewildering sequence of attempts to occupy definitively the
position of the final myth. (To mention only a few of these attempts, after those
of the Idealists: Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence," Max Scheler's story of the God
who becomes himself through the world process, Heidegger's story of Being.) It
does not appear that any of these attempts, either in philosophy or in literature,
has in fact brought myth to an end. As Blumenberg finally says about Kafka's
'eschatological' version of Prometheus: "But what if there were still something to
say, after all?" cc It seems impossible to exclude the possibility that the myth
might after all be capable of further variation, and thus of retellingthat it might,
in fact, go on.
This should not be surprising if we take seriously the parallelism of "absolutism
of reality" and "bringing myth to an end." A definitive solution to the problem of
the absolutism of reality would be just as much a hypothetical "limiting case" as
is the problem to which it

 Page xxxiv

would be addressed. Neither 'end' of the history of myth is something that we

can know has in fact been realized. Both are necessary postulates in
understanding what we have done, and are doing, with myths, but they function
like the "limit" that is approached by a converging function in mathematics: One
never in fact arrives at it. If there is a 'human condition,' then it is between these
two limits.
Does accepting such a 'condition'recognizing that myth cannot be definitively
brought to an end, that we cannot know that we have reached the point where we
no longer need itmean that we have to renounce the Enlightenment's dream of
the autonomous individual who dictates to reality, rather than being dictated to
by it? And does recognizing Fichte's, Hegel's, Nietzsche's, and Heidegger's
stories as a series that is potentially endless, because they attempt something that
cannot be definitively accomplished, require us to conclude that such efforts are
simply in vain?
Blumenberg would answer both of these questions in the negative. The sequence
of would-be 'final' myths that he reviews is not, to him, in vain, because it
reflects an effort that can be better understood and more effectively pursued,
even though never terminated; and such understanding and effort directly serve
the autonomous individual, though likewise never definitively 'establishing' him.
This becomes evident when Blumenberg contrasts two kinds of "final myth":
those (like Nietzsche's myth of eternal recurrence and Hans Jonas's myth of
God's putting the success of his Creation, and his own 'happiness,' irrevocably in
man's hands) that continue Idealism's tendency to make the
subjectmanresponsible for the world as a whole, and those (represented here by
Schopenhauer's myth of reincarnations) that come closer to a "standard for final
myths" that Blumenberg says Schopenhauer established, which is (in
Blumenberg's words) that they should present "the subject's responsibility to
himself and for himself." dd
This latter category is easier to grasp in the light of a recent short essay,
"Reflections on a Proposition of Nietzsche," in which Blumenberg presents what
he regards as an attractive version of the myth of the immortality of the soul.ee
He interprets Nietzsche's note, "That we could bear being immortalthat would be
the highest thing," as suggesting that we should imagine immortality as the
capacity to see all the consequences of one's actions (after as well as before one's
death) and to remember (without benefit of repression or forgetfulness)

 Page xxxv

everything that one did; from which flows the question: Could one, in fact, bear
itto continue eternally as the person who had that past and those consequences?
This myth certainly serves very well to focus one's "responsibility to and for
oneself," while avoiding the 'superman' implication of Idealism and of (most of)
Nietzsche, and of Jonas's myththe implication that man must accept
responsibility for reality as a whole.
So not all 'final myths' are created equal. Some meet the "standard for final
myths" better than others do. But what is the status of this "standard"?
Schopenhauer laid it down by example, in his myth of reincarnations, which
resembles Blumenberg's myth of immortality in the way it focuses on the
individual's responsibility for his own fate (though it has logical difficulties,
which Blumenberg brings out in the final paragraphs of the chapter), but equally
important is the fact that Schopenhauer noted an essential connection between
his myth and Kant's "postulate" of the immortality of the soul. Kant held that
such a postulate was necessary for practical reason (even though it could not be
known to be true, as metaphysicians had thought it could, by theoretical reason)
because it held open the possibility that virtue might be rewarded in the
hereafter, so that our sense of justice would not be contradicted outright by
reality. There was also the possibility, if the "postulate" of immortality was
expanded into a myth of reincarnation, that virtue might be easier to achieveone
might make progress toward (the impossible) complete compliance with the
Categorical Imperativein future lives. Overall, then, the postulate's function was
to ward off moral resignation due to the difficulties encountered by the goodwill
in the real world.
This was just what Schopenhauer's myth of reincarnations was meant to do
(though by the reverse process of threatening punishment in future lives for
suffering that one inflicted during this life). And Blumenberg's myth of
immortality, without bringing in moral criteria, as such, does the same thing.
Thus all three philosophersirrespective of whether they propose "postulates" or
mythsaim to encourage an autonomous individual who takes charge of his own
fate, which is, in fact, the goal of the Enlightenment and of modem "human self-
assertion" (as Blumenberg called it in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age) in
general.
The effectiveness of Kant's doctrine of the postulatesindeed, of his whole
analysis of practical reasonhas been limited by its schematic character,
beginning with the distinction of theoretical from practical

 Page xxxvi

reason: What exactly is a necessary but unknowable "postulate"? How can

theoretical reason be satisfied with action based on premises that it can never
test? Myth, on the other hand, which wears its untestability on its face and does
not claim to be "reason," is at least something whose function we have been
familiar with for a long time.
To those who think that under either name, myth or postulate, immortality is
"obsolete rubbish," Blumenberg replies that "the oppressiveness of contingency,
which lies behind the myth, does not cease." Whether as a result of "the conflict
that arises from the fact that a subject is the result of a physical process" which it
can never hope to control completely (the conflict that Idealism seeks to resolve
by projecting the subject behind the physical process), or as a result of the more
recently recognized "overwhelming presumption that one is produced by alien,
social agencies" (the presumption that existentialism desperately resists with its
doctrine that existence is prior to essence), it is clear that the autonomous subject
is in chronic trouble. ff Our consciousness of both of these types of contingency
will (if anything) be increased by the progress of science, which, while it creates
new means for us to use in controlling a continuously increasing range of reality,
at the same time continually strengthens the presumption that the most
fundamental layers of our personhood are exogenously determined. This
ultimate contingency seems to be, in fact, the irreducible, permanent form of the
absolutism of realityright at the core of the human subject who dreamed of
freeing himself from it.
This being the case, one can see that "final myths," if they can help us to deal in
some way with this permanent problem, have a crucial role to play. However
successful the various myths that have been created for this purpose may be
judged to be, the problem that they address is clear. And having it clearly in
view, it is easier to see why, to maximize their chances of effectiveness, final
myths should present "the subject's responsibility to himself and for himself."
This is the minimum position that must be defended if autonomy is not to be
entirely lost.
A further implication of Blumenberg's account is, presumably, that the authors
of the "final myths" that do not meet this standard so wellbecause they go
beyond it, to extremeswould nevertheless recognize its validity. When one thinks
about Fichte's moralism, Nietzsche's doctrine of the will, Heidegger's
"authenticity" and "resoluteness," it seems not unlikely that they would in fact do
so. (In this

 Page xxxvii

case their extravagant final myths would be evidence of the need for further
"work," rather than of some fundamental modem hubris.) Indeed, the premise
underlying the "standard"that one must accept responsibility for being who one
is, in spite of all physical and social determinismsis so fundamental for us that it
seems safe to assume that the writers who seek to bring myth to an end by
bringing one great traditional myth to an end would recognize its validity for
their efforts tooeven though the claim that one has brought Faust or Prometheus
to an end (which, of course, is never explicitly made) would itself be about as
hubristic as anything Fichte or Nietzsche wrote. For their real goal, just as with
the philosophers, is not omnipotence or omnicompetence, but only a termination
of dependency and determinism, a definitive exclusion of the absolutism of
reality, which would be the achievement of the Kantian, the modern, and the
(perhaps) universal human goal of autonomy. gg
Unattainable, or not definitively attainable, though that goal is, the more clearly
we formulate it the more evidently necessary the pursuit of it becomes. It is a
major step forward in this clarification when the role of myth in the
processalongside the well-known and much celebrated role of reasonis
explained, and when it becomes clear that the two modes, reason and myth, are
both just as necessary to the pursuit of this 'end' of human history as they were
'in the beginning,' in the first confrontation with (or, more accurately, avoidance
of) the absolutism of reality.

Acknowledgments
The translator is grateful for a grant from the Translations Program of the
National Endowment for the Humanities, which made this translation possible.
He also wishes to thank Professor Ennis Rees for permission to use a number of
lines from his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; and Mrs. Hazel D.
Kaufmann for her generous permission to reprint the whole of Professor Walter
Kaufmann's translation of Goethe's "Prometheus," as well as lines from
Professor Kaufmann's translation of Goethe's "Urworte: Orphisch."

 Page xxxviii

Notes
a. Work on Myth, originally published as Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1979), is Blumenberg's third major work. The first, The Legitimacy
of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983)translated from the
revised edition (1973 1976) of Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1966)is the only one previously available in English. The intervening
major work is Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1975). Since Work on Myth, Blumenberg has published Die Losbarkeit der Welt
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). His other works include Paradigmen zu einer
Metaphorologie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1960), reprinted from Archiv für
Begriffsgeschichte 6 (1960); 7 142; Die kopernikanische Wende (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1965); and Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigms ether
Daseinsmetapher, suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 289 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1979).
b. Cassirer's works on myth extend from the second volume (1925) of his
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1955) to The Myth of the State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1946).
c. Blumenberg gave an address assessing Cassirer's accomplishment, and
containing some very pregnant indications of what, in Blumenberg's opinion,
remained to be done, on the occasion of his acceptance of the University of
Heidelberg's Kuno Fischer Prize for work in the history of philosophy, in July
1974. It appeared under the title "Ernst Cassirers gedenkend . . . ", in Revue
Internationale de Philosophic 28 (1974): 456 463, and is reprinted in his
Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), pp. 163 172.
d. Pp. 3 4 below.
e. P. 120 below.
f. "Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik," in
Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben, pp. 114 115. (This paper was first published
in Italian in Il Verri. Rivista di Letteratura 35/36 (1971): 49 72.) (On
destruieren/Destruktion see translator's note a to part I, chapter 2.) In the passage
I have quoted, Blumenberg goes on to say that "a first attempt of this kind was
made by Paul Alsberg in 1922 in his Das Menschheitsrätsel. . . . Then in 1940,
Arnold Gehlenwith his work, Der Menseh, which, though questionable in its
intention, was nevertheless fundamentalexpanded this beginning into a theory of
perception and of language, and since then has extended it into the foundation of
a doctrine of 'institutions.'" Alsberg published a rewritten and updated version of
the argument of his Menschheitsrätsel in English in 1970, under the title In
Quest of Man: A Biological Approach to the Problem of Man's Place in Nature
(Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1970). At present, Gehlen's work is
represented in English only by Man in the Age of Technology (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980), a translation of Sozialpsychologische
Probleme in der industriellen Gesellschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1949), which was
later reissued as Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957).
For more on Blumenberg's relation to Gehlen, see parts 4 and 5 of this
introduction and note x.
g. One twentieth-century philosopher to whom a comparison would be
illuminating is, of course, Heidegger, who also (following Kierkegaard) gave
Angst a central position in his structure of thought but did not ground his
understanding of it in man's unique biological status, as Blumenberg suggests we
should do; nor did he legitimate myth, or culture in general, as a means of
avoiding it, as Blumenberg does. Blumenberg's key passage on this aspect of
Heidegger's thought, which is on p. 110, ends: "[Humanl life is the result of a
long history of congruence between [man's] environment and
'signification'congruence that is only shattered in its most recent phase. In this
history, life itself continually deprives itself of an immediate relation to its
abysses, to what would make it impossible, and thus refuses to obey the
summons of its terrifying 'authenticity.'" For Blumenberg's relation to another
recent philosophical anthropologist, Arnold Gehlen, see note f, above, and note
x, below (and corresponding text).

 Page xxxix

h. P. 45 below.
i. In the paper cited in note c, above, Blumenberg describes Cassirer's
Subaanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff of 1910 (translated as Substance and
Function [LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1923]) as a work that has "still not been
fully dealt with and has been largely, and unjustly, forgotten" (p. 164).
j. The key passage on the status of the "positions" that are "reoccupied" is found
in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 466 467.
k. On the peculiar term pregnance, see translator's note i to part I, chapter 3,
below.
l. The renewed interest, recendy, in the idea of social evolution (see the
references in Jürgen Habermas's "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical
Materialism," in his Communication and the Evolution of Society [Boston:
Beacon Press, 1979] ) is aimed at explaining major social changes, such as (in
Habermas's version) from neolithic societies to early civilizations, from early to
"developed" civilizations, and from the latter to the modern age (ibid., pp.
157 158). This is quite different from Blumenberg's interest in explaining the
survival power of mythsthrough all those changesas a result of the millenniums
of testing and selecting out that they have undergone. And when Blumenberg
describes culture, including science and technology, as being subjected to a
process of selection in place of human individuals, he does not relate this
process to comprehensive social systems; what he has in mind here, as being
subject to selection, are specific techniques, theories, and "institutions." It is
interesting to note that in both myth and the field of science and technology
there is a "variety-generating mechanism" at work (a large number of
storytellers, a large number of theoreticians and tinkerers), in which one could
see a randomness analogous to that of mutations in biological evolutiona
randomness for which there is no evident analogue on the level of the evolution
of ''social systems." Habermas himself regards the process of learning, which
may contribute constructively to new social formations, as central, so that
despite the large leaps or discontinuities between the stages of this kind of
"social evolution," it still seems to have more in common with the
Enlightenment model of cooperative progress than it has with a Darwinian
mechanism of selection.
m. P. 165 below. (Emphasis added.)
n. A bold statement that comes closer to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
philosophies of history than we might expect from the author of The Legitimacy
of the Modern Age. The statement differs from those philosophies by making it
clear that the asserted progress is not relative to all possible human values, but
"by this criterion," that is, by the criterion of contributing to the capacity for
survival; and it also differs from them by avoiding (by explicit reference to
"whatever else [history] may be") the implication that this "optimization" is the
central, essential process inthe "meaning of"history as a whole.
o. Gehlen presented his doctrine of "institutions" in Urmensch und Spätkultur
(Bonn: Athenäum, 1956).
p. Pp. 161 162 below. On Neptunism and Vulcanism see translator's note c to
part II, chapter 2.
q. Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 280.
r. Ibid., p. 282.
s. Ibid., p. 183.
t. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 99, Blumenberg wrote that "this
book's concept of rationality is neither that of an agency of salvation nor that of
a creative originality either,"

 Page xl

but that of "a sufficient rationality. It is just enough to accomplish the post-
medieval self-assertion and to bear the consequences of this emergency self-
consolidation." In "Anthropologische Annäherung on die Aktualität der
Rhetorik," p. 124, he discusses "the principle of insufficent reason
(principium rationis insufficientis)" that is "the axiom of all rhetoric." In both
cases the analogy and the contrast to Leibniz's "principle of sufficient reason''
is explicit.
u. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, first edition (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 60.
v. This interpretation of Blumenberg's respect for 'institutions' is not just a
hypothetical possibility. At least one quite painstaking reviewerH. L. Ollig, S.J.,
writing in Theologie und Philosophie 56 (1981): 148 152was unhappily
convinced of its correctness.
w. Part II, chapter 1. This and all the remaining quotations in this section can he
found in the eight paragraphs beginning on p. 168 below.
x. The passage in Blumenberg's "Anthropologische Annäherung an die
Aktualität der Rhetorik," quoted in note f, continues: "With Gehlen's absolutism
of 'institutions,' anthropology returns, in a certain way, to its point of departure
in the model of the social contract [Staatsvertrag]. The discussion of this
anthropology has not yet settled the question of whether that fateful return is
inevitable." The account of "institutions," in relation to rationality, that is given
in this book must clearly represent a major contribution to that discussion.
y. P. 222 below.
z. P. 69 70 below.
aa. This section is a brief version of part of my "Introduction to Blumenberg,"
which appears together with part II, chapter 4, of this book in New German
Critique 32 (Spring/Summer 1984).
bb. Readers who are familiar with Schelling and Hegel will be able to translate
this more Fichtean formulation into the language of "nature achieving
consciousness of itself" or of "absolute spirit."
cc. The last sentence of the book.
dd. P. 291 below.
ee. "Nachdenken über einen Satz yon Nietzsche," one of three short essays
collectively entitled "Über den Rand der Wirklichkeit hinaus," in Akzente.
Zeitschrift für Literatur (Feb. 1983): 16 27.
ff. These three quotations are from pp. 293, 269, and 270 below.
gg. This extension of the Kantian idea of freedom as autonomy is a consistent
development of the approach to Kant and to ethics that Blumenberg first
sketched out in "Ist eine philosophische Ethik gegenwärtig möglich?", in
Studium Generale 6 (1953): 174 184. See also (especially on Kant's
"postulates"), "Kant trod die Frage nach dem 'gnädigen Gott,'" Studium Generale
7 (1954): 554 570, and "Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der
Rheterik," in Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben, p. 128 in particular.

 Page 1

PART I
ARCHAIC DIVISION OF POWERS

 Page 3

1
After the Absolutism of Reality
They could not put the determining divine principle at sufficient distance from
themselves; the whole pantheon was only a means by which the determining
forces could be kept at a distance from man's earthly being, so that human
lungs could have air.
Kafka to Max Brod, August 7, 1920 a

To those who are bored with this success, the mastering of reality may seem a
dream that has been dreamed out, or was never worth dreaming. It is easy for the
cultivation of boredom and discontent to commence when one accepts as a
matter of course, and no longer takes note of, the conditions under which life
experiences its difficulties in what are now only marginal problems. Cultures
that have not yet, achieved mastery of their reality continue to dream the dream
and would snatch its realization away from those who think they have already
awakened from it.
If one turns from the professionally (or even professorially) depicted terrors of
the present, and all the more of the future, to the past and to its past [die
Vorvergangenheit "the pluperfect"], one encounters the necessity of picturing an
initial situation that serves the purpose of the old status naturalis [state of
nature] of philosophical theories of culture and the state. This concept of the
limit toward which the extrapolation of tangible, historical features into the
archaic tends can be formally defined in a single designation: as the absolutism
of reality. What it means is that man came close to not having control of the

 Page 4

conditions of his existence and, what is more important, believed that he simply
lacked control of them. It may have been earlier or later that he interpreted this
circumstance of the superior power [Übermächtigkeit] of what is (in each case)
other [i.e., not himself] by assuming the existence of superior powers
[Übermächten].
What justifies us in using this limit concept is the common core of all currently
respected theories on the subject of anthropogenesis.
Whatever may have been the appearance of the prehuman creature that was
induced, by an enforced or an accidental change in the environment it inhabited,
to avail itself of the sensory advantage of raising itself upright into a bipedal
posture and to stabilize that advantage in spite of all its internal disadvantages in
the functioning of organsthat creature had, in any case, left the protection of a
more hidden form of life, and an adapted one, in order to expose itself to the
risks of the widened horizon of its perception, which were also those of its
perceivability. It was, as yet, no forward thrust of curiosity, no gain in pleasure
from the broadened horizon, no exaltation at acquiring verticality, but merely the
exploitation of a favorable opportunity for survival by avoiding the pressure of
selection, which would have driven toward irreversible specialization. It was a
situational leap, which made the unoccupied distant horizon into the ongoing
expectation of hitherto unknown things. What came about through the
combination of leaving the shrinking rain forest for the savanna and settling in
caves was a combination of the meeting of new requirements for performance in
obtaining food outside the living places and the old advantage of undisturbed
reproduction and rearing of the next generation, with its prolonged need for
learning, now in the protection of housing that was easy to close off from the
outside. The formula of "hunters and mothers" sums up the overcoming of the
loss of the old state of concealment in the primeval forest.
What is here called the absolutism of reality is the totality of what goes with this
situational leap, which is inconceivable without super-accomplishment in
consequence of a sudden lack of adaptation. Part of this is the capacity for
foresight, anticipation of what has not yet taken place, preparation for what is
absent, beyond the horizon. It all converges on what is accomplished by
concepts. Before that, though, the pure state of indefinite anticipation is 'anxiety.'
b To formulate it paradoxically, it is intentionality of consciousness without an
object. As a result of it, the whole horizon becomes equivalent as the totality

 Page 5

of the directions from which 'it can come at one.' Freud described the complete
helplessness of the ego in the face of overwhelming danger as the core of the
traumatic situation, and saw in the child's early demand for love the
compensation for such helplessness. Ferenczi found the correlate of the
phylogenetic transition from the sea to the land in the ontogenetic birth trauma,
and no speculation is required in order to recognize the repetition of this
fundamental situation in the emergence from the primeval forest's concealment
into the savanna as well.
If we have to seek man's origin in the category of animals that 'flee,' then we can
comprehend that before the change of biotope all signals that set off flight
reactions would indeed have the coercive power of fear but would not have to
reach the level of a dominating condition of anxiety, as long as mere movement
was available as a means of clarifying the situation. But if one imagines that this
solution was no longer, or no longer constantly, successful, then from that point
onward the situations that enforced flight either had to be dealt with by standing
one's ground or had to be avoided by means of anticipation. The transition from
reacting, in the present, to pointlike stimuli, to the ongoing state of maximum
excitement and suspense [Höhstspannung] of the organic system in a state of
alarm makes the creature dependent on means by which to master dangerous
situations, even when they cannot be avoided. The focus of the state of
excitement and suspense necessarily becomes less specific as the ambiguity and
indefiniteness of the data defining the situation increase. This produces a
readiness for an attitude of expectation, of feeling one's way forward, that refers
to the entire horizon. It has its functional value precisely in not depending on
determinate or already determinable actual threats.
In turn, while this attitude to reality can be maintained episodically for longer
periods, it cannot be managed indefinitely. The generalized excitement and
suspense must always be reduced, again, to the assessment of specific factors.
Put differentlyspecifically in the language of the neurologist Kurt Goldsteinthis
means that anxiety must again and again be rationalized into fear, both in the
history of mankind and in that of the individual. This occurs primarily, not
through experience and knowledge, but rather through devices like that of the
substitution of the familiar for the unfamiliar, of explanations for the
inexplicable, of names for the unnameable. Something is 'put forward,' c so as to
make what is not present into an object of averting, conjuring

 Page 6

up, mollifying, or power-depleting action. By means of names, the identity of

such factors is demonstrated and made approachable, and an equivalent of
dealings with them is generated. What has become identifiable by means of a
name is raised out of its unfamiliarity by means of metaphor and is made
accessible, in terms of its significance, by telling stories. Panic and paralysis, as
the two extremes of anxiety behavior, are dissolved by the appearance of
calculable magnitudes to deal with and regulated ways of dealing with them,
even if the results of the magical and ritual quid pro quo now and then make a
mockery of the intention of gaining the favor of the powers on behalf of man.
It is worth remembering, to present an extreme case, the sacrificial hysteria of
the Aztecs before the invasion of the Spaniards, during which the priests waded
in the blood of the ritual massacres, and wars had to be conducted that were the
fiercer the more difficult it became to procure, from the surrounding peoples, the
masses of prisoners for sacrifice that were acceptable to the gods. And all of this
in order to save the empire from a danger that had been proclaimed by astrology
and that was realized on the very day it was prophesied for. But at that point
there was a shortage precisely of those who had the qualities of nobility that
were needed to make them satisfactory to the gods as sacrifices.
Anxiety is related to the unoccupied horizon of the possibilities of what may
come at one. It is only on account of this that it can appear, in maximal
magnitude, as 'existential anxiety' ['Lebensangst']. In spite of its biological
function in separation and transition situations where magnitudes of danger are
not predefined, anxiety is never realistic. It does not first become pathological as
a phenomenon of man's recent history; it is pathological. Consequently we don't
learn anything new when Freud says that anxiety becomes neurotic as a result of
its infantile relationship to danger, since, in anxiety, reactions are produced that
are no longer appropriate to the situation of mature individuals. One who reacts
out of anxiety or in a state of anxiety has lost the mechanism of putting forward
imagined 'authorities' [Instanzen]. The despised formulas of bourgeois courtesy
can also be an 'authority' that is put forward, and the 'critical' destruction of
which, while it does produce the desired 'nakedness' between people
encountering one another, also deprives the weaker person, who previously
never had to be found out, of his protection.

 Page 7

The category of actions that are entitled "overreaction" is described by the fact
that these actions are committed by people who cannot understand metaphors.
That holds not only for the production of metaphors but also for their use:
'Carryings-over' d are things that have to be performed, but that must not be
taken literally. The inability to undertake substitutions or to accept them is
practically identical with the other inability to undertake the delegation of
competences to others and to accept the representation of the many by a few for
purposes of decision making. It is a rigid realism of immediacy that is espoused
by those who want to decide everything themselves, or to participate in every
decision, so as to refuse the favor of institutions that would enable them not to
have to be involved in everything themselves. The 'art of living'that primary
skill, which has become obsolete even as a phrase, of dealing with and
husbanding oneselfhad to be acquired as a faculty for dealing with the fact that
man does not have an environment that is arranged in categories and that can be
perceived exclusively in its 'relevances' for him. To have a world is always the
result of an art, even if it cannot be in any sense a 'universal artwork'
['Gesamtkunstwerk': Richard Wagner]. Some of this will certainly have to be
described under the heading of "work on myth."
One's 'horizon' is not only the sum of the directions from which one has to be
prepared for the appearance of undefined things; it is also the sum of the
directions to which anticipation of possibilities and reaching out toward them are
oriented. Prevention is matched by presumption [Präumption]. What it fills the
horizon with, imaginatively and wishfully, can lack realism as long as this does
not extend to the central matter of survival. Even in the late phenomenon of
theory there are collections of propositions that persist only by virtue of their
irrefutability and that form a halo around a core stock of the necessary realism of
propositions, the refutation of which would be lethal. Seen from the point of
view of this realism, what appears at best as a residue of what is as yet unrefuted,
or as something that, being irrefutable, is of no interest, is now understood only
with difficulty. It will be as a means of maintaining a position in the face of an
overpowering reality, through millenniums, that stories, which could not be
contradicted by reality, were successful.
Whatever starting point one might choose, work on the reduction of the
absolutism of reality would already have begun. Among the

 Page 8

relics that dominate our conception of the early ages of man and that mark his
image as that of the "tool maker," we can detect nothing of what also had to be
accomplished in order to make an unknown world known, to make an
unarticulated field of data surveyable. This includes what, being beyond the
horizon, is inaccessible to experience. To fill the last horizon, as the mythical
'edge of the world,' is only to anticipate the inceptions and degenerations of what
is unfamiliar. Homo pictor [man the painter] is not only the producer of cave
paintings for magical practices relating to hunting, he is also the creature who
covers up the lack of reliability of his world by projecting images.
The absolutism of reality is opposed by the absolutism of images and wishes. In
Totem and Taboo, Freud spoke of the "omnipotence of thoughts" as the signature
of archaic animism. We must remember that after the abandonment of the forest,
the division of life between caves and open hunting grounds set in. The closed
space allows what the open space prohibits: the power of the wish, of magic, of
illusion, and the preparation of effects by thought. But not only by thought. The
illusionary power of magic is less one of thought than one of 'procedure.' He
who keeps to a rule whose importance and origin no one (any longer) knows can
produce a precisely determined result that is not bound to the time and place of
the procedure. In accordance with Freud's personal interpretation of Haeckel's
fundamental biogenetic law, the phylogenetic 'animism' that was referred to
corresponds to ontogenetic 'narcissism' in the main feature of its "overvaluation
of one's own psychical acts." This is the presupposition of a concept of reality
that makes consciousness of it arise from an ensuing ''unmistakable protest of
reality" against narcissism. It may be that one can take a further step toward the
construction of the facts of the case by imagining the absolutism of wishes and
images as that of products of the caves, in isolation, at first, from the absolutism
of reality. The connection of the one to the other, whether one calls it magic or
cult, would only be a secondary confrontation on the basis of an already
structured, already differentiated, independent world. In the hunting magic of his
cave pictures the hunter reaches, from his housing, out and across to the world.
I will now attempt, with caution, to introduce a clarifying example from
literature, which also originated in a situation of absolutism, admittedly a late
and artificial absolutism. In Auf den Marmorklippen [On the marble cliffs], in
1939, Ernst Jünger laid out his allusions to

 Page 9

the events of the time in a mythical scenery. After the battle of Alta Plana, which
stands for the events of June 30, 1934, e the narrator resolved to offer resistance
with spiritual forces alone. He does this in library and herbarium. Contrary to
this resolution, he says, he and his allies sometimes "like children . . . fell back
onto that earlier world in which terror rules supreme." It seemed that they had
not yet succeeded in bringing purely spiritual forces to bear. The narrator
explains this with a single sentence: "We did not yet know the full measure of
man's power. "f
This could have described, by approximation, what I have put prior to the
mythical empowerment, as its status naturalis [state of nature]: In it man's
potential power is unknown, unexplored, untested. At the same time the art myth
of the Marmorklippen shows that everything that man gained in the way of
dominion over reality, through the experience of his history and finally through
knowledge, could not remove the danger of sinking backindeed, the longing to
sink backto the level of his impotence, into archaic resignation, as it were. But
for this sinking back not only to become possible but to become the epitome of
new desires, something had to be forgotten. This forgetting is the achievement of
distance through 'work On myth' itself. It is a necessary condition of everything
that became possible on this side of the terror, of the absolutism of reality. At the
same time it is also a necessary condition of the fact that the desire to return
home to the archaic irresponsibility of simple surrender to powers that cannot be
gainsaid does not need to be resisted and is able to penetrate to the surface of
consciousness. I see it as itself a mythical way of expressing this state of affairs
when Ferenczi, in his Theory of Genitality of 1924,g associates with the birth
trauma the desire to return to the womb, which has to content itself with
symbolic fulfillment in the sexual act.
Man is always already on this side of the absolutism of reality, but he never
entirely attains the certainty that he has reached the turning point in his history at
which the relative predominance of reality over his consciousness and his fate
has turned into the supremacy of the subject. There is no criterion for this
turning, for this 'point of no return.' To those who saw themselves as
beneficiaries of science and enlightenment who were already beyond the point
where they could be overtaken, the Middle Ages still seemed to belong in the
category of a primitive world of unmastered and unmasterable powers that

 Page 10

were nothing but names and addressees of helplessness. It was theological

absolutismwithout its mitigations in the institutions for the administration of
gracethat made the Middle Ages look dark when seen in retrospect after the
modern age's act of foundation. Even Goethe scarcely wanted to believe
Romanticism's first revisions of this historical self-consciousness and of the
image of the prehistory that went with it. On April 21, 1831, he writes in his
diary: " . . . in the centuries when man found nothing outside himself but
abomination, he had to be happy that he was sent back into himself, so that in
place of the objects, which had been taken from him, he could create
phantoms. . . . "
What the viewer found entirely missing in the rediscovered Gothic art was
contemplation of nature, and consequently any trace of the metaphysics that
corresponds to thatof pantheism. But the polytheism that Goethe sees in an
attenuated form even in the gallery of the saints is a way of bridging over the
difficulty of being unable to be a pantheist in these centuries, in the absence of
contemplation of nature, but being unable to do without 'phantoms.' According
to the note, the objects had been "taken from" this late 'primitive world' that
preceded Goethe's ownone only needs to substitute for this way of putting it the
idea that they hadn't been gained yet at all, to make it possible to apply the train
of thought to any early epoch of man that hasn't been provided for yet. What
remains is the setting up of images against the abominationthe maintenance of
the subject, by means of its imagination, against the object that has not been
made accessible. What it is then possible to establish is not the presence of any
fragment of theory, however small, but rather the extent to which theory is
unnecessaryignoring the effort with which the aesthetic metaphysician, late in
the day, undertakes to make it unnecessary again.
The contradiction that seems to enter the construct of the archaic concept of
reality hereabsolutism of reality on the one hand, omnipotence of ideas on the
otheris repeated in the description of dreams. Dreaming is pure impotence with
respect to the content of the dream, the complete bypassing of the subject and of
his disposition over himself, in the midst of his images, together with an extreme
disposition to anxiety; but at the same time it is the pure dominion of wishes,
which makes waking up the epitome of disappointment, however the censors
may be constituted under which the psychic mechanism is then placed. To fly in
one's dreamsNietzsche's formula

 Page 11

for something that he calls his prerogativeis the metaphor of a zero level of
realism together with the most intensive illusion of reality.
Dreams are the faithful interpreters of our inclinations, Montaigne wrote; but we
were forced to learn that in order to communicate their message to us, the
interpreters required a theoretically sophisticated interpreter in their turn. Since
our only concern here is to clarify the supposed contradiction in the hypothetical
construct of archaic 'realism,' a slight detour to a clever aperçu of Stanislaw
Jerzy Lec's may be permissible: "Last night I dreamed about Freud. What does
that mean?" It is only secondarily the meaning of the dream that may connect it
to the world of early men; first of all, and most importantly, the dream gives us
access to a limiting case of prostration to reality.
In his biography of Pericles, Plutarch concludes his account of how Pericles
dealt with the fear inspired by an eclipse of the sun with the remark that the story
was told even in the philosophical schools. During the Peloponnesian War,
Pericles was setting out with 150 ships to besiege Epidaurus, and they were just
ready to set sail when the sun was suddenly extinguished. Everyone was seized
with terror. Evidently, in the case of this eclipse, later dated to August 3, 431, the
example of Thales of Miletus's depriving the event of its ominous content by
predicting it with the aid of theory did not have any effect. Pericles's way of
bringing to his senses the steersman of his ship, who didn't know which way to
turn for fear, consisted in holding the man's cloak before his eyes and, having
thus put him in darkness, asking whether he still thought he perceived a terrible
disaster or an omen of such a disaster. The seaman had to reply in the negative,
and Pericles completely freed him of fear by asking where, then, was there any
difference between what happened to him, here, and to the sun in the other case,
except that the sun was eclipsed by a larger object than a cloak.
"This story is told in the schools of the philosophers," Plutarch concludes, and no
doubt one sees from this what mattered more to philosophy than the admiration
of the cosmos. But the anecdote's rhetorical recoil against the vehicle of theory's
prospect of success in freeing man from fear cannot be overlooked either. For,
while the Athenian statesman thought that he was carrying out a model instance
of bringing explanation to bear, the steersman was probably already calmed by
the fact that he, to put it paradoxically, could no longer see the eclipse, and could
surrender to mere encouragement. But the

 Page 12

anecdote illustrates still more: The boundary line between myth and logos is
imaginary and does not obviate the need to inquire about the logos of myth in
the process of working free of the absolutism of reality. Myth itself is a piece of
high-carat 'work of logos.'
It may be that magic was able at first to generate the beneficent illusion that man
was able to accomplish more in relation to the conditions of his existence than
his skills could substantiate in reality. Even before that, the directions had to be
determined and named, from which benefaction or the opposite was to be
expected. Agencies to which to address oneself had to become apprehensible, in
order for it to be possible to wring favor from them or to prevent their disfavor.
It is not mere metaphorical convenience when phenomena are seen as results of
actions. One of the fundamental patterns in which man's history presents itself,
into recorded times, is that in which the perception of his interest in relation to
reality was played through in illusion and defended in the form of an
(unrecognized) fiction before it could even begin to become realistic. The broad
field of health-care practices provides the material to support this statement; but
in principle there is nothing different in the ritual cultivation of forces and
powers. The narrow zone of realistic behavior is always surrounded by a field of
suggestions of action and of the producibility of results. The burden of proving
where the limits of influencing the world would be found always lay on cases of
failureand only on those where no supplementary explanation of its causes was
available (an uncommon exception to the rule). This presumption supports an
increasingly rich pattern of 'as if' behavior, whose success consisted in its initial
or permanent incontrovertibility. Mankind has supported itself, through the
greatest part of its history and of the contents of its consciousness, on irrefutable
assumptions, and perhapsit is a suspicion, not capable of proofstill does so.
That events were interpreted as actions is, according to Nietzche's formulation,
the distinguishing mark of all mythologies. But it is not primarily a matter of
explaining phenomena, as it appears when he brings in causality. Urgently and
early on, the interest was certainly in the existence of powers that one could
appeal to, that could be turned away from or toward one, that were capable of
being influenced in every sense, and that were also (to a degree) dependable, as
long as this did not have to be the dependability of jealousy or enmity.

 Page 13

Even Epicurus, with his removal of the world of the gods into the intermediate
spaces between the worlds, makes it possible for us to see what tied man's
interest to them, what recommended their continued existence despite even the
soberest atomistic view of the world. When he writes in the Letter to Menoiceus
that it would be better to accept the myth about the gods than to become a slave
of the necessity of the physicists, he thinks this as a result of weighing the
assistance available from each in reducing the absolutism of reality. There is as
yet no hint of Schiller's "gentle bow of necessity" whose "shot" threatens man;
that is a figure of beautiful resignation, which presupposes the softening of
physical by ethical lawfulness. In contrast to that, part of the concept of ancient
atomism was that it saw 'accident' as an opportunity, at least for one who knew
how to avoid the risks of nature and remained in his 'garden,' rather than going
into the wilderness. The selection of the garden as the home of Epicurus's school
was not an arbitrary one.
Epicurus's gods are more than tolerated and they do more than survive. They are
conceived in accordance with the ideal of the wise man, who does not worry
about the reality of the worlds because he has assessed their possibilities as not
affecting him. The spaces between the worlds, in the absolute emptiness of
which the old gods of Olympus continue their existence, are in a way an
outbidding of the cosmos of the Platonic-Stoic lineage: They are the idea (if
there can be such a thing here) of not being affected, and being incapable of
being affected, by what the worlds are made by and made ofthe complete
depletion of the power of their reality. Epicurus's wise man lives as though he
were a god, and that is only possible . . . in the absence of realism. Still, a
quantum of realism is unavoidably involved in merely having any idea of such
acosmic divine beings at all. For, according to this philosophy's concept of
knowledge, the wise man could never know what it means to live with one's
back to the worlds, without the burden of their reality, if the gods whose flying
images reach him were not really there in empty space. After this culmination of
ancient polytheism, modern pantheism will be the first doctrine to offer, again, a
solution that promises or even confirms as already accomplished what Heine
describes as "the reinstatement of man in his divine privileges."
Of that, if one may formulate it this way, myth could not even dream. The way
in which it pursued the reduction of the absolutism

 Page 14

of reality was to distribute a block of opaque powerfulness, which stood over

man and opposite him, among many powers that are played off against one
another, or even cancel one another out. Not only to be able to shield oneself
from one power with the aid of another, but simply to see one as always
occupied and entangled with the other, was an encouragement to man deriving
from their mere multiplicity. Seen in terms of the history of religion, it is the
confining of a diffusely distributed quality of uncanniness and unmanageability
into enclaves limited by strict sanctions.
In these, Rudolf Otto believed he had recognized "the holy" in its original form.
h In this he proceeded from the anthropological interpretation of everything a
priori, as taught by the Neo-Kantian schools of Fries and Nelson. If one accepts
the construction of an original absolutism of reality, then the 'auras' [Fluida] of
mana, orenda, manitou, and wakanda, which Otto made popular, are best seen as
remnants of the aura of superior power and intractability that originally
surrounded the appearances of the world.
What is and remains 'taboo' would thenconcentrated in itself and pars pro toro
[as a part standing for the whole]have to represent (and no doubt also to
simulate, now and then, in the service of the status quo) the overall tinge of an
undefined unfriendliness that originally adhered to the world. The taboo, like
other strong sanctions, would be the exaggeration, at one point, of the rejecting
unwillingness with which the world had once confronted man. It would be, if
you like, the 'symbolic' conjuring up of that quality, serving to keep its enclosure
in reservations and its insertion into the 'interworlds' of culture present to
consciousness. In the fear or awe that is accorded to such enclaves, the price of
the domestication of the whole is paid.
One grasps man's 'policy' in dealing with a reality that is not tractable for him at
too late a point when one focuses, with the history of religion, on "the holy," and
does not perceive in it the already institutionalized mode of reduction of the
absolutism of reality, of that sheer inimicalness to life and unobligingness
toward this "dilettante of life," as Scheler called man. It is hardly an accident that
Greek myth tried to concentrate the world's alienating quality [Befrerndlichkeit]
into forms, that it translated it into the optical realm, and hardly ever alluded to
the tactile aspect. Among the Gorgons, who are descended from the sea, with its
resistance to form, and from its monstrous gods (predating even Poseidon), and
who inhabit the vague edge of the

 Page 15

world, beyond Oceanus [the 'world ocean'], it is especially Medusa, with her
look that kills by turning to stone, in whom unapproachability and intolerability
have been almost proverbially concentrated: Athena, who herself has already
moved too far from this quality in the direction of pleasantness and friendliness
to culture, has to procure the gorgoneion [the Gorgon head on her shield]
through Perseus as a reinforcement of her armor. In return for this the hero
received her advice to approach the Gorgon only with the aid of her reflection in
his metal shield.
The fine arts have achieved only meager results in relation to the original terrors.
As a result they have fed the secret idea that behind the verbal heaping up of
hideousnesses, a jealousy of an entirely original beauty might have hidden itself.
What is a bridge to aestheticization and what is an apology for it is not a
question that will be decidable. At the end of the process stands admission into
the canon. When Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria acquires the high relief of
Medusa from the Palazzo Rondanini in Rome, Goethe receives a cast as a
present and conveys his thanks with the words: "For almost forty years now I
have felt the absence of what was once the familiar sight of an image that hints
at the highest concepts, such as developed in the ancient world from its daily
presence." He had been made "exceedingly happy," he says, by receiving the
replica of "this magnificent treasure." Before him stood the long-desired ''work
of art from a mythical primeval time," which, although at other times it had been
"fearsome on account of its fatal effects," appeared "beneficent and wholesome"
to him.
For Goethe the head of Medusa is the triumph of classicism. It stands for the
overcoming of the terror of the primeval times by means no longer of myth or of
religion, but of art. When he possesses this "ardently hoped-for presence" on the
Frauenplan, i it has already become a distant memory that in Rome he had lived
opposite the palazzo of the Rondanini and had often seen the marble mask, "of
remarkable excellence"a sight "that by no means turned one to stone, but rather
enlivened one's artistic sense exceedingly and magnificently," as he writes to
Zelter on January 21, 1826.
This is a unique paradigm of the 'work on myth' that may have begun with the
'apotropaic' [hindering, averting] accomplishment of naming. Franz Rosenzweig
spoke of the "name's breaking into the chaos of the unnamed," though the word
chaos may conform too much to what is familiar from myths and cosmologies,
as though these were

 Page 16

fossils embodying the history of the human race. However late that may already
be which we can grasp with the aid of the names that have been handed down, it
is a piece of mastery ofof giving shape to and bringing into viewsomething that
went before and that is beyond our reach. What was produced can be called "the
capacity to be addressed." It prepares the way for the exercise of influence
through magic, ritual, or worship. And again, in the interpretation of the
institutions, practices, and rituals, the power that they are directed at becomes
entangled in a story, which naturally is the story of the greater possibility, at
least occasionally, of getting along with it. Every story gives an Achilles' heel to
sheer power. Even the 'world' gave its creator a need, when his dogma had
hardly been completed, for a justification of the fact that his world acquired a
history.
The historical power of myth is not founded in the origins of its contents, in the
zone from which it draws its materials and its stories, but rather in the fact that,
in its procedure and its 'form,' it is no longer something else. I would never call
it the "faith of the Hellenes" j that Homer's and Hesiod's gods are a 'sequel' to
other gods, who stand behind them or have been merged into them. There is
room for discussion of Edvard Lehmann's formula that myth was destined to be
overcome, although I fear that it contains an unfortunate deeper meaning. But it
will be incomparably more important to describe myth itself as already the
manifestation of an overcoming, of the gaining of a distance, of a moderation of
bitter earnestness.
In connection with transformations of the possibility of 'getting along with'
power, one should think not only of attitudes of reverence and seeking favor but
also of those of provocation, of forcing commitment, and even of malicious
cunning, like that of Prometheus and of the 'trickster' figures known all over the
world. To make the god endure curses, mockery, and blasphemous ceremonies is
to feel out and possibly to displace the limits on which one can rely. To provoke
the savior to the point where he comesto intensify the wickedness so much that
he finds that he can no longer justify making the world wait for himto test,
through sin, whether the commitment of grace is absolute: all of these belong to
the repertory of ways of coercing a power that it is all-important to make sure of.
In Gnostic circles troops of unspontaneous sinners have always tried orgies of
infamy as means, following the rules of the god of this world, to stimulate their
'foreign

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god' to carry out his eschatological deed. One who discovers the law of
increasing misery [Verelendung] sees everything driving toward the point at
which the only thing left is for everything to become different.
Frivolity is only a weak derivative of all this, a means of anthropomorphic
relaxation of tension vis-à-vis myth: One can do this, or say that, without being
struck by lightning. It is the first stage of 'Enlightenment' satire, of rhetorical
secularization as a stylistic technique employed by a spirit that is not yet
confident of its enlightened status. Once again: In relation to the sacrosanct,
before it has been declared dead, one can act as though it didn't exist without
being fetched by the devil. That Goethe's devil can no longer fetch Faust as
Marlowe's did is another demonstration of 'work on myth' with a proof,
favorable to the modem age, of the goodwill of powers that have been conjured
up. The final outcome, for the paragon of the 'virtues' of his age, was good.
Finally, to reenact the pattern, the revolutionary only needs to hang on the tail of
a police horse in order to prove to his hesitant comrades that it doesn't kick and
doesn't biteit is trained specifically to do nothing.
On account of their immorality, the mythical gods of the Greeks were criticized
by the philosophers and were excluded from association with reason. But
describing them as immoral is only a late reflection on a kind of behavior that,
though not entirely arbitrary and impenetrable, cannot be measured by human
standards: [a reflection that says that] at least frivolity should not have it easy.
Still, this was the front on which the advocates of reason felt themselves to be
fundamentally and definitively superior. In their rhetoric, the writers of the early
centuries of Christianity anticipated much that the Enlightenment of the modem
age was to allege and bring into play against their own position. "Should one
laugh or become angry," writes Tertullian with linguistically effective disdain, in
his To the Heathen, at the beginning of the third century , "when beings are
A.D.

regarded as divine that act in ways in which even men may not act?" That is the
shortest formula for the way myth is viewed, looking back, by those who profit
from its supposed absurdity.
It is, in addition, the formula of a complete lack of understanding of what had
been accomplished by the pantheon. In this respect, also, the arrogance of the
new epoch anticipated what was again to be inflicted on it by the epoch
succeeding it. Nothing is more instructive than to observe the repeated
performance of the 'final overcoming'

 Page 18

of the absurd and the abstruse in history, from which one can learn at least that it
is not so easy to 'overcome.'
Godsthey were indeed, if one follows Tertullian's grim humor, such as men
should not be, but before that they were also such as men could not be. Only late
in the day is it their immorality that finally qualifies them for satyr plays and
comedy, for the enjoyment of their not unrestricted power: Not only do they
need the cunning deception of metamorphosis for purposes of seduction, but
they also prevent one another from carrying out their will and their whims
without restraint. This already holds for the exposition of the initial situation in
the Iliad, in all the nuances of the distribution of powers that the prior stories
introduce into the current ones.
The priest of Apollo, grieved by the abduction of his daughter, urges his god to
punish the Achaeans, who consequently have to take the spoil away from
Achilles again, to his wrath, and restore it to the priest. The offended Achilles
turns to his mother, Thetis, onetime bride of Zeus, whom Zeus, giving her up,
had given in marriage to Peleus. Let her urge the Olympian to punish the
Achaeans, because they had deprived her son of something on behalf of his son's
priest. The mother-son relationship between Thetis and Achilles succeeds in
outweighing the father-son relationship between Zeus and Apollo. And it is
certainly stronger than Zeus's relationship to Hera, who as the protectress of
marriage is angry with the Trojans over the abduction of Helen and does not
want to let the Greeks suffer injury, Still another factor plays a role here: While
Hera is powerful in her incontestable position, she was a participant in an old
conspiracy with Poseidon and Athena against Zeus. On that occasion Thetis had
saved Zeus's power by bringing up the hundred-handed giant Briareus, exultant
in his glory. However the relative strata in the history of religion and the location
of cults that lie behind this initial situation may have been established, in the
stage of reduction [of the absolutism of reality] that has been arrived at in epic
poetry the separation of powers is already cause for a merriness that is entirely
unrelated to its consequences in the outcome of the war between the Trojans and
the Achaeans.
The Enlightenment, which did not want to be the Renaissance again and
considered the contest between ancient and modern to have been decided, did
not forgive myth its frivolities any more than it forgave Christian theology the
seriousness of its dogmatism. It sought to hit the latter indirectly, by way of the
former; for instance, in the dispute

 Page 19

about the falling silent of the ancient oracles at the beginning of the Christian
era, which was settled by Fontenelle in a manner that set literary standards as
well. still more in the God who had demanded of Abraham the sacrifice of his
only son, the child of his old age, and only stopped Abraham from carrying it out
when his obedience had been demonstrated, the Enlightenment saw the
counterpart of the sacrifice of Iphigenia that was demanded (but also carried
through) by Agamemnon. For the moral critique of myth, as of the Bible, it
mattered little that in the second case the goddess Artemis had withdrawn the
maiden who was dedicated to her, or that in the first case God had recognized
Abraham's obedience and substituted the institution of the sacrifice of animals
for that of humans. Decisively more important is the fact that the Father-God had
been, indirectly, the target of the critique, and a target that it hitthe Father-God
who was also supposed to be capable, according to dogma, of the incredible act
of having the sacrifice of his own son brought to him to compensate for a
relatively modest crime involving fruit.
The Enlightenment saw and evaluated all this from the perspective of the
terminus ad quem [the point at which the process terminates]; it was incapable of
turning its attention to the terminus a quo [the point from which the process
takes its departure], and it paid for this incapacity with its defeat by historicism.
k The Enlightenment examined the favorite instance of its moral critique of the
biblical God, the scene of sacrifice on Mount Moriah, as an instance of almost
completed immorality, an immoral act that was already accomplished in
principle. A reversal of the temporal perspective would have made it possible to
see here a boundary, at which something that had been possible and customary
through millenniums is definitively discontinued precisely by the divine will, in
contradicting itself, exhibiting the before and after in one scene.
Nothing could have made so impressive what was no longer supposed to be
possible as the continued telling of this story across the generations, generations
that may have been ready again and again to seek the more weighty and more
effective sacrifice for their God as soon as he refused what they expected, did
not fulfill his obligations under the covenant. Behind the sacrifice in Aulis, too,
which extorted a favorable wind for the Greek fleet in its voyage to Troy, stands
the history (as long as that of the human race) of human sacrifice, a history that
is ended here by the goddess's intervention and the last traces

 Page 20

of which are not absent even from a tradition that has repeatedly been purged as
a result of the abhorrence of later generations. The Iphigenia who is transferred
by Artemis to the land of the Taurians still participates in human sacrifices there,
as a priestess in the goddess's templewhich directly characterizes this as
something that is now only supposed to be possible in the distant land of the
Scythians. Herodotus described Iphigenia as herself a divinity to the Taurians, a
divinity to whom they bring the abominable sacrifices of shipwrecked Greek
sailors and prisoners of war. Consequently it is an act of Hellenic domestication
when Orestes and Pylades are supposed to have carried off the wooden statue of
the Taurian Artemis, and Iphigenia is supposed to have helped them. She
explains to the king, Thoas, that the goddess did not want these men as
sacrifices, but wants a gift of lambs instead.
In connection with the function of institutional renunciation of human sacrifice,
the Spartan version of the myth is instructive, according to which Orestes
brought the Taurian statue of Artemis to Sparta, where he became king; the idol
brought human sacrifice along with it, until the giver of Sparta's constitution,
Lycurgus, put an end to it: at the price, however, of still offering to the goddess's
thirst for blood at least its smell, by means of the flogging of the Spartan boys.
The place of the offering up of human life is taken by the offering up of an
absolute obedience, both in the history of the patriarchs, as a prelude to the
giving of the Law in the Sinai and to Paul's concept of faith, and in the Spartan
state myth. The negation of human sacrifice, as a restriction on unchecked
efforts to gain the favor of divinity, could only be institutionalized if it was
possible to avoid the appearance of falling short of the threshold of the divine
requirements. Something less than what had hitherto been offered could always
be discredited as an insult to the god.
There is something in the definition that Wilhelm Wundt self-confidently
proposed in the second volume of his Völkerpsychologie [Ethnopsychology] of
1904: "Myth is affect that is converted into idea and action." l Regarding 'affect'
as an unspecific potential, from the transformation of which an entire sphere of
culture arises, is in keeping with the orientation toward energy-ideas that was
common at the time. Freud's concept of"sublimation," which was introduced in
1908, follows the same guiding metaphor. But in his definition Wundt is not
very concerned with what, as a given quantity, he entitles "affect," which for him
is only the "other side" of a balance of energy. Only

 Page 21

in 1917 did Rudolf Otto decode the affect side and equip it with nomenclature of
lasting effectiveness.
But this nomenclature also involves the danger of containing from the beginning
the phenomenon that is supposed to be explained. If, instead, one takes 'affect' as
already despecified agitation, then its indefinitehess turns out to be related to that
hypothetical status naturalis of the absolutism of reality. Affect is then a
condition of paying attention, which had to take over the position of a habitual
adaptive system of challenge and performance in order to make possible, in the
process of anthropogenesis, the change of environment preceding the emergence
of man. Attention, which is the difference between perception and observation,
is stabilized most of all by affect.
Even when it is still a matter of being on one's guard for the invisible and
evading it by observing its rules, affect is the inclusive bracket that unites partial
actions that work against the absolutism of reality. Intentionalitythe coordination
of parts into a whole, of qualities into an object, of things into a worldmay be the
'cooled-off aggregate condition of such early accomplishments of consciousness,
accomplishments that had led the way out of the bracketing together of stimulus
and response and that were at the same time the outcome of this exodus. To that
extent there is something in the classical idea that emotion is the unclarity of the
mind in the process of feeling its way forward. This schema of accomplishment
is filled not only by sensation and perception but also by the names, figures, and
stories, the rituals and machinations that are bracketed together by the one still-
undefined affective condition of overwhelming power that Rudolf Otto entitles
the "numinous."
To speak of beginnings is always to be suspected of a mania for returning to
origins. Nothing wants to go back to the beginning that is the point toward which
the lines of what we are speaking of here converge. On the contrary, everything
apportions itself according to its distance from that beginning. Consequently it is
more prudent to speak of the "pluperfect" [Vorvergangenheit, the past's past]
rather than of "origins." This pluperfect is not that of an omnipotence of wishes,
which would have submitted to compromise with reality, as 'realism,' only after
colliding with the hostility of what does not bow to wishes. There we can only
imagine the single absolute experience that exists: that of the superior power of
the Other.

 Page 22

The Other is not yet by preference the other One. m Only when the former is
interpreted with the aid of the latter, when the neuter is made accessible by
means of the metaphor of the alter ego, does a world exegesis begin that
involves man, who comes to know, in the story of the Other One, who comes to
be known. All at once man sees a piece of nature as having the character of the
hunting or grazing ground of this Other One and conceives this as a possible
confrontation, which is avoided or sought through one's behavior toward the
dominion of the Other One and which obliges one to engage in compensatory
actions, restitutions, efforts to compel good conduct, efforts to obtain favor, and
exchange of gestures. He who touches or crosses the horizon of the Other One
encounters him with the aid of his name, to which he has delegated his presence.
The name that functions magically must be unintelligible, and in the Gnostic art
mythindeed, in the undercurrent of magic in the modern ageit still stems from
out-of-the-way or dead languages. The little importance that is attached, in the
study of the history of religions, to allegorical names of gods, which are treated
as later inventions, at which the Romans, above all, with their relationship to
myth which was not autochthonous in any case, were to become mastersthis low
importance is probably not always justified. The allegorical personifactions are
precious for the insight into the myth's mode of functioning that they illustrate:
Clementia [Clemency] is invented in order to hinder Justitia [Justice] in its sheer
logical consistency. Such names, pulled out of the 'and so forth,' are fitted into
the system (a system that is already fitted together) of the separation of powers;
they are obedience to the 'Pantheon' as a guiding idea.
Once the place of the 'Other' is taken by the 'Other One,' the work of
physiognomic comprehension of the latter begins. That is also, in fact especially,
accomplished by the typification of an animal form, which has familiar modes of
behavior and characteristics. These lay down the ways in which to deal with
him. The construction of his story initiates the ritualization of the modes of
behavior of all the participants. The cult is the effort of the weaker partner to be
exemplary in this. The Other, having become the Other One, must have his own
'others,' and has them in other gods, including the gods of other people.
As soon as a god acquires something like a 'character' (in the language of
philosophy: attributes that commit him to his 'essence'), the other

 Page 23

gods already become potentially superfluous for the purpose of defining his
reliability as the limitation of his power. His identity is then described as his
"fidelity," which sets his power free as an executive power over against others,
who do not identify themselves with him and with his partners in his covenant.
He is trustworthy on his conditions, constitutional according to his law, by which
he has committed himself even in the use of his power. This state of affairs
entails his uniqueness, and that uniqueness excludes the possibility that another
story could be told about him in relation to other people, apart from the story that
he shares with the people for whom he is responsible and whom he has chosen.
Such a god of fidelity can watch 'jealously' over the exclusiveness of his
acceptance and dominion; to withdraw oneself or anything from that dominion
becomes an absolute offense against the god himself. That he is the only one
becomes the first article of his 'dogma.' The ability to enter into a covenant is the
foundation of his history with men; one who observes his conditions can be sure
of enjoying what he promises. Doubt first arises in the form of the question
whether the fulfillment of these conditions is humanly possible. That is the route
from the God of Noah with the rainbow, and the God of Abraham who forgoes
the sacrifice, to the God of Paul, whose Law had been impossible to comply with
and makes a new form of constitutional lawlessness necessary.
To define, within a first sketch of the ways in which the early experience of
superior power is digested, a limiting-case concept of the singularization of this
experience can be understood as a task of 'free variation,' as a piece of
phenomenology. Among the attributes of that Other One, as a 'being,' superior
power could be combined with unconditional sympathy with man. The
proposition that the New Testament's First Letter of John uses to express this,
that "God is love," would be the basis for the inseparable combination of the
experience of superior power with the certainty of salvation. If one seeks, next,
to determine how the conjunction with love, as a restraint that power places on
itself, can be raised to the level of certainty, then there emergesprior to any
actual dogma of any theology whatevera compelling need to go beyond the
model of covenant and contract to an absolute realism of the commitment of
divine favor to men. The definitive and irrevocable welcomeness of men to their
God would find its realistic sanction in that God's himself appearing on both
sides

 Page 24

of the relationship: as pure superior power and as pure impotence. This

prescription, which can be arrived at a priori, was filled by the history of
Christian dogma, with the Christological immersion of the Son of God in human
nature.
Christology tells the story that necessarily has to have happened in order to
attribute to God an absolute interest in the 'human interest,' indissolubly and
without regard to the mutuality of a contract that is fulfilled. It is true that
Christianity's taking over of ancient metaphysics forbade theology to think the
fundamental idea of the absolute interest through to the end, because it had to
accept the superimposed idea of the essential autarky and untroubledhess of
gods. But the obstructiveness of the central idea of Christianity to this postulate
breaks through all the seams of the dogmatic system. For medieval
Scholasticism, an example of this is the topic of 'sacraments': They are the
means, granted by God himself, of coercing himthe execution of his absolute
interest, as against his will, however else that will may be motivated. No theory
of myth, if it is meant to show how to understand what has happened, can lose
sight of this perfect convergence of Christianity with myth (despite the
suspension of its means).
If anyone should take this interpretation of core theological elements of the
Christian tradition amiss, I would have to reply that it is only under the imposed
rule of pagan metaphysicswhich is not myth itself, but its transcriptionthat one
can be prohibited from being impressed by the granting to man of the devices of
which theology talked for so long and of which it would always have to talk
when the issue is man's self-assertion against his god with the aid of his god (or,
for the mystic, his self-assertion even as the one who has become god, against
the god who has not come into being). The point of this anticipatory defense is to
make it possible to note here already that Goethe's "extraordinary saying" n will
play a central role in the development of the scheme of this book.
Besides, the metaphysics that had to restrain Christian theology from pursing the
logic of the idea of God's absolute interest in man arose from a satiety with myth
and from a defense against regression into it. Medieval theology was not able to
enjoy the great idea, invented in passing by Paul, that God had parted with
himself and taken on the form of a servant. It had to think about the preservation
of the substance, of the essence, of the natures that it caused to be combined. But
a suffering Omnipotence, an Omniscience that was ignorant of

 Page 25

the date set for the Last Judgment, an Omnipresence that was drawn into history
at a specific time and placemeasured against the standard of the philosophical
disdain for myth, these were instructions for thought that were difficult to
combine. That is why this God, to whom ancient metaphysics was to render such
great services, for his part had no success with that metaphysics and in relation
to the gods whom it had disciplined.
When Thales of Miletus had declared the exhaustion of the mythical mode of
thought with his obscure saying that ''everything is full of gods," that had
become a kind of concluding statement for the history that followed. Though
new gods, from distant places, might still turn up and be tried out, still there was
nothing essential left to be added to the stock of people's expectations. Paul will
notice this when in his wonderfully inventive and yet unsuccessful missionary
address to the Athenians he points to the inscription dedicating one of their altars
"to an unknown God," proposing to make up the supposed deficiency himself,
with his god [Acts 17:23]. What he discovers is that the advertised care for the
cult of this "unknown god" is an incidental result of the pedantry of a state cult
overseen by officials, rather than a pious zealousness that doesn't want to let
even the least of the gods be forgotten. It was like the proof, after some
centuries' delay, of that obscure saying of Thales.
What Paul hadn't noticed was that the inscription lacked the definite article. The
God whom he had imagined as the unknown one would only have been one
further god, like many before him and even after him. So Philostratus's version,
in his life of Apollonius, also says that in Athens there were "altars of unknown
gods," in the same double plural. Paul's speech on the Areopagus is one of the
magnificent historical misunderstandings that aid our comprehension more than
the missionary successes do. The apostle leaves Athens without being able, as he
did elsewhere, to leave behind him a congregation.
If one of the functions of myth is to convert numinous indefinitehess into
nominal definiteness and to make what is uncanny familiar and addressable, then
this process leads ad absurdum [to absurdity] when "everything is full of gods."
From that situation no further conclusion can be arrived at by a finite procedure,
and no result can be expected beyond counting up and having named [the gods].
That could have been foreseen to a large extent already from the case of Hesiod's
Theogony. The power of generating images, the imagining of figures

 Page 26

and histories, the systematics of their relationships with one another were not
able to measure up to the abundance of names. If Thales had wanted to explain
why myth was no longer sufficient, inasmuch as its outcome was a plenitude of
gods, then the philosophy that he brought in would not have been something that
pushed destructively into the sphere of myth's full vigor, but instead would have
been called for precisely by virtue of the demonstration that myth had fulfilled
its function.
It is not an accident that the anecdotal, improbable tradition makes the
protophilosopher take over the office that myth too had held: that of discussing
and, if not explaining, at least depleting the power of unfamiliar and uncanny
phenomena. The prediction of a solar eclipse, which is ascribed to Thales, goes
beyond the covering of the event with names and stories. It reveals for the first
time the capacity of theoryso much more effective in 'warding offto show, by
means of foreknowledge, that the extraordinary is normal, that it is governed by
a rule. Even as an invention, the nexus between the protophilosopher and the
solar eclipse would have to be admired, because it would have been only too
accurate in its representation of the replacement of one heterogeneous form of
attitude to the world by another.
Theory is the better adapted mode of mastering the episodic tremenda [terrors]
of recurring world events. But leisure and dispassion in viewing the world,
which theory presupposes, are already results of that millenniums-long work of
myth itself, which told of the monstrous as something that is far in the past and
has been forced back to the edge of the world. What we find occurring in Thales'
obscure saying is not a zero point of reason's self-encouragement, but rather the
perception of a long-accomplished setting free of the world observer.
In this case Aristotle's hypothesis that philosophy began with wonder and that it
then progressed from puzzles that were close at hand to those relating to small
things and great things requires correction. This hypothesis has been gladly
heard in the tradition. Man's natural vocation for knowledge was supposed to
have proclaimed itself in wonder as the consciousness of his lack of knowledge.
Myth and philosophy would then have come from one root. By analogy to
philósophos [wisdom-loving], Aristotle constructs the term philómythos [myth-
loving], so as to be able to relate the philosopher's predilection for what is
wonderful to myth, since after all myth itself is composed of wonderful things. o
The philosopher has something left over for myth because it is com-

 Page 27

posed of what is also supposed to constitute the attraction of theory. But more
than that he does not have.
It is true that myth becomes material for exegesis and allegorical interpretation,
just as it had become the material of tragedy, but it does not itself become an
appropriate procedure for dealing with what had given rise to wonder. The
classical 'disinformation' that is contained in the formula "from mythos to logos"
p and that still lies innocently dormant in Plato's indecision between myth and
logos is complete where the philosopher recognizes in myth only the identity of
the objects for which he believes he has found the definitive mode of treatment.
The mischief of that obvious historical formula lies in the fact that it does not
permit one to recognize in myth itself one of the modes of accomplishment of
logos.
That the course of things proceeded "from mythos to logos" is a dangerous
misconstruction because we think that we assure ourselves by it that somewhere
in the distant past the irreversible 'spring forward' [Fortsprung] took place that
determined that something had been put far behind us and that from then on only
'steps forward' [Fortschritte "progresses"] had to be executed. But was the spring
really between the 'myth' that had said that the earth rests on the ocean or rises
out of it and the 'logos' that had translated this into the so much paler universal
formula that everything comes out of water and accordingly is composed of it?
The comparability of these formulas supports the fiction that in both cases it was
a question of the same interest, only of fundamentally different means by which
to pursue it.
Myth had hardly defined the philosopher's objects, but it had defined the
standard of achievements that he could not fall short of. Whether he had loved or
despised myth, he had to fulfill demands that had been set up by it because they
had been satisfied by it. To surpass them might be a matter of other norms that
theory would produce immanently by extrapolation from its real or supposed
successes, as soon as it should be successful in moderating expectations. But
before that the postmythical epoch is under pressure to accomplish what the
epoch preceding it had claimed or even only pretended to accomplish. Theory
sees in myth an ensemble of answers to questions, such as it is itself, or wants to
be. That forces it, while rejecting the answers, to acknowledge the questions.
Thus even the mistaken interpretations that an epoch gives to the one preceding
it become an obligation for it to understand itself as the correction of a failed
attempt to deal

 Page 28

with the real issue. By 'reoccupying' identical systematic positions it avoids or

seeks to avoid letting the longing gaze of its contemporaries turn back to the
gods of the Egypt that they have left behind. q
Moses comes down from the mountain with tables inscribed by God and
encounters the golden calf of deprivation of familiar idols. What he had to do
and did do was to expand the Law into a full-time employment that pushed aside
all images, into an aggregate of minutely detailed life regulations, into the
fulfilling 'praxis' (which is craved again and again) that does not allow past states
to return. Describing this form of fulfillment, one could make Paul say, in a
modification of that obscure saying of Thales of Miletus, that everything was
full of laws. The observation of these laws destroyed respect for them; that is
Paul the Pharisee's problem in the Letter to the Romans.
If we look back on the multiplicity of the historically accumulated theories of the
origin of religion, they sort themselves out into two main types. The first is
represented by Feuerbach, for whom the divinity is nothing but man's self-
projection into heaven, his temporary representation in a foreign medium,
through which his self-concept is enriched and becomes capable of retraction
from its interim state of projection. The second is represented by Rudolf Otto,
for whom God and the gods arise from an a priori and homogeneous original
sensation of the 'holy,' in which awe and fear, fascination and world anxiety,
uncanniness and unfamiliarity are secondarily combined. Must one not also
expect both theories to have their corresponding phenomena, which just haven't
been separated, descriptively, by the name "religion"?
In that case the origin of polytheism would not be from what originally belongs
to man, but from what is originally foreign, which even in its later
anthropomorphism is still on the path of laborious approach and subjection to
discipline, after initially being brought out of its native undefinedness and into
the most rough-and-ready diminution of power by means of functional division.
Only the God of monotheism, then, would be that Feuerbach God, which is
something that is already evident from the fact that unlike the many gods, who
only as it were fill up the world, he occupies man or even tyrannizes him
internally. Because he is like man and because the development of man's self-
consciousness depends on him, his relationship to man has the character of the
'narcissism of small differences,' where a jealous attention is paid to dotting i's
and crossing t's. This relationship

 Page 29

of 'being made in the image of . . . ' is recognizably different from the beautiful
anthropomorphousness, with its invitation to artistic embodiment, of the
Olympian gods. In them there is always a remainder of the originally foreign
element, which had laboriously arrived at and put aside animal form, taking on
human form as a mere gesture of friendliness, the better to let humanlike stories
be told of them, but never entering into serious rivalry with man, any more than
man does with them. For that, to be a god, in the language of the Greeks, meant
too little.
The pure representation of opposition to myth is, in Aristotle's metaphysics, the
unmoved mover, who was to make such a great impression on Christian
Scholasticism because he seemed to fulfill all the conditions under which the
existence of a God would be demonstrable. His unmoved state also epitomizes
his lack of interest in the world. His autarkic immersion in theory puts an end to
all division of powers and all power problematics by the simple act of omitting
their precondition: the attributes of action, of volition, of a desire to have an
effect. It is this God, entirely engaged in 'theoretical' contemplation of himself,
who in the Scholastic system will determine the quality of the human goal of
salvation as well: as the final pure theory of the visio beatifica ]beatific vision].
The epoch-making misunderstanding according to which this could be the
conceptual-systematic form of the biblical God is almost incomprehensible,
since, after all, autarky is the exact opposite of what was supposed to make the
lengths to which this God went in saving man not only intelligible but also
credible.
In a fine symmetry with Thales's concluding sentence of the mythical epoch,
Nietzsche, at the other end of history, as it were, spoke the concluding sentence
of satiety with the dogmatic God of Christianity: "Almost two millenniums and
not a single new god!" And to explain his disappointment at the sterility of what
had once been a flourishing capacity of man: "And how many new gods are still
possible!" These two sentences designate a new threshold situation that, seen as
a need, comes under the heading of"remythicization." What makes Nietzsche's
suggestive observation alarming is the further consideration that the new gods
would not have to have the names and the stories of the old ones again, and
would exercise their superior power in unknown ways. Do we feel the danger
that lies in such a generous promise of

 Page 30

something totally different, from the mouth of the man who affirmed the eternal
recurrence of the same?
Myth defocuses the gods' interest in man. According to the story of Prometheus,
the mere toleration of man in nature is the result of the vanquishing of Zeus by
Prometheus's invincibility. In spite of Hesiod's partiality for the final world ruler,
in his work too the fact is dimly apparent that the latest set of gods accepted
man's existence only with reluctance. The organizer of the mythical material
vacillates between, on the one hand, ascribing the favor of man's survival to
Zeus's generosity and justice, and, on the other hand, extracting from the course
of the history of the gods the elements of an existential guarantee for man. To
that extent the myth of Prometheus in the Theogony and that of the ages of the
world in the Erga [Works and Days] are closely related. It had evidently been a
different generation of gods with whom man in the golden age was able to do
what in the meantime had come to be prohibited: to break bread. But the poet
also recognizes a sort of increasing maturity in Zeus's behavior as sovereign.
This occurs between the futile punishment of Prometheus for his assistance to
mankind, and the establishment of law and prohibition of force, which the poet
praises. Only these make Zeus into the ultimate authority in a reality that can
carry the title of "cosmos." Now it is man who, by his origin, still belongs to the
age of Cronus and the Titans and projects into the new god's sphere of legality
like a piece of untamed nature, always inclining toward the use of force. It is
necessity that forces him to submit to the laws of nature and the requirements of
workeven to the rules of conflict as the agoninstead of this condition being
Zeus's revenge for the illegitimate occupation of his [Zeus's] nature by the
creature of the Titans.
This Olympian of Hesiod becomes the epitome of the ordering of human
existence. For man must adapt his relationship to reality to the given conditions,
rather than following his heterogeneous nature. He does it by necessity in the
regulated relationship of work as the fundamental form in which he comes to
terms with nature. The trustworthiness of the cosmos and of its lawgiver is
shown by the fact that he gives a dependable reality the form of time. One can
only do the right thing if there is a right time for it.
The god's disfavor remainshe is not moralized; but his disfavor has been reduced
to a pattern that becomes discernible for man. Hesiod, the singer, is able,
following the instruction of his muses, to

 Page 31

proclaim the distribution of favorable and unfavorable days for particular kinds
of work. Thus man becomes a beneficiary of a form of order, without being its
legitimate focus.
Myth allows man to live, by depleting superior power; for man's happiness, it
has no images. If there are more daring forms of existence than the peasant's, this
is because of the striving to obtain a better life, beyond the mere securing of
survival That is the way Hesiod sees it when he describes the peasant who
undertakes, on the side, a little seafaring on the Aegean, as venturing into the
less certain dominion of the earthshaker, Poseidon.
It is not the action of seafaring itself that, as sacrilegious presumption, relieves
the god of the charge of capricious persecution; instead, the mythical idea is one
of competences, precincts, territories. As a seafarer, man crosses one of these
boundaries, goes over into the precinct of another god who, while he would have
to submit to the will of Zeus, is free, in the absence of any expression of that
will, to follow his own inclination. The sea, of all the realities of the Hellenic
world, is the least integrated into the 'cosmos.' The other side of the coin of the
division of powers is that man cannot construct a homogeneous relationship to
the world, and must cross boundaries of forms of power, too, under the stimulus
of his appetites and wishes.
There is a measure of unseriousness in myth, of frivolity. Even Hesiod, who
takes pains to make the image of god reliable, has difficulty describing a Zeus
who establishes conditions and respects the observation of them. He had before
him the embittered complaint of Agamemnon in the Iliad, who announces a
forced return home after the nine-year-long siege of Troy and accuses Zeus of
breaking his promise because he let Thetis persuade him to favor the Trojans.
And this god could not even be offended by referring to his fickleness, his kake *
apate*, wicked deception. No lightning struck the speaker. The theological
defect of divine faithlessness did not exist here.
Hesiod's defense of Zeus keeps to the level of the minimum: When a person
strictly obeys his rules of the correct work at the correct time, he retains a naked,
miserable, and indigent existence. Only if one sees that after Zeus's original
desire to destroy the Titan's creatures this was already a concession and the
essence of Prometheus's whole accomplishmentonly then does one see, in relief,
what myth grants to man and what it denies to him. To accept no gift from gods
is Prometheus's warning to his brother. To accept gifts means to go

 Page 32

beyond the realm of lawful order and to abandon oneself to favor and
benefaction. That is the core of the myth of Pandora as it appears to Hesiod.
Zeus has Pandora, the artificial woman, fitted up and passed to the unsuspecting
Epimetheus, who has forgotten his brother's warning.
Zeus does not let loose the evils themselves over mankind, but only Pandora's
dowry of curiosity, which assists Zeus's cunning. Thus her fate cannot be
directly blamed on Zeushere is one source of the stream of European theodicies,
of the exoneration of the gods and of God by man. Such exoneration becomes
seriously necessary only when the origin and condition of the world have to be
entirely ascribed to God and would put his wisdom and goodness in question.
That is then one of the ways in which man seeks to make himself indispensable
to Godeven if it is only as the sinner who drew the evils onto the world, and not
yet as the subject of the history whose detours have to help the God-in-the-
process-of-becoming r to final consciousness.
From this perspective it becomes evident that theodicy andin its
'reoccupation'the speculative philosophy of history finally fulfill myth's most
secret longing not only to moderate the difference in power between gods and
men and deprive it of its bitterest seriousness but also to reverse it. As God's
defender, as the subject of history, man enters the role in which he is
indispensable. It is not only for the world that, as its observer and actor, indeed
as the producer of its 'reality,' he cannot be imagined as absent, but also
indirectly, by way of this role in the world, for God as well, whose 'fortune'
['Glück'] is now suspected of lying in man's hands.

Notes
a. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. R. Winston and C.
Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), p. 242 (translation slightly revised).
b. Anxiety, here and throughout this discussion, is used to translate Angst, and
should be understood in the strong sense in which it is used in psychiatry, as
"intense fear or dread lacking an unambiguous cause or a specific threat"
(American Heritage Dictionary). Its well-known use by Kierkegaard and
Heidegger is no doubt also relevant.
c. Vorgeschoben, literally, "pushed forward."
d. Übertragungen. Note that a 'metaphor' is literally a "carried-over" use of a
term.

 Page 33

e. June 30, 1934, was the day of the Röhm putsch, when Hitler had many leaders
of the SA and the Nazi movement murdered, inaugurating the use of overt terror
as an instrument of Nazi government.
f. Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs, trans. Stuart Hood (Norfolk, Conn.: New
Directions, 1947), p. 59.
g. S. Ferenczi, Versuch einer Genitaltheorie (Vienna: Internationaler
Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1924); translated by H. A. Bunker as Thalassa; A
Theory of Genitality (New York: Norton, 1963).
h. Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Über dos lrrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und
sein Verhäiltnis zum Rationalen (1917; 4th ed., Breslau: Trewendt und Granier,
1920); translated by J. W. Harvey as The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the
Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational
(London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1923).
i. Goethe's house in Weimar was located on the Frauenplan.
j. Wilamowitz's phrase. See U. yon Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Der Glaube der
Hellenen (Berlin: Weldmann, 1931 1932).
k. The author (unlike Sir Karl Popper but in common with most writers in
German) uses Historismus "historicism" to refer to the endeavor, in historical
scholarship and the humanities generally, to interpret each historical
phenomenon as having a unique character that is to be understood as the product
of a specific process of historical development. In contrast to this, the
Enlightenment, by understanding history as a whole in terms of itself as the
'goal,' or as, at any rate, enlightened rather than 'dark,' prevented itself from
understanding the unique character of previous epochs in terms of what they had
overcome (their terminus a quo, in each case).
l. Wilhelm Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie, Grundlinien einer
psyehologischen Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit (Leipzig: Kröner,
1904); translated by E. L. Schaub as Elements of Folk Psychology: Outlines of a
Psychohistory of the Development of Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1916).
m. "Das Andere [neuter] ist noch nicht vorzugsweise der [masculine, i.e.,
personal] Andere."
n. The "ungeheuere Spruch""Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse" (roughly: "Only
a god can prevail against a god")appears in Goethe's Aus meinen Leben:
Dichtung und Wahrheit, Part Four, chapter 20, ed. S. Scheibe (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1970), p. 642 (cited henceforth as Dichtung und Warheit, ed. Scheibe).
Goethe calls it ungeheuer in the same place. For an extensive discussion of this
saying, see part 4, chapter 4, below.
o. The reference in this paragraph is to Metaphysics 982b 12 19.
p. This formula was given currency in Germany by Wilhelm Nestle's Vom
Mythos zum Logos. Die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens yon Homer
bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1940). On this see the next
chapter, text to translator's note c.
q. The idea of a system of 'positions' that are 'reoccupied' in the course of
changes of epoch is central to the author's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
(cited in the Translator's Introduction, note a. See especially part 1, chapter 6, of
that book.
r. "Der werdende Gott," a formula from Max Scheler. See the fourth to last
paragraph of part 2, chapter 2, below, for part of its context.

 Page 34

2
The Name Breaks into the Chaos of the Unnamed
Hundreds of river names are woven into the text. I think it moves.
Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, October 28, 1927

Myths are stories that are distinguished by a high degree of constancy in their
narrative core and by an equally pronounced capacity for marginal variation.
These two characteristics make myths transmissible by tradition: Their
constancy produces the attraction of recognizing them in artistic or ritual
representation as well [as in recital], and their variability produces the attraction
of trying out new and personal means of presenting them. It is the relationship of
'theme and variations, "whose attractiveness for both composers and listeners is
familiar from music. So myths are not like 'holy texts,' which cannot be altered
by one iota.
Stories are told in order to 'kill' [vertreiben] something. In the most harmless, but
not least important case: to kill time. In another and more serious case: to kill
fear. The latter contains both ignorance and, more fundamentally, unfamiliarity.
In connection with ignorance what is important is not that supposedly better
knowledgesuch as later generations, in retrospect, have considered themselves to
possesswas not yet available. Even very good knowledge about what is
invisiblelike radiation or atoms or viruses or genesdoes not put an end to fear.
What is archaic is the fear not so much of what one does not yet know as merely
of what one is not acquainted with. As something one is not acquainted with, it
is nameless; as something nameless

 Page 35

it cannot be conjured up or appealed to or magically attacked. Terror [Entsetzen],

for which there are few equivalents in other languages, becomes ''nameless" as
the highest level of fright. So the earliest and not the least reliable form of
familiarity with the world is to find names for what is undefined. Only then and
on the strength of that can a story be told about it.
The story says that some monsters have already disappeared from the world,
monsters that were even worse than those that lie behind what is present; and it
says that things have always been the way, or almost the way, that they are now.
That makes ages that are characterized by high rates of change of their system-
conditions eager for new myths, for remythicizations, but also ill adapted for
giving themselves what they desire. For nothing permits them to believe what
they would very much like to believethat the world has always been or has once
before been the way it now promises or threatens to become.
All trust in the world begins with names, in connection with which stories can be
told. This state of affairs is involved in the biblical story of the beginning, with
the giving of names in Paradise. But it is also involved in the faith that underlies
all magic and that is still characteristic of the beginnings of science, the faith that
the suitable naming of things will suspend the enmity between them and man,
turning it into a relationship of pure serviceability. The fright that has found the
way back to language has already been endured.
Herodotus considers it important to know where the names of the gods who
appear in the myths come from. He gives it out as the result of his own research
that they come predominantly from the barbarians, almost all of them from
Egypt, and those that do not come from Egypt come from the Pelasgians. 1 Of
these Pelasgians, whom he stylizes as very archaic, he says that they had "in
their sacrifices . . . called upon gods . . . without giving name or appellation to
any; for they had not as yet heard of such." The Pelasgians received permission,
he says, to take over the names of the as yet unnamed gods whom they
worshiped from Egypt, by inquiring at the oldest of all the oracles, that of
Dodona. Later this sanction was extended to all the Greeks. Stories
corresponding to these names were first added, he says, by Hesiod and Homer:
"But whence each of the gods came into being, or whether they had all forever
existed, and what outward forms they had, the Greeks knew not till (so to say) a
very little while ago." The

 Page 36

two poets had set up the family tree of the gods, had given them their epithets,
distributed their competences and honors among them, and characterized their
appearances. It is not unimportant that it was poets and not priests who could
carry out something like this with the gods, with such lasting effect, and that the
oracles too did not prescribe any dogmatic definitionsperhaps could no longer
prescribe, once their tone of voice had been established.
It is a later rationalization when names are interpreted as attributes of the
divinity, as its characteristics and capacities, which have to be known. What is of
primary importance is not to know the god's characteristics but to be able to call
him by the name that he himself has recognized as his own. If one can believe
Herodotus, the gods themselves weren't at all concerned to make their names
known to men, since they received their worship in any case. The knowledge of
the names of the gods reached Greece accidentally from Egypt, and when the
oracle was asked about their admissibility it consented to their use. It is not an
act of knowledge, but neither is it an event having the quality of revelation.
The biblical tradition cultivated the idea that God wanted to be known to his
people and to be reliably accessible to them, although it was also important to
him to make his name known only for this one purpose, and consequently only
to priests. So there were evasive and auxiliary designations, paraphrases, that
allowed one to protect the secret of the one real name. The secret name will have
been a single name at first, and only when this one was no longer reliably hidden
was the place of its knowledge taken by the other commandment, thought of as
unfulfillable by foreigners and as easier to protect, that one must have reliable
knowledge of all of God's names if one wants to indine him favorably and to
exercise unfailing influence over him. Here it doesn't matter how the
accumulation of these names came about, whether through amalgamation of
figures, through conquest of foreign national divinities in the manner of the
Pantheon, through superimposition of cult traditionswhat is decisive is that the
disposition toward secret knowledge combines most readily, in a lasting fashion,
with the principle according to which wishes vis-à-vis the divinity are fulfilled
only for one who knows all the names.
To the extent that one speaks of revelationand thus of a dogmatic claim of cult
forms and cult stories to strictly disciplined observancein the limiting case such a
revelation can consist solely in the com-

 Page 37

munication of God's name. In the classical writings of the Jewish Cabala, the
statement is continually repeated that "the entire Tora is nothing but the great
Name of God." 2 But these names are not only appellations, but also
designations of the various ways in which God operates and is active. When he
speaks, he acts, as the account of the Creation shows, and since he is not a
demiurge his action consists exclusively in naming the effects that he wants to
achieve. For the Cabala, again, that means that "the language of God has, in fact,
no grammar. It is composed entirely of names."
The demiurge of the Platonic myth must also speak one single time, at the
critical juncture of his workhe must, very significantly, apply rhetoric in order,
by persuasion, to bring the Ananke [necessity] that opposes the execution of the
Ideas in the cosmos into cosmic obedience. Beyond that, the language of names
here alreadyand momentouslyhas that of numbers and geometrical figures
superimposed on it. The biblical Creation, on the other hand, is a command to
come into existence and a naming as existing: "With the creative omnipotence of
language it begins, and in the end language as it were assimilates the created,
names it. Language is therefore both creative and the finished creation, it is word
and name. In God name is creative because it is word, and God's word is
cognizant, because it is name. 'And he saw that it was good'; that is: He had
cognized it through name. . . . That means: God made things knowable in their
names. Man, however, names them according to knowledge."3 Thus one of the
presuppositions of the biblical story of Paradise is that the Creation is accessible
and familiar to man by virtue of the fact that he knows how to call the creatures
by their names.
The reestablishment of Paradise would be once again to have the correct name
for everything, including the enigmatical creature that one is oneself and that
possesses its so-called "civil" name ["bürgerlicher Name" family name] by the
pure contingency of descent and legal order. To find one's real name, or at least a
new one, has again and again been connected with ideas of salvation. Maria
Gundert, the mother of Hermann Hesse and daughter of a student of David
Friedrich Strauss who had returned to the Pietism of his forefathers and become
a missionary and expert on Indian languages and literature, wrote in her diary in
1877 that her father had spoken exquisitely about the new name that God would
give to each individual, ''a divine masterpiece, both grammatically and lexically,
a name that includes every-

 Page 38

thing that we were on earth, that we experienced and that we became through
God's grace, a name so all-comprehensive, and comprehensive with such an
impact, that at merely hearing it called, everything past and forgotten, the entire
riddle of our life, everything in our own nature and existence that has been
hidden and incomprehensible to us will suddenly be illuminated by the light of
eternitywill appear clearly to the soul." 4 At the end of days, that isfor the
subject here is this eschatological hopeeverything that had once begun with the
name and had been spun out of it will have returned into it: History [is seen] as
the carrying out of the name.
Francis Bacon, to whom the programmatic formulation of scientific empiricism
can be ascribed only with reservations, connected the reestablishment of
Paradise (relying on magical traditions more than anything else) with the
rediscovery of the original names of all things. It is true that this part of his
equation of knowing and being able was quickly forgotten; but the
accomplishments of the giving of namesabove all in the area of biological
classification, with the great concluding work of Linnaeusare easy to overlook
alongside the glamour of the mathematical natural sciences. The modern age has
become the epoch that finally found a name for everything.
What science repeats has already been suggested by myth: the success, achieved
once and for all, of acquaintance with everything on all sides. Myth itself tells
the story of the origin of the first names from night, from the earth, from chaos.
This beginningas Hesiod pictures it in the Theogonyis crossed over with the ease
of a leap and a bound, with a plethora of figures. The remnants of the previous
dread now speak only to him who knows their stories as assurances of the
depletion of their power.
Aphrodite arises from the foam of the terrible castradion of Uranusthat is like a
metaphor for the accomplishment of myth. But that is not the end of its work: In
Botticelli's Venus Anadyomene [Venus rising from the sea] she rises as though
from the foam of the seaonly for one who is versed in the myth is it from the
foam of the secretion of Uranus's terrible wound. When finally at the beginning
of the twentieth century the vitalist philosopher reaches for the mythical scene of
the anadysis [rising from the sea] in order to make the original relationship of
life and form, of vital flux and eros, come clear in it, then for him the timeless
beauty of Aphrodite now arises only "from the subsiding, scattering foam of the
agitated sea."5 The background

 Page 39

of terror has been made forgotten, the aestheticizing process is complete.

The function of names is not exhausted in their allowing stories to get under
way. Otherwise the abundance of names that are laid up around and between the
figures that are equipped with stories would be incomprehensible. Hesiod's
Theogony offers the evidence for this superabundance, and it would no doubt be
aesthetic projection if one chose to see in this only the 'poetic' aspect of the way
the verses sound. Myth is always anxious about what one might call integration;
it abhors a vacuum (as was still to be said for a long time, in a half-mythical
proposition, of nature). Its stories are seldom localized in space, and never in
time; only the structure of genealogy embeds them in a network of definiteness.
Just as little as the historian, later, can set episode alongside episode and
anecdote alongside anecdote, since after all he is less bound to significance in
the individual item than he is to overall coherence, so little can myth set emblem
alongside emblem without joining them together by means of the
matternamesthat belongs quite exclusively to it.
Even one who reads the two genealogies of Jesus in the New Testament still has
before him not only the genetic connection with David and Abraham, indeed in
Luke even with Adam and God, as the cardinal points of a descent that
establishes Jesus' credentials for the purposes of the salvation storyhe also has
before him the filling up of the empty time with names that are for the most part
unknown, not attested to in any story. Matthew expressly breaks the time down
into three phases, each composed of fourteen generations, between Abraham and
David, David and the Babylonian exile, and the latter and Christ. Only a few of
the names refer one to stories. It is striking that, in particular, the names of the
four women named in Matthew do have such stories behind them. Of these at
least one has a mythical character: the introduction of Thamar, and her
participation in the line of descent of David and of the Messiah. When, disguised
as a harlot, she forces Judahthe father of her two deceased husbands, who denies
her the marriage to the third brother to which she is legally entitledto give her
the progeny that makes him the ancestor of David and of the Messiah, she
pursues the ends of history against the failure of virtue and of nature. For one
who is versed in the Scriptures and still expects the Messiah to come (or holds
him already to have come) from the stock of David, the outcome makes the
mon-

 Page 40

strous crime comprehensible as the artful concealment of the direction of history.

Matthew knew what he was doing, for he inserted three additional names of
women of questionable reputation into Jesus' family tree: Rahab, the
harlotfamous elsewhere in the New Testament as wellof Jericho; Ruth, who as a
Moabite could also become an ancestress of David; and finally Bathsheba, the
wife whom David took from Uriah. For the pre-Davidic genealogy, the fact that
God made use of detours and artifices in preparing the way for the Messiah was
a matter of indifference compared to the belief in a Messiah who had already
appeared, or to continued expectation of him. Regarding the figure of Thamar,
the Midrash Tanchuma writes: "A lover who was rewarded was Judah, for from
him sprang Pharez and Hezron, who were to give us David and the King
Messiah, who will redeem Israel. See what devious ways God must follow
before he can cause the King Messiah to arise from Judah." 6 The evangelist
more than ever gives the believing hearer of the list of names the confirmation
that no particle of the time that has passed since the beginning of the world, or
since the patriarch, has been unrelated to the event that has become pregnant
with salvation for him.
Catalogs of names carry the mark of uninventability, for we believe that we
would notice immediately if a poor invention had been included. Even in
Hesiod, well-invented names are uncommon. His catalog of Nereids is now quite
rightly credited to the poet of the Iliad. Such display, in the great epics, creates
confidence that the world and the powers in it are well known to the poet. One
can imagine that in the rhapsodic delivery of the poem they had the effect of cult
litanies, which also have to produce reassurance that nothing is omitted and that
satisfaction can be given to everyone. The fact that this fundamental
accomplishment is no longer perceived as such is the reason why such catalogs
have an unpoetic character for modern tastes. The fact that the world could be
mastered is expressed early on by the effort to avoid leaving any gap in the
totality of names, which could only mean: to give it out as having been avoided,
by means of an excess.
Looked at from the opposite perspective, this already 'literary' phenomenon still
allows an initial state to show through, in which the namelesshess of what was
shapeless and the striving for words for what was unfamiliar were dominant.
Thus Nereus, in Greek mythology, is originally nameless, the old one from the
seaeven in the Odyssey,

 Page 41

where he appears as Proteus, the 'First One,' he is in fact still not named, but only
placed at the head of a long genealogy as the most prolific of the children of
Pontus. But since, unlike his lovely daughters, he is without a cult, he is left in a
state where one can forget about him. 7 If one perceives, in the background of
the entire genealogy of the gods, the chaos, the gaping abyss, which is only
employed as a place of derivation, of which the mode of operation is unknown
and which accordingly receives no cult, then one sees figures and names form
correlatively and gain clarity as they move away from it. It seems almost with a
sigh of relief that the classifying singer of the myth greets the fact that nothing
comes out of that abyss except what he knows how to call by name and to fit
into his system. One begins to understand such formulas (which so easily
become meaningless) as those in the early Christian Didache, in which the
believers give thanks to their God for nothing more than his holy name. In the
thanks we can still hear the echo of the fear that he could have remained
unknown, that he could have come upon them as one who was not called.
When Mohammed encountered difficulties, with the inhabitants of Mecca, in
driving out their polytheism and demonstrating the superiority of his God, they
defended themselves with the argument that their gods had names that expressed
something, whereas the name of the new god, "al-ilah," meant nothing but "the
god," and was consequently no name at all.8 The weight that such an objection
had can also be observed in connection with Paul's speech on the Areopagus. He
makes use of the argument that while the altar to an unknown god was a good
idea, it became intolerable as soon as the name of this god had become known
and could be communicated (by him). Except that the apostle had nothing to
offer but a God who had to deny the existence of the other gods. He would fill
the gap dedicated to the "unknown god" only by destroying the system around it
that defined the gap. The name of the unknown god, once it was communicated,
had to develop into the negation of the function of names. Dogma is composed
of definitions.
The old suspicion that many figures of gods are younger than the abstract
qualities from which they derive their names has been abandoned; but the
opposite state of affairs has not yet been established, that in myth the neuter is at
any rate not at home. The latter [the neuter] is more nearly a device by which to
suggest a remythicizing process through reduction. Thus "the evil one" [der
Böse, masculine

 Page 42

gender] can return as "evil" [das Böse, neuter]. The diabolos [slanderer; devil],
with which the Septuagint translates the Hebrew name "Satan" and by whichas
in the Book of Jobthe figure of an accuser before God may originally have been
meant, acquires, through ambiguity, all the characteristics of the adversary as the
opposite agency.
The mysterious personalization of a neuter term, the katechon * [restrainer], in
the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, will have been a result of the unsolved
problem of the Parousia [the Second Coming]. The anonymity of a mere
function designation protects against deviation into polytheism: There is a power
that still holds down and delays the eschatological eruption, but it is not known
by name and consequently cannot be influenced. If delay, in the ambivalent
situation between eschatological hope and fear, cannot be unambiguously
evaluated, then this participle with an article was rightly kept anonymous, so that
it could attract neither trust nor appeal. In a novel situation of indefiniteness, it
was like a piece of that mightiness of the primeval time with which, for lack of a
name and a face, one could not negotiate.
To equip the world with names means to divide up and classify the undivided, to
make the intangible tangible [greifbar], though not yet comprehensible
[begreifbar]. The setting up of means of orientation also counteracts elementary
forms of confusionof perplexity, at the least, and, in the limiting case, of panic.
A precondition of this is the delimitation of directions and figures out of the
continuum of the pregiven. The catalog of the winds, favorable and
unfavorableas distinguished, in a way that is not only quantitative, from that of
disastrous stormsis a distinguishing mark of a life-world in which weather can
become destiny. Campanella's City of the Sun has thirty-six points of the
compass at its disposal, instead of the otherwise customary thirty-two. The
classification of the seasons, of the elements, of the senses, of the vices and the
virtues, the temperaments and the affects, the constellations and the ages of
manall of these are accomplishments that, for the most part, we can still know as
capable of historical documentation. Occasionally, posited systems of order have
to be retracted, as with the distinction between the morning star and the evening
star, the identity of which was not yet known to Hesiod.
Myth is a way of expressing the fact that the world and the powers that hold
sway in it are not abandoned to pure arbitrariness. However this may be
signified, whether by a separation of powers or through a codification of
competences or through a 'legalization' of relationships,

 Page 43

it is a system of the elimination of arbitrariness. Even in the latest, ironically

scientific use of mythical names, this element comes through. The planets of the
solar system have long borne mythical names, and when the first new one was
discoveredHerschel's Uranusit was predecided not only what this one would be
called but also what was the only way in which names of further ones could be
arrived at.
The ritual of christening did not function entirely without friction. The French
astonomer Arago wanted Uranus to be named "Herschel," after its discoverer,
probably not without the thought that this would create space in the heavens for
further discoverers. Thus, in 1846, after the telescopic confirmation of his
mathematical discovery of Neptune, Leverrier did not fail to press Arago to
accept the name "Leverrier" for the new planet. He announced this as a
resolution in the French Academy of Sciences on October 5, 1846. Perhaps
Leverrier would not have been seduced into hubris if the Berlin astronomer
Galle, who had made the optical discovery, had not proposed the name "Janus,"
because Janus was genealogically prior to Saturn. Leverrier rejected this name
on the mistaken assumption that Janus was the Roman god not only of gateways
and doors but also of boundaries and that this christening would suggest that the
planet just discovered was the last one in the solar system. Leverrier himself, not
yet thinking of what were to be his own ambitions of a few days later, proposed
the name "Neptune." This was accepted so rapidly among astronomers outside
France that Arago's authority remained without effect. Leverrier had already
exercised the right of the discoverer, but only by submitting for a moment to the
expected elimination of free choice. 9 Nationalisms, such as came into play later
in the new discoveries in the periodic table of the elements, were not yet
involved. They had no chance against the 'objectivity' of the mythological
nomenclature in the case of the discoveryannounced by Lowell on the basis of
disturbances in the orbit of Neptune and confirmed by Tombaughof the planet
Pluto, in 1930.
On June 22, 1978, the American astronomer James Christy, in Arizona,
discovered with high probability a satellite of Pluto, since on several
photographs the same blemishes appeared against the disk of the planet's light. It
would be the thirty-fifth moon of a planet in the solar system. The naming was
accomplished more quickly and with less trouble than the final verification of
the discovery: the satellite of Pluto would be called Charon. To the god of the
underworld was

 Page 44

added the ferryman who carries the dead across the Acheron into Hades. The
christening was not without a convergence with reality, since on Pluto the sun is
no longer a source of light and would scarcely still be visible to an unaided eye.
Accordingly Pluto's moon, too, cannot be a figure of light comparable to our
moon; it is a dusky companion, recognizable by possible Plutonians only when it
covers up stars.
The names that were the earliest still stand ready as the last, when the stories
already have been almost forgotten again. They are like a reservoir of the
elimination of free choice, and that not only in the landscape of nineteenth-
century European education, where classicism still reverberates, but even in the
mass production of the almost automated evaluation of exposed film in the
astronomy of the latter part of the twentieth century. Is that a late success of
myth, of its indelible traces in our history, or is it the almost ironical exploitation
of myth for effect? Is there a qualitative difference between Herschel's "Uranus,"
which after all was the first and scarcely anticipated surprise in what was
thought of as a completed system, and "Charon," which is suspected only on the
basis of blemishes in the pictorial data and cannot even be demonstrated, like
Neptune, as a source of orbital perturbation?
Herschel's planetary discovery had been one of the decisive breaches of the
suggestion of completeness that had been set up by the postulate of visibility: Up
to that point only 'satellites' had been confirmed by telescopesno planets. The
basic constitution of the solar system still seemed to be related to man's natural
optics. The name "Uranus" already almost exhausted the mythical genealogy,
unless one wanted to have recourse to "Chaos." Still, the sea god of indefinite
age, Poseidon/Neptune, was an elegant solution that no longer designated any
breach of empirical rationality but merely the quantitative optimization of means
for an indefinite 'and so forth.' There was no shock of repugnance to order when
it turned out that Pluto's highly eccentric orbit made it possible for it to exchange
positions with Neptune: Early in 1979 Pluto cut across Neptune's orbit and will
be closer than it to the sun until 1999. No one any longer feelsthough the
Associated Press even issues it as a syndicated reportthat this exchange of places
introduces anything like 'enlightenment' in the minds that are now called
consciousness. The report does not need to be disarmed [by commentary] any
more than does that of the most recent or the next comet to cross the earth's
orbit. The background of a

 Page 45

tradition that would no longer have trusted the 'cosmos' in which such things
were possible has faded away entirely.
This makes it all the more surprising that the names survive. The name "Pluto,"
which was conferred in 1930, is not a friendly bow to the humanistic realm, but
an entirely logical connection between the unnamed in its latest mode of
appearanceas a scarcely perceptible 'remnant,' forcibly snatched from
unrecognitionand its earliest omnipresence. In such an act one can still be
conscious of what Plato has his spokesman say about 'onomathesy' [setting up
names]: "It seems that the first men who gave names to things were no ordinary
persons. . . . " 10 A world that is full of names has kept one quality of the world
that was full of gods: It has kept subjects for its statements that are perceptibly
different from those that are presented when a radio galaxy's or some other
quasi-stellar object's inaccessibility to our natural optics is acknowledged by its
designation with letters and numbers.
It is the 'intentionality' of the history of the working up of myth that alone allows
us, by thinking of it as proceeding constantly over time, also to make conjectures
about what in each case are the previous phases of this history. But theories
about the origin of myths are idle. Here the rule is: Ignorabimus [We will not
know]. Is that bad? No, since we don't know anything about the 'origins' in other
cases either. Even so, such theories have implications that reach further than the
claim to explain the phenomenon allows us to see. In his Treatise on the Origin
of Inequality among Men, Rousseau explicitly did not want his conjectures about
the initial situation to be taken as historical truths; but he did not escape the fate
of seeing the suppositions that he had introduced only to illuminate later
situations received as normative origins.
Did myth work up the terrors of an unfamiliar world, with which it was
confronted, into stories, or did it produce the terrors, for which it then also had
palliatives to offer? If one follows the 'enlightenments' in the tradition of
Epicurus, down to the Enlightenment of the modern age, then the exciting of fear
and hope through myths is part of the repertory of priestly castes, which
provided themselves in this way with the monopoly of redemption and of the
procuring of salvation, just as the lawyers in the comedy take care of the trials
arising from conflicts that they themselves have previously foisted on their
clients. The fruitlessness of such enlightenment can hardly be explained without
focusing on the frivolity of its hypotheses about the derivation and the durability
of what considers it to be necessary and possible to

 Page 46

overcome. So assumptions about the origins of myth are not without

consequences for supposed triumphs over it. Neither are they without
consequences for the assessment of the potential for its (wished-for or feared)
return, as well as for discerning its ways of functioning and modes of reception.
It was the pride of the modern age as it got under way that it had made a clean
sweepor, at any rate, would soon be able to make a clean sweepof myths as well
as of dogmas, of conceptual systems as well as of authorities, under the
comprehensive rubric of prejudices. Backwardness in this regard appeared as an
indefensible atavism, a wish formation, a stubborn product of the application of
flattery to anthropocentric vanity. What was supposed to be rational was what
was left over when reason, as the organ adapted to uncovering illusions and
contradictions, had cleared away the sediments that had accumulated from
schools and poets, from magicians and priestsin other words, from seducers of
all kinds. Both were supposed to be called reason: the organ of critical
destruction, and the residue that it exposes. The suspicion that there was no
guarantee that anything at all would be left over, or what it would be when those
sedimented opacities of the ages had been cleared away, had no chance of a
hearing until it broke through in the form of Romanticism's flagrant denial. It
was the delayed application to the efforts of the Enlightenment of the metaphor
of peeling an onion.
The counterposition was expressed in its most drastic form by Heine in his later
years. It is true, he says, that the battle of philosophy against religion is carried
on with the goal of destroying the latter and allowing the former to prevail, as in
the replacement of the ancient gods by the Christian God and again in the
finishing off of Christianity by contemporary philosophy, but in both cases
without final success and with a prospect of repetition. A new religion will
certainly come, the philosophers will get fresh work again, and once more in
vain: "The world is a great stable, which cannot be cleaned as easily as that of
Augeas because while one sweeps it the oxen remain inside and continually pile
up more dung. . . . " 11 This gloomy allusion to one of the labors of Hercules
tells us nothing about their futility, which was presumably out of the question for
the myth of the superhuman son of Zeus. But it reminds one of the cynicism with
which Napoleon had confirmed the failure of the Enlightenment, when he said
on Saint Helena, regarding the way in which his age mythicized him: "They

 Page 47

make a Hercules out of me!'' 12 Still, this Napoleon had considered declaring
himself to be the son of God, but had recognized that this was no longer feasible
because the peoples were too enlightened. Apotheosis, without the name, was
only the equivalent of the staging of theophanies. The peoples, as it turned out,
were not sufficiently enlightened to make impossible, as a reality, something
whose name alone had been successfully put out of circulation. Though the
ailing emperor might be surprised that the role of Hercules was ascribed to him,
the rising General Bonaparte, who equipped his expedition to Egypt in 1798
with every attribute of the mythical repetition of the campaigns of Alexander the
Great and of Rome's taking of new provinces, would not have been.
When the enterprise had failed, he was also done with Enlightenment and
revolution: "I am sick of Rousseau since I have seen the Orient; the savage is a
dog."13 This, even before the coup d'etat, is the failure of the Enlightenment in
the shattering of its presuppositions, all the way to the intolerability of what was
supposed to be the foundation of the Egyptian adventure: not only the imitation
of Alexander and of Rome, but also the opening up of access to the oldest
culture as a legitimation of the new reason, as the establishment of a connection
across the indifference of the ages. That is certainly thoroughly mythically
conceived. The contingent event is legitimized by establishing ownership of the
whole of history, and is shattered by the public exhibition of this claim. The
myth was cut short by reality. The conqueror could not tolerate the fact that this
Orient did not look the way it would have had to look in order to be worthy of
his theophany.
Heine's comparison of the world to the Augean stables could not explain, any
more than Napoleon's cynicism could, why philosophy had not been able to
accomplish what it had claimed to accomplish. Someone who declares a
question to be a philosophical one has an initial duty, as a minimum
accomplishment that could be accepted in place of an answer, to characterize the
type of answer that is required or possible. The answer to the question why
philosophy as enlightenment was not able to accomplish what it had claimed to
accomplish could be of the following kind: The philosophical 'destruction'a was
aimed at and adapted to contents that were easy to hit; and for that very reason it
failed to appreciate the intellectual and emotional needs that these contents had
to satisfy. Further, it imagined the process of such a destruction as a critical coup
de main with which, overnight,

 Page 48

the walls of La Flèche were to be torn down.b Finally, it saw seriousness only on
its own side, in its determination to pursue denudation, and not on the side of the
secure situations [Geborgenheiten], which it regarded as superficial.
Otherwise the fascination would not have been allowed to escape it, either, to
which it itself always succumbed when it sought to appropriate or to win back
the great images of myth as forms in which its truth was concealed. The
temptation to pursue allegorical interpretations was characteristic of philosophy
right into the last century, if not even into our own. But it was never regarded as
being instructive beyond the level of rhetoric and style. Romanticism generally
seemed contemptible to philosophers, although they could have learned from it
what underlay the stubbornness of the resistance to the Enlightenment and the
final success of opposition to it in the name of the primeval truths. Romanticism
is certainly an antiphilosophical movement, but that is not sufficient to make it
unimportant and barren for philosophy. There is nothing that philosophers
should have analyzed more eagerly than the opposition to their cause. In this
connection they must be clear that the antithesis between myth and reason is a
late and a poor invention, because it forgoes seeing the function of myth, in the
overcoming of that archaic unfamiliarity of the world, as itself a rational
function, however due for expiration its means may seem after the event.
One of the arguments of Romanticism was that the truth could not and should
not be as young as the Enlightenment had undertaken to present it as being. The
reasons may often be obscure, but there is also a dear one, namely, that
otherwise man's rational nature would be badly constituted, and consequently he
could not be confident of his present or his future either. To the unseriousness of
myth, Romanticism attaches the seriousness of the conjecture that in it there is
hidden the unrecognized, smuggled contents of an earliest revelation to mankind,
perhaps of the recollection of Paradise, which was so nicely interchangeable
with Platonic anamnesis. Thus it reevaluated the Enlightenment's idea that myths
were stories from the childhood of the human race; that is, that while they were
anticipations of the future, more reliable business of theory, they were calculated
to appeal to the susceptibility of a reason that, while it was as yet unilluminated,
nevertheless did not wish to leave everything alone. In names, the original
language of myth had left behind something of its paradisaic

 Page 49

immediacy: "Each of their names seemed to be the key to the soul of each thing
in nature," Novalis indicated, referring to a distant and different understanding
by means of a "sacred language." 14 Against the expectation of all truth from a
science that always remains in the future, Romanticism and historicism set up
the more or less distinct idea of a substance of tradition that changes only in
form and that seemed to allow even recovery of the original idea, if one only had
a key. Even if no original idea was rediscovered, still, a by-product of this
turning was the higher valuation of names as very reliable invariants. Even
where conquerors repeatedly moved in over the established residents and forced
their language upon them, the names of waters and of summits, of prominent
features of the landscape and of fields, remained the old ones. The earliest
orientations of dwelling got their evidence, as something that couldn't be
invented, from this stationariness beneath all migrations.
What was meant by the antithesis of reason and myth was in fact that of science
and myth. When the latter antithesis is claimed as already applying to the ancient
world, with the phrase that was put into currency by the title of Nestle's book,
Vom Mythos zum Logos [From myth to logos],c then that is a secondary effect of
the characteristic endeavor of Neo-Kantianism to make Plato the founder of the
theoretical tradition that is supposed to have found its logical completion in
Kant. The concept of 'hypothesis' becomes the main item of evidence for this.
Paul Natorp's work, Platos Ideenlehre [Plato's doctrine of ideas],d dated (in its
foreword) "Marburg, 1902," not only founded and justified the amazing interest
of the subsequent half century in Plato and in ancient philosophy in general, but
also had the specific consequence that Plato's services on behalf of such an early
projection of scientific thought could be asserted and praised only at the cost of
playing down the role of his philosophical myths and banishing them to the
marginality of stylistic ornamentation.
The importance of this effect of Neo-Kantianism cannot be over-estimated. If
Plato had already traversed half of the distance to Kant, there no longer needed
to be the "chasm of a historical emptiness and wasteland" between Plato and
Kant, across which a bridge would first of all have to be built.15 Here, for the
first time, the Enlightenment's image of history is fundamentally and definitively
altered: The modern age does not begin with an absolute act of foundation at the
edge of the abyss of dark epochs preceding it; instead, the Renaissance, as a

 Page 50

renewal of Platonism and thus of the "Idea as hypothesis," already has the rank
of science. Figures like Nicholas of Cusa, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and
Leibniz move onto the single plane of the continuation of the Platonic
inheritance.e There is no leap from Plato to Kant, nor is there between Idea and a
priori, since both refer to the same "fundamental idea of scientific world
history," which is present here for the first time.
Now it will be easy to see that the neglect of the art myths in Plato could not
have been maintained for long. But the necessary correction was only an
individual move in a more comprehensive correction that intended to take that
concept of a scientific world history completely seriously and was no more
prepared to accept a hiatus between myth and logos than between the ancient
world and the modern age. Still within Neo-Kantianism, a philosophy of myth
comes into beingand not of myth only, but of those phenomena of expression
that in their turn are not theoretical, not yet scientific. This philosophy makes
one conceive of the mythical as the aggregate of those accomplishments that, as
surrogates, are necessary and possible in order to endure and to live in a world
that has not yet found its way to any theory. If Hermann Cohen had still said that
"idea" was "unquestionably the most important concept of the language of
philosophy," for Cassirer the most important concept is one that is remote from
the actual terminologies of philosophy and consequently is able to transcend
their historythe concept of symbol. The theory of the symbolic forms allows one
for the first time to correlate the expressive means of myth with those of science,
but in a historically irreversible relationship and with the unrelinquishable
presupposition of science as the terminus ad quem [goal toward which the
process is directed].
Myth is made obsolete by what comes after it; science cannot be made obsolete,
however much, in each of its steps forward, it itself makes the preceding steps
obsolete. More subtly historicized than in the Enlightenment's crude expectations
of the reason that was to be emancipated by it but for the actual
accomplishments of which it had, at the same time, a low regard, myth moves
into a position that has a functional value of its own only in relation to a totality
that counts, as though as a matter of course, as something that can already be
surveyed. It is a delay in a history of which it is always well established how it
will continue. Such prior knowledge from the point of view of the supposed goal
prevents one from focusing on myth as a mode of

 Page 51

working up reality, which has its own legitimacy. Instead it is the placeholder of
a reason that cannot rest content with this accomplishment and that ultimately
subjects it to measurement against categories with which science comprehends
itself in the stage of its completion. With science, it appears, we have 'come
through' [ausgestanden] the affinity to myth. Nowhere does it appear, as a
temptation or a way out, that one could relapse into the system of forms and the
capacity for totality that characterized the mythical phase of history. At the same
time it remains curious that precisely the recognition of myth's specific
'rationality' should render it definitively archaic and 'bygone.'
Against the background of his Neo-Kantianism, it is not without irony that
Cassirer, the theorist of myth, completed as the last in the long sequence of his
works The Myth of the State, which appeared only in 1946, a year after his death.
Naturally this was a domain for which the philosophy of symbolic forms had
least of all made provision, a domain in which it was at a loss. What Cassirer
registers is fundamentally a unique Romantic regression, which it does not seem
possible to fit into any philosophy of history.
The historian of philosophy, of science, of the cultural subject, of the
consciousness of reality, cannot too generously overlook such Romantic
thrustswhich breach the image of a reason that irresistibly secures its rightsso as
to avoid being disturbed in his philosophy of history. Rationality and
irrationality are not predicates of the universe, Nietzsche claimed, and he by no
means wanted this knowledge to be entitled Romanticism. What is called
Romanticism is not, after all, merely that. Philosophy easily integrated this into
its history, like so much that had gone before, and imputed itself even to those
who, in these and other forcible dicta, proclaimed themselves to be excluded
from it and believed that by this means they could decree its end at the same
time. As such, certainly everyone who lives by the possibility of confusing the
end of an unloved reality with the beginning of an anticipated one is such a
Romantic without the title, even if Novalis's "blue flower" has changed its color,
a century later, to the "black flower" in George's Algabal.f
Affinity to myth always consists in finding and naming the subject of which the
last of the correct stories can be told. Even what is traditionally most abstract can
become a name, as soon as it is transformed into an acting or a suffering subject.
It can be as insubstantial in appearance as "Being." When it has become the
name of a subject

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that is pregnant with stories, this can be gathered from people's considering the
possibility of, or actually, no longer writing it like the old abstract noun. What
makes "the story of Being"g into another piece of Romanticism is the
circumstance, which is presupposed in it, that the true future can be nothing but
the true past. Not as the 'turning back' of man who has been promoted to the
status of the subject of history, but as the 'return' of the Being that was hidden,
throughout an epoch, by metaphysics. Its returnnot foreseen, but only to be
awaitedis no better than the new creation that must result from the impending
chaos, at whatever price.
Common to all affinities to myth is the fact that they do not make one believe or
even allow one to believe that anything could have been definitively 'come
through' in the history of mankind, however often people believed they had put it
behind them. That is not a matter of course, since myth itself speaks of monsters
that have been subdued, of power that has been refined. Historical experience
seems to speak against any finality of restraints that have been or can be arrived
at. We have learned to regard 'overcomings' of this and that with mistrust,
especially since the conjecture, or the suspicion, of latencies has arisen. We are
acquainted with regressions to early states, with primitivisms, barbarisms,
brutalisms, atavisms. Should declines and extinctionsh be excluded here? They
contain the consolation of what they could make possible again. Withering away
can offer less consolation than being struck dead by the stars in their fall.
If there are not to be alternative mythogonies [accounts of the genesis of myth]
between which a decision is possible, still doubtless there will be a typology of
them, just as there is in the case of cosmogonies. In connection with the latter, if
I see the situation correctly, we have a choice between one initial situation where
matter is distributed uniformly and extremely thinly in space, and another where
the primal matter is concentrated to the highest possible degree in a single
almost pointlike center of mass. Kant and Laplace took the first hypothesis as
their point of departure, and the more recent cosmogonies, since the discovery of
the galactic Doppler effect and the Hubble constant, take the explosion of the
concentrated mass as theirs.
For the problem of mythogony there are fundamental theses that correspond
reasonably accurately to this rough sketch of a typology of theorems. They can
best be described, by analogy to the classical

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alternative theories of biological development, as preformation and epigenesis.

The theory, modeled on Gestalt psychology, of the excess pressure of datain
other words, the postulation of the cultural 'digestion' [Verarbeitung] of an
original 'inundation of stimuli'is contradicted by the asserted or actually
extensive correspondence of contents and basic forms of myth [in different
cultures]. Such correspondences have provoked both genetic and metaphysical
deductions.
The culture-circle theory was based on the assumption of a tradition extending,
with a high degree of constancy, through man's entire history, and traced the
cultural correspondences back to an initial condition of mankind in an original
circumscribed region. 16 Mankind's capacity for transporting constants through
time and space, in this theory, looks amazing. If one doesn't concede it, one can't
avoid more or less explicit assumptions to the effect that man is fundamentally
equipped, independently of cultural tradition, with categorical or symbolic
modes of 'digestion.' One is then threatened by the fate of all Platonisms: The
derivation of accomplishments from innate or remembered forms can 'explain'
everything only by the fact that it has been there all along. If one had to
acquiesce in that, one would at any rate have acquiesced in the weakest form of
theory.
The giving of names largely escapes the great theoretical alternatives. In
understanding it, one is caught between the original quality of the "momentary
gods" postulated by Hermann Usener and the late construction that generalizes
the formation of names through allegory. It is the dilemma that Socrates
arbitrates in the dialogue with Philebus that carries that latter's name. Philebus
had declared hedone*, pleasure, which governs everything and evades every
discussion of its justification, as his goddess, and had given her the name of her
concept. Socrates insists that this goddess too must retain her old and official
cult name of Aphrodite.
It is not only ironical that the Socrates who was shortly to be indicted and
condemned on charges of rejecting the state gods takes his stand against the
apotheosis of a philosophical abstractionPlato must also have meant ironically
the fact that the one who appealed to his daimonion [tutelary spirit] as a final
authority, beyond the need for justification, denied his opponent the same
privilege of introducing a 'new god,' an authority having no need for
justification. Socrates rejects specifically the omnipotent divinity of pleasure that
is capable of being singled out by philosophyin favor of an Aphrodite who is
bound

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up, by myth, in the division of powers on Olympus, and is provided for in the
state cult only among others.
In the Philebus dialogue, the correlate of the mythical pattern of that Olympian
interconnectedness is the existential metaphor of the mixed drink of life. The
insistence on the old name is only the foreground aspect of resistance to the
attributes of philosophical gods, equipped as they are with universal quantifiers,
and to their monocracy. The rejection of Philebus is more radical than that of
other opponents of Socrates: He withdraws from the dialogue.
The fact that myth has to do with origins is far from consecrating it for the later
observer; the fact that it ever got free of them, that it is able to characterize and
make comprehensible the distance between itself and them, is the quintessence
of what a 'mythology' [a study or doctrine of myth] can still offer. This includes
what is achieved by a stabilization of names that is remote from controversy. It
is over-stating the case to go the full length of characterizing this already as
"legitimacy"; it is more nearly the trivial qualitya 'premodality'of the taken-for-
grantedness of something that is named in the life-world, a quality that it
accumulates. At the end of his "Princess of Babylon," with the characteristic
suspension between ironical respect and enlightened disdain in which he leaves
facts about exotic cultures, Voltaire comments in regard to the identity of names
of the star and the port city of Canopus that no one had ever known whether the
god of this name had founded the city or the inhabitants of the city had made the
god for themselves, whether the star had given its name to the city or the city to
the star: "All that is known is that the city and the star were very old. But that is
also all that can be known of the origin of things, of whatever kind they may be."
17
Canopus, a city on the western arm of the Nile Delta, is supposed to have been
founded by the Spartans in honor of the mythical steers-man in Menelaus's ship;
since the first-magnitude star of the same name dominates the southern
constellation of the ship Argo, the analogy is immediately evident. The astral
school of mythology was no less productive than the sexual one in attaching a
correlate to every feature of myth: to the constellations, the daily and annual
motions of the sun, the phases of the moon, the planets. Since our purpose here
is not to devise hypotheses about the origin of myths, it remains to compare this
perhaps earliest success in mastering the public aspect

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of the reality of the life-world by means of names with the latest one, which
relates to the opposite pole, the psychic underworld.
No success in hitting on names can be compared to Freud's. To go on to present
evidence of that would violate every relevant adage. What I would like to
present evidence of is an element of biographical significance in the office of
assigning names to 'subterranean' phenomena. Significances simply crowded in
upon Freud. No doubt he distilled what he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess on April 14,
1898, about an Easter trip to Istria, a trip that also immediately played a role in
The Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud reports to his friend in Berlin on his inspection of the stalactite caves in
the Carso near Divaca *, an underworld filled with "giant horsetail, pyramid
cakes, tusks growing upwards, curtains, corn-cobs, tents and draperies, hams and
poultry hanging from above," and on the discoverer of Rudolf's Cave, a decayed
and alcoholic genius who immediately revealed himself to the analyst's gaze as a
figure of the conversion of libido: "When he said he had already been in 36
'holes' in the Carso, I recognized him as a neurotic and his conquistador exploits
as an erotic equivalent." The man's ideal was "to come to Vienna to get ideas for
naming his stalactites from the things in the museums."18 Down below there had
been, in Freud's own words, "Tartarus itself," an underworld not inferior to
Dante's fantasies of the Inferno. It cannot be accidental that Freud gave the
friend who was initiated into his constructions such a detailed report of the caves
and of their discoverer and name-seeker. Consider the fact that this
correspondence also shows us Freud's most influential name-invention, his
recourse to Oedipus. And his first theory of the endogenous formation of myths
as images of the psychic apparatus.
Only to someone who, like Fliess, speculated along with and ahead of him could
Freud communicate the rough idea of a "psycho mythology": "Can you imagine
what 'endopsychic myths' are? They are the latest product of my mental labor.
The dim inner perception of one's own psychical apparatus stimulates illusions,
which are naturally projected outwards. . . . "19 It is completely inappropriate for
the editors to refer us, in connection with this earliest mythogony, to the treatise
"Creative Writers and Daydreaming" ["Der Dichter und das Phantasieren"] of
1906, where myths are called the ''age-long dreams of young humanity" and are
thus given a phylogenetic status; whereas the "endopsychic myths" are not
primarily contents of the

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psychic apparatus and of the memories it possesses but are rather something like
its muddled self-representation, which 'explains' both the diffusion of myth
around the world and also the intensity of its reception. One is almost tempted to
impute to Freud a reading of Kant's "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer" ["Träume eines
Geistersehers" (1766)], as the means by which he arrived at this type of theorem;
but there are no other grounds for such an imputation.
In this connection it is important to observe that Freud's earliest description of
the psychic apparatus, in the "Entwurf einer Psychologie" (so named only by its
editors)i of 1895, does not yet seem to take notice of the function of assigning
names. The possibility cannot be excluded that it was the cave guide in the
Istrian Carso, three years later, possessed as he was by the lifework of finding
names, who first made it manifest to Freud that any reconnoitering of the
unknown is confronted with the urgency of seeing that unknown also as
something unnamed and in need of naming. For the attempt at describing the
psychic apparatus and its internal energy drama in the language of
neurophysiology and brain anatomy had already ceased to satisfy the author of
The Interpretation of Dreams. He replaces a world of excitation quantities and
stimulus conduits with a system of agencies and their 'separation of powers,' a
system that seems to tend irresistibly toward the condition of hypostatization, of
personification, or at any rate of active powers. While the structure of the neuron
theory of 1895 presents itself to the observer in terms of the horizontal metaphor
of a system of conduits, the system of the ego and the unconscious, the superego
and the id, desire and censorship, discharge and repression, instinctual energy
and symbolism, traumatic injury and neurotic symptom, is that of a vertical
imagination, which as such would already have an affinity to myth, even if it had
never reached the point of producing a mythogony. In the "Entwurf" of 1895
there were, in contrast, only currents, stimulus escape, zero levels, resistance to
discharge, contacts and barriers, perception and memory cells, openings of and
preferences for paths, quantity reserves and degrees of penetrability, screens and
sieves. Even the ego, which is introduced separately and almost ceremonially, is
nothing but a certain state of organization of this system of channels, a mere
degree of complication of its conductivity for primary processes. 20
When Freud nevertheless proclaims the self-perception of the psychic apparatus
as his first mythogony, the mythogony of the endogenous

 Page 57

myths, he anticipates the tendency toward transformation of the early sketch all
the way to the metapsychological essays of 1915. He invents the term
metapsychology as a counterconcept to metaphysics as early as a year after the
"Entwurf einer Psychologie," in the letter to Fliess of April 2, 1896:
Metapsychology is something like the reverse translation of the outward
projection of those individual endogenous myths; in other words, it is also their
employment as orientation in the construction of the internal dramaturgy. But
there remain mysteries regarding the final state of the planned Metapsychology,
since of the twelve pieces of work belonging to it only five were published in
1915, and the remaining seven were probably destroyed.j The concept of
"endopsychic myths" would after all have finally led to the kind of explanation
exemplified by 'innate ideas,' although what presents itself in the confused self-
perception of the psychic apparatus is not supposed to be a complex of ideas
complete with content. While the fundamental equipment for the production of
myths would then be the psychic functional system itself, this would involve its
depriving itself of its functional character. It is the explanation of myth as the
latency of prehistoric experiences of mankind that detaches it, for the first time,
from the mechanism of ontogenetic projection.
The last step is only taken at a very late date, when, with the concept of
"construction," Freud expresses resignation in regard to the complete penetration
of infantile amnesia. In "construction" the patient receives, in place of the
recollection that he fails to come up with, an offer of a made-up story, an
hypothesis of what he doesn't know, which under favorable conditions he
accepts as his 'truth.' Here for the first time, in 1937, the place of the early
endogenous myth has been taken by an exogenous onea means employed, in a
state of desperation, to satisfy the unrelinquishable need for truth. In this year of
writing ''Constructions in Analysis" one of his life's final perceptions of
significance overcomes Freud, one that connects him to his earliest mythogony:
His student Marie Bonaparte writes to him, on December 30, 1936, that she has
obtained his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess from a person entrusted with it
by Fliess's widow in Berlin. Freud responds to her, on January 3, 1937, that "the
matter of the correspondence with Fliess has stirred me deeply. . . . I don't want
any of it to become known to so-called posterity." 21 That already falls under the
category of 'significance' ['Bedeutsamkeit'].

 Page 58

Translator's Notes
a. Destruktion. This also happens to be the term used by Martin Heidegger in
Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 41ff. (pp. 18ff. of German editions) for what he
proposed to do to the history of ontology. As "deconstruction," it has recently
been popularized by Jacques Derrida.
b. La Flèche was a Jesuit college at which Descartes and other prominent
seventeenth-century rationalists studied.
c. Wilhelm Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos: Die Selbstentfaltung des
griechischen Denkens von Homer his auf die Sophistik und Sokrates (Stuttgart:
Kröner, 1940).
d. Paul Natorp, Platos Ideenlehre: Eine Einführung in den Idealismus (Leipzig:
Dürr, 1903).
e. For some of the author's own ideas on the relationship between Plato and early
modern thought, see his "Pseudoplatonismen in der Naturwissenschaft der
frühen Neuzeit," Abhandlungen der Akademie zu Mainz (Geistes- und
sozialwiss. Kl.), 1971, no. 1.
f. The "blue flower" is a central symbol in Novalis's (Friedrich von
Hardenberg's) Heinrich von Öfterdingen (1800). The "black flower" of Stefan
George's Algabal can be found in the Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke (Berlin:
Bondi, 1927 1934), vol. 2, p. 96.
g. 'Seinsgeschichte' (author's scare quotes)Heidegger's term for the vicissitudes
of man's relation to Being.
h. Untergänge, as in Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the
West).
i. The translator gave this the title "Project for a Scientific Psychology," in S.
Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 347 445.
j. The five papers are published under the editor's collective title, "Papers on
Metapsychology," in Freud, Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth
Press, 1953- ), vol. 14, pp. 103 258.

 Page 59

3
'Significance'
Ah, les vieilles questions, les vieilles réponses, il n'y a que ça!
Beckett, Fin de partie
[All life long the same questions, the same answers!]
More important than to know what we are not going to know, namely, how myth
came to exist and what experiences underlie its contents, is to work up and to
coordinate with history the ideas about the origin and the original character of
myth that we have made for ourselves at various points in our history. For like
the work expended on its figures and contents themselves, the account of its
genesis that is put forward by mythology [i.e., by the study of myth] is also a
reagent having an effect on a way of working on myth, and on the obstinacy of
inheritance with which it accompanies us through history. If there is anything at
all that deserves the attribution of the phrase "It stays with me," it is the archaic
imagination, whatever it may have been that provided its initial material.
Two antithetical concepts make it possible to classify ideas of the origin and the
originative character of myth: poetry and terror. At the beginning stands either
the imaginative extravagance of anthropo-morphic appropriation of the world
and theomorphic enhancement of man, or the naked expression of the passivity
of fear and horror, of demonic captivity, magic helplessness, utter dependency. It
is better, however, not to go on to equate this pair of rubrics with the antithesis
between irresponsibility and an orientation to reality.

 Page 60

That the poets lie is an old saying, and the discovery of truth in poetry may only
be an episode of the late aesthetic metaphysics that wanted art to stop being the
mere exercise of imagination. That poets are the earliest stage of the
transmission of work on myth that is accessible to us is a phenomenon of
foreshortening that is a result of our point of view; above all, it does not mean
that the poetry involved in the work of myth must have given myth a
mendacious character. When Jean Paul says, in his School for Aesthetics, that
"the Greeks believed in the gods and heroes they sang about," this serves him in
the first place and above all as a contrast to the classicism of his time, for which
these gods of the Greeks were "only flat images and empty dress for our
feelings, not living beings." At the same time Jean Paul has something that he
can blame for the fact that the ease with which myth had been produced had not
survived; it was the introduction of the concept of "false gods" that brought the
song of the gods to an end. 1 More than imagining their restoration through art,
Jean Paul expressed his age's longing for gods who could only promote man's
serenity through their own.
When Romanticism rediscovered fairy tales and legends, it did so with an almost
defiant gesture, in the manner of the Enlightenment and in opposition to it: Not
everything was deception that had not been allowed past the checkpoint of
reason. Bound up with this was the new evaluation of the sphere of the origin of
these materials and figures, which had begun with Vico and Herder. The early
times of the peoples, before the episode of classical antiquity, had not only been
characterized by darkness and dread, it was asserted, but also and above all by
the purest childlike condition in which truth and lie, reality and dream, are not
distinguished from one another.
The understanding of myth, or what we can still call mythology, has not
benefited from being harnessed into these antitheses of Enlightenment and
Romanticism, of realism and fiction, of belief and unbelief. If there is something
correct in Jean Paul's observation that the gods of the early times were not
subject to the question of whether they were the true gods until they had been
demonized as the false ones, then his formula that the Greeks believed what they
sang must also be understood in a way that avoids involvement with the concept
of 'belief,' which came into being only when the condemnation and the sin of
unbelief existed. For the question raised by the latter was after all only
marginally the question of whether a god or gods existed

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at all; centrally, it was always the question which god was the true god or which
gods were admissible and reliable.
The antithesis of poetry and terror in connection with the origin and the
beginning of myth, and in connection with its originative quality itself, is tied to
more general premises of the kind of projection in which the philosophy of
history engages. While Romanticism's opposition to the Enlightenment, together
with the postulatesince Vico and Herderof mankind's initial childlike poetry, was
not necessarily presented as a history of decline, beginning with a golden age
and continuing through a series of metals of declining quality, it did unavoidably
lead to the thesis that great resourcefulness, effort, and art would be needed in
order to recover and to renew at least something of the deteriorated and buried
achievements of the early times. Until, in the course of Romanticism's
development, the original poetry became the original revelation, which had to be
recovered.
Ignoring for now the difference between original poetry and original revelation,
Romanticism contained an important consolation, in the area of the philosophy
of history, for the age to which it had to recommend itself: the consolation of the
guarantee that mankind did not have to be deprived entirely, in its substance and
its potential, of what it had once been. This is also something belonging to the
nature of myththe suggestion of repeatability, of a 're-cognition' of elementary
stories, which approaches the function of ritual, by which the inviolable
regularity of actions that are pleasing to the gods is secured and imprinted on the
mind.
With his "Talk on Mythology," published in 1800, Friedrich Schlegel not only
stamped the Romantic conception of myth but also freed it from the anti-
Enlightenment schema of a history of decline. This "Talk" is the second
theoretical excursus inserted into his Dialogue on Poetry, and is delivered by the
figure of Ludovico, who is characterized, at his introduction, as one who "with
his revolutionary philosophy pursued annihilation on a grand scale." 2When the
representative of the age who is typified in this way speaks of a ''new
mythology," and makes it his program, the theory of myth transforms itself into
a myth. This revolution becomes the recurrence, under a new name, of the
primeval, which cannot have a position in history as it is, but instead has to
become a 'fixed point' over against it. Myth permits one to take a stand outside
history not only as its onlooker but also as one who can enjoy the use of its
oldest properties. In myth, the

 Page 62

mythologist's imagination narrates its own history, the cosmogony by which it

emerged from chaos with the aid of Eros. This is why there can be a 'new myth'
whenever the poetic imagination comes to itself and this, its own story, becomes
its subject.
What is characteristic even of 'programmatic' myth is that it is not proposed
without totality and below the level of a pretension to totality: It asserts that what
at present is called "physics" has lost this very totality, has reduced itself to
"hypotheses" and thereby forfeited 'intuition,'a which should not be abandoned
in any relationship to nature. If hypothesis were supposed to have taken the place
of myth, and physics that of the genealogy of the gods, then it would
nevertheless beonce againunderstanding of the ultimate intention of hypothesis
that reveals the possibility of a "new mythology.'' The decisive move is
concealed in the seemingly naive rhetorical question: "Why should what has
once been not come alive again?" 3If the Enlightenment had inquired about what
should not come alive again, and equipped it with all the attributes of obscurity
and terror, the Romantic sees himself as obliged to prove that the sort of thing
that he longs for as a new reconciliation of science and poetry has already
existed as a phenomenon that is simply repeatable.
In his early years, the same Friedrich Schlegel who was to discover the poetry of
archaic myth had less comforting thoughts about the starting point of human
dealings with the divine. The first presentiment of the infinite and the divine, he
wrote, had filled man, "not with joyful amazement, but rather with savage
terror."4Could it be that he considered the early poetic phase that he discovered
for Romanticism with his "Talk on Mythology" (or rediscovered, after Vico and
Herder) as a condition that is already at a distance from the "savage terror"? For
it is undoubtedly an elementary and proven technique not just to shiver in the
dark, but to sing as well.
Since Rudolf Otto, "the holy,"b the quality of the numinous that appears in men
and in things, is something of which the effect, or at least one effect, is fearthe
mysterium tremendum [terrible mystery], which may be reduced in intensity in
the milder forms of awe and reverence, of wonder and amazement. Precisely to
transform the original emotional tension of a "savage terror" into distance, to
elaborate it as something concretely perceptible, is part of the function of rites
and of mythfor instance, in the way in which, in ritual, the numinous object is
shown, presented, conveyed in a procession, displayed, or

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touched, as when, in one world religion, the goal of the pilgrimage that is
undertaken once in a lifetime is to kiss the holy meteorite in the Kaaba in Mecca.
The center of the numinous sphere not only has a form and a name but above all
is strictly localized, which is important in defining the direction of prayer,
wherever one is in the world.
Too little thought is given to the meaning of such localization for what is at first
the diffuse quality of the numinous. "The holy" is the primary interpretation of
the undefined 'power' [Mähtigkeit] that is assumed and felt to exist on the
strength of the simple fact that man is not the master of his fate, of the duration
and circumstances of his life. When the primary interpretation of undefined
'power' is understood in this way, rites and myths are always secondary
interpretations. Even if the subsequent interpretation of myths is termed
"secondary" in its turn, as a ''secondary rationalization"as a rationalization it
tends, not unambiguously and necessarily, but still in the direction of what had
already been accomplished by the primary interpretation of undefined 'power.'
'Reason' just means being able to deal with somethingin the limiting case, with
the world. If the numinous is supposed to have been the primary interpretation, it
is still already interpretation and not the thing itself that is interpreted. But we
possess no other reality than the one we have interpreted. It is real only as the
elementary mode of its interpretation, in contrast to what is excluded from it as
'unreal.'
Now the quality of the numinous is not only 'reduced' [abgebaut] and leveled
off, it is also distributed, in accordance with a pattern that it has in common with
polytheism, to objects, persons, directions. What was originally diffuse gains a
well-marked distribution. It is not an accident that the phenomenological study
of religion has derived its orientation from the institution of the taboo. Here the
numinous quality becomes the guarantee of commandments and prohibitions,
protected precincts, definite rights and prerogatives. The sign of what was
originally and involuntarily terrifying is transferred to what is appointed to
participate in this quality. The mystery cult, for example, painstakingly imitates
the quality of the unknown, even the quality of what is normally prohibited, but
permitted just once for the initiate.
While the 'reduction' function relates to what was originally and involuntarily
uncanny, the function of transfer and simulation affects things that of themselves
neither have this quality at all nor can attain it, as in the distinction that is
accorded to priestly persons, chiefs, and

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shamans. We have come closest to a description of this second quality in the

term sanction,c as something that rests on an oath, not only because the latter is
an institution rooted in religion, but also because it justifies the unusually high
penalites that are prescribed for violation of the institution or that can be
inflicted on sworn persons who lapse from the role that is defined and protected
by it, for example, as experts, officials, or soldiers. The 'oath of manifestation'd
even goes so far as to require an assertion leading to one's own disadvantage and
injury. But the simulation now consists only in the justification of the extent of
the penalty that the lawgiver considers it legitimate to prescribe for cases in
which the oath is broken.
Ernst Cassirer documented the transition of the experience of numinousness into
a regulated institution in a myth that was told by the Ewe:
When the first settlers arrived in Anvo, it is related that a man saw a giant baobab tree in the bush.
At the sight of the tree he took fright. He therefore went to a priest for an interpretation of this
occurrence. He was told that the baobab tree was a trô who wished to live with him and be
worshipped by him. 5

So his fright, we are told, was the sign whereby the man knew that such a trô-
spirit had manifested itself to him. But this story pushes two temporal stages
together, thus producing an anachronism: The taking fright at the sight of the
tree is already linked to the knowledge of what to do and who to turn to in the
case of such an experience; the depletion of power is already institutionally
regulated.
One should not designate that as pure primitivism. It is also a phenomenon of
delegation, that one asks someone what is to be done, that one seeks advice,
although for us such a situation would have the character of an extremely
individual perplexity [Ratlosigkeit, literally, "absence of advice," i.e., not
knowing who to turn to]. This myth of the establishment of religion quite
unabashedly presupposes the existence of the priesthood before the moment at
which the cult comes into existence; in other words, it joins the Enlightenment's
critique of religion in its assumption that the priests were the inventors of
religion. Taking fright when confronted with the baobab tree has already become
an admissible event because it is one that is parried by the institution in advance.
As such, it has lost its subjective function of producing confusion. The position
of the priest in the process of the development

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of culture becomes clear: While he is not a culture hero who makes possible or
improves human life by a great deed, still he is conceived in accordance with
this mythical prototype. All that he has to do is to know what is to be done in
each caseto have a knowledge the validity of which consists in the fact that no
one can come along who can subject it to 'critique,'
There is no leap involved in placing the great clearings of monsters from the
world, such as are illustrated by the cycle of myths about Hercules, alongside
this simple event. The Ewe's fear when confronted with the baobab tree, a fear
that is hardly intelligible any longer to the myth hearer, is (as it were) condensed
in the images of those monsters, which, as the form in which the terror of the
early times is embodied, do not make the earth unsafe any longer only because
there was someone who finished them off. The position of these monsters in the
system of mythical genealogy is often indefinite; they are not altogether divine
themselves, but they are neighbors of the gods. In Hesiod's catalog of monsters,
Medusa, among the Gorgons, was mortal, though she came of parents who
themselves were immortal. Only thus does she make it possible to represent fear
in its purest form but still as something that could be overcome. In Ovid, Perseus
ends the story of his victory over the Gorgon by saying that the snake hair of the
severed head, now on Minerva's shield, still terrifies her enemies:e "nunc
quoque, ut attonitos formidine terreat hostes, / pectore in adverso quos fecit,
sustinet angues" [And now, to frighten her fearnumbed foes, she still wears upon
her breast the snakes she made]. The inclusion of such prototypes of the
fearsome in sculpture and vase painting is the final step, in which what was
overcome, in the story, is also displayed. The image of Medusa is presented,
with a facial expression of suffering beauty, only from 300 onward.
B.C.

Nevertheless, Hesiod's commentator has to make a fine intellectual effort to

make comprehensible the difference between the frightfulness described in the
story and the beauty of the visual representation: "The idea that beauty, in the
extreme, can be lethal, and, in reverse, that what is lethal can be beautiful, may
contribute to this conception; for the fearsome effect of the Gorgon's head is
certainly unforgettable." 6
On the other hand Pegasus, the horse who carries Zeus's lightning and is thus a
functionary of his terror, never in ancient times became the carrier of the poet
and of his imagination. Artistic representation can never keep up with the
storyteller's generosity; it reduces Cerberus's

 Page 66

fifty mouths to two or three. Nothing can be as fearsome in a picture as in words.

Sphinxes and Sirens are aestheticized only at a late date. The primary process is
not destruction by a fearless hero but self-destruction as a result of the first
experience of ineffectiveness: in the case of the Sphinx, as soon as a man
withstands her magic; in the case of the Sirens, as soon as their song no longer
has its intended effect.
But it is always apparent that these are only rearguard actions in the world
decision that goes against the figures of terror. It was Zeus himself who
conquered the terrible earth-born Typhon, son of Tartarus with Gaea, and
prevented him from exercising the dominion over the earth to which he was
entitled by his ancestry. Only the mopping up of monsters that is decisive for the
world as a whole is the business of the god. Otherwise it is more that of his
potential successor: Hercules is recognizable, even at a distance, as a threat to
Zeus's power when he approaches very close to the domain of his father's
sovereignty with his slayings, laying low the sacred eagle that Zeus assigns to
the unceasing torment of Prometheus. It is a later harmonization that says that
this was done with Zeus's approval. Originally Hercules in this situation is
already the equal in strength who is close to taking over from Zeus himself.
Poetry or terror as the original reality of myththis antithesis is based on
projecting backward: Muses, nymphs, and dryads, as friendly and uplifting
animations of the landscape, direct one's gaze toward a free and pleasant initial
situation; Medusa the Gorgon, Harpies, and Furies induce a posteriori inferences
of a tortured consciousness of reality and of man's situation in it. Both types of
projection presuppose that late forms of myth existaren't merely left over, like
prehistoric toolsthat can induce and support those projective conjectures about
beginnings and, above all, motivate our sympathy. Independently of conjectures
about remote times, then, a philosophical theory of myth must prove itself with
respect to the question of whether it can make comprehensible the effectiveness
and the effective power of mythical elements, both archaic ones and possible
newly formed ones. The weakness of the traditional mythologies [theories of
myth], insofar as they are statements about mythologies as systems of myths,
seems to me to be that they sever the connection between, on the one hand, the
documentable history of the individual myths and, on the other hand, their
original state, prior to all historyand they do this because,

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on grounds derived from a philosophy of history, these theories have assigned

myth so definitively to an 'epoch' that everything after that can only be a
specialty of the histories of literature and art. The identification of myth with 'its'
primeval epoch places the accent of theory on the questionwhich is inaccessible
to us, and consequently delivered over to speculationof its origin.
Only if we take into consideration the history of myth, to the extent that it is not
primeval, will we be able to approach the question that we naturally ask: What
after all does the disposition toward mythical ways of looking at things consist in
and why is it not only able to compete with theoretical, dogmatic, and mystical
ways, but actually increased in its attractiveness by the needs that they awaken?
No one will want to maintain that myth has better arguments than science; no
one will want to maintain that myth has martyrs, as dogma and ideology do, or
that it has the intensity of experience of which mysticism speaks. Nevertheless it
has something to offer thateven with reduced claims to reliability, certainty,
faith, realism, and intersubjectivitystill constitutes satisfaction of intelligent
expectations. The quality on which this depends can be designated by the term
significance [Bedeutsamkeit], taken from Dilthey.
Erich Rothacker has laid down a "principle of significance."f Its purport is that
in man's historical world of culture things have 'valences' for attention and for
vital distance different from those they have in the objective world of things that
is studied by the exact sciences, in which the distribution of subjective value to
phenomena that are studied tends, in the norm, toward zero. Although such
indifference on the part of the analytical observer may never have been realized,
historically or biographically, nevertheless it is part of the ideal of the theoretical
attitude. The theoretical subject is only able to strive for indifference because it
is not identical with the individual subject and its finitude, but has developed
forms of integration that have an open temporal horizon. 'Significance' is related
to finitude. It arises under the imposed requirement that one renounce the
"Vogliamo tutto" [I want everything], which remains the secret drive for the
impossible.
The limiting case of significanceor already a case of going beyond the limitis the
good old 'judgment of taste,' which combines the pure subjectivity of its origin
with the exclusion of dispute that accompanies the claim to objectivity that is
made and is never fulfilled. A person who finds a work of art beautiful will
expect everyone else

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to share this judgment, even though he can know, and does know, that the
fulfillment of this expectation will only be a contingent event. This sort of
objectivity is an expression of subjective conclusiveness, that is, of the
unsurpassability of aesthetic determinations. In significance, the subjective
component can indeed be greater than the objective one, but the latter can never
return to zero. As a valence that was 'thought up,' significance would have to
break down. That is decisively important even for the phenomenon of the
simulated new myth; where it appears, it makes use of the established repertory
of procedures by which to secure an objective foundation, and dresses its
creation up in a more or less ritualized scientific manner, as for example
[Houston Stewart] Chamberlain, [Ludwig] Klages, or Alfred Rosenberg did, and
before them perhaps most clearly Bachofen. So significance must have its own
relationship to reality, a basis that has the status of reality. Status of reality does
not mean empirical demonstrability; the place of the latter can be filled by taken-
for-grantedness, familiarity, having been part of the world from the beginning.
Even when the story of Prometheus is supplemented by the invention of his
return from the Caucasus and his finding shelter in Athens in his old age, this is
based on the unquestionability of the figure, which is precisely not felt to be
something invented.
Significance is one of the concepts that can be explained but cannot, in the strict
sense, be defined. Heidegger associated it, together with 'involvement,' with the
'worldhood' of the world, and thus with the assemblage of being-in-the-world,
from which objects, as 'present at hand' with their properties, must first be
detached before one can bring to them a theoretical interest that is no longer
subjectively 'owned.'g Equipping something with significance is not something
that we can choose to do. Even granting that man makes history, still there is at
least one of its side effects that man does not make; this is the 'charging' of
constituent parts of the human world with significance. Whatever it may
arousereverence, astonishment, enthusiasm, rejection in different degrees of
intensity and in the form of unprovable damnatio memoriae [rejection from
memory], exertions to expel it from the collective consciousness, museum
custody, officially organized conservationall of these are ways of dealing with
what is significant, and differ from the obligatory uniformity with which
sciences administer and categorize their objects. Goethe gave its name to the
"imprinted form" [geprägte Form] that "through its life evolves,"h and Jacob
Burck-

 Page 69

hardt, following him, spoke of the "royal right of the imprinted form." This
includes everything that possesses 'pregnance,'i as opposed to indifference, but
also as opposed to the overwhelming evidence of, say, the mystical event. As
with the aesthetic object, part of the definition of significance is the way it
emerges from the diffuse surrounding field of probabilities. History, like life,
works against the tendency of a situation to be increasingly determined by
probability, against the "death instinct" as the point toward which the leveling-
off process converges. The outcomes and artifacts of history impress us as
notions that one wouldn't have believed any brain capable of. Pregnance is
resistance to factors that efface, that promote diffusion; resistance especially to
time, which nevertheless is suspected of being able to produce pregnance
through the process of aging. This suggests a contradiction, or at least a
difficulty.
I want to illustrate the difficulty by means of the comparison with which
Rothacker tries to make plausible the relationship between pregnance and time:
"The imprinted forms have a quite singular durability, inflexibility. The imprint
is not easy to obliterate. Once the imprinted forms are there, they are difficult to
alter. . . . Their being imprinted and even the tangibility that is added to that have
a conserving effect. Thanks to this they stand firm in the temporal flux, just as
stones simply outlast the passage of time. Stones over which the mountain
torrent flows stand still, they are there. The water flows, the stone stands still. It
is true that stones can be worn away by water, but that takes quite a long time;
they may also be carried further along, they may also be hit by rocks that are
rolling with them and be damaged, but they have durability in time." 7To be
sure, Rothacker immediately reduces his claim, saying that the image of the
stone and the mountain torrent exaggerates the duration of the imprinted forms
somewhat: They are not as firm as stones, only much firmer than the sand castles
that summer vacationers make on the ocean beach.
But the image is not only too strong, it is positively wrong. Time does not wear
away instances of pregnance; it brings things out in themthough one may not add
that these things were 'in them' all along. That holds, in the case of myth, least of
all for extensions. When Albert Camus said of Sisyphus that one should imagine
him as being happy, the change of 'sign' was an increase in the visibility of the
myth's potential. When Paul Valéry 'corrected' the Faust story by suggesting that
the only way we could picture the one who had once

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been tempted, now, was as himself tempting Mephistopheles, something became

perceptible that simply could not have been made up and added on, but was
irresistibly drawing near as the classical demon figure grew increasingly inferior.
These figures have their history even in the modern age, and Valéry wanted to
gain by force the position of having told their story for the last time. But the
configuration that had gained its stature in the course of four centuries only
gained in dimension once again. There is no trace of grinding away by time here.
That would in any case also presuppose that all the depth of relief had been
thought out and implanted in the figures at the beginning.
One may ask what are the means of operation with which significance 'works,'
and with which work on significance is done. If I list some of them, no claim to
comprehensiveness is implied. But some can be named in place of all (and in
place of those that are less common and less effective): simultaneity, latent
identity, the closed-circle pattern, the recurrence of the same, the reciprocity
between resistance and heightened existence, and the isolation of a thing or
action, in the degree of reality ascribed to it, to the point of excluding every
competing reality.
It may be desirable to provide a more detailed example of latent identity, one
that also, in a subtle way, demonstrates the element of the closed circle. In doing
so it is unavoidable that instead of archaic evidence we must accept material that
is closer to us in time, that is not mythical by virtue of the epoch from which it
derives but which nevertheless tends toward the qualities of mythso that it is also
always evidence for the proposition that the phenomenon of myth could not be
brought to an end with the protophilosopher's exclamation that now everything
was full of gods.
On December 17, 1791, Goethe's play Der Gross-Cophta [The supreme
magician] received its first performance, in Weimer. Its material was taken from
the "famous necklace story" of 1785, which had connected the charlatan
Cagliostro and the queen, Marie-Antoinette, in such an infamous mannerj that to
Goethe's eyes the abyss of the coming revolution had opened for the first time
and had driven him into a crazy kind of behavior that was incomprehensible to
those around him. Nevertheless the first thing to emerge from the affair was to
be the libretto of an opera buffa, "which seems to have been the real purpose

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of the event," as he writes from Rome to the Zurich composer Kayser on August
14, 1787.
Three months after its first performance, on March 23, 1792, Goethe tells the
duke's mother's regular Friday gathering about his experience during his journey
to Italy five years before, when he sought out the family of the conjurer,
Cagliostro. He reported this episode in the second part of the Italian Journey,
and in 1817 added a reference to the intervening publication of the documents of
Cagliostro's trial in Rome. One can feel a reluctance, in this retrospective
remark, to expose the connection that he had staged (not without use of the
embarrassing means of artfulness and deception) between the figure who had
entered history with such fateful results and the simple family in Palermo: "Only
now, when the whole affair is closed and beyond discussion, can I bring myself
to complete the official document by telling what I know." 8It may be that only
the downfall of Napoleon made it possible for Goethe to report on this
involvement with the background of the hated revolution before its outbreak,
during his last period of happiness in Italy.
Of Goethe's first narration of the story, in the intimate circle of the Friday
gathering, a quarter of a century before its publication, we have the report of
Karl August Böttiger, which contains at the end a small but (here) decisive
addition to its content.9During his stay in Palermo in 1787, Goethe had heard
that Cagliostro's family lived there, in the most miserable circumstances. In the
course of the trial [in Paris] the French court had undertaken inquiries regarding
the adventurer's origins, and Goethe was able to search out the advocate who had
carried them out. He had himself introduced to the mother and sister as an
Englishman who could give them an accurate account of Cagliostro's release
from the Bastille and of his successful escape to England. The sister, a poor
widow with three grown children, now tells how grieved she was that her
magnificent brother, at the time of his last departure into the great world, had
borrowed thirteen ducats (in the later text of the Italian Journey, fourteen
ounces) from her in order to redeem his pawned things, and up to the present
date had not paid his debt. Goethe's traveling funds are not enough to allow him
immediately to make good the small amount on the pretext that he will get the
money back from her brother in England.
The author of the report adds that what could not be done then was done from
Weimar after Goethe's return. Goethe had the money

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conveyed to the family by an English storekeeper in Palermo, and she who was
provided for thought that the money had really been collected by the foreigner
from her brother in England. The money arrived at Christmastime, and both
mother and sister credited the Christ child with moving the heart of the fugitive.
This stands in the letter of thanks that both of them addressed to Cagliostro and
that came into Goethe's hands by way of the middleman. Goethe read it to the
gathering, together with the other letter (which he had not delivered) from the
mother to the son. When the master trickster of the century is finally put on trial
in Rome, Goethe cannot continue his assistance to the family without revealing
the truth: "Now, since they have been informed of the imprisonment and
sentencing of their relative, all I can do is to contribute something to their
enlightenment and to their consolation. I still have in my hands a sum for them,
which I intend to send them, advising them at the same time of our true
relationship." Böttiger passes on the conjecture, which one member of the Friday
circle expressed, that this was the fee that Goethe had received from the
publisher Unger, in Berlin, for the Gross-Cophta. Böttiger agrees, remarking that
to him this is probable for other reasons as well: " . . . and thus it would indeed
be very singular that a sum of money that was earned by means of a play that
scourges Cagliostro's frauds and brazen impudence was conveyed to the same
Cagliostro's old mother and helpless sister in Palermo for their comfort, and that
both things were done by one and the same German."
Plainly, for the biographical or realistic consideration of what Goethe himself
describes, with one of the phrases he used for cases of 'significance,' as "a
singular adventure," the latent identity of the money is unimportant. His listeners
could not know the subjective importance of the story, which depends on the
presentiments of 1785. For them it acquired its significance from the closing of
the circle by which, through a series of metamorphoses, something that had had
its beginning in Palermo returned there. By this means not only was Giuseppe
Balsamo's unscrupulousness toward his mother and sister made up for, but a side
product of the great world-historical scandal was returned (independently of the
scandal's consequences) to that poor corner of Sicily, by way of the poet.
In the same year in which he told this story to the Friday gathering in Weimar,
Goethe came into contact, through the campaign in France, with the main line of
history, with what the affair of the necklace had

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turned into in the course of only seven years. Nor, in his account of the
campaign, does he fail to avail himself of the strongest mythical means by which
to express his fear, and at the same time his way of mastering it: ''In the year
1785, the affair of the necklace already terrified me, as though it were the
Gorgon's head . . . and all the subsequent events, from this time on, unfortunately
confirmed my terrible presentiments all too well. I carried them with me to Italy
and brought them back in even more intense form." He had only just finished
Tasso when "the world-historical present" began to fully engage his spirit. To
provide himself with consolation and entertainment in this situation, he tried, in
the form of the comic opera that had been in his mind for a long time, "to extract
a merry side from this monster." His effort at merriment proved unsuccessful, all
the more so as the composer Reichardt's did too. Thus it became a play with a
sharply negative effect: "A fearsome and at the same time a bad-tasting subject,
treated daringly and unsparingly, it frightened everyone; no heart found it
sympathetic. . . . " The public was put off, there was little comprehension, and
the poet even took secret pleasure "when certain people, whom I had often
enough seen exposed to deception, boldly assured us that one could not be
deceived by such gross means." 10
The search into Cagliostro's family background has a different meaning for the
listeners from the one it has for him who gives the account of it. For them it was
sufficient to conjecture the latent identity between the assistance and the
publisher's fee. For Goethe something else was also involved: the sobering of his
relationship with Lavater, who was one of those who had been deceived by the
supposed miracle worker Cagliostro, because they were all too ready to give
credence. About the time of the writing of the Sicilian section of the Italian
Journey, Goethe looks back, already with finality and with all the distance one
feels toward a debacle, on the failure of the century of the Enlightenment, which
had first showed itself symptomatically in the success of figures like Cagliostro.
One of the absurdities was that only the trial in Rome put an end to the
deceptions: "Who would have thought that Rome, of all places, would contribute
so much to the enlightenment of the world and the complete unmasking of an
impostor. . . . " What had come to light there redounded upon a public that
imagined itself already enlightened. The extract from the records of the trial was
"a fine document in the hands of any sensible reader. For years we had

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to look on in dismay while the deceived, the half-deceived and the deceivers
worshipped this man and his conjuring tricks, prided themselves upon their
association with him, and from the height of their credulous conceit pitied, if
they didn't scorn, common sense." Here one can discern even embitterment on
the part of one who must immediately, and not without reference to himself,
append the question that, continually recurring, formulates the worrisome aspect
of having a share in historical blame, as a result of having let things pass: "Who
did not prefer to keep silent during those times?" 11
The Kampagne in Frankreich [Campaign in France] was written years later,
again, than the Italian Journey, and again the description of the discomfort that
Goethe had felt around the middle of the eightiesand later recognized as a
historical faculty for sensing the imperceptible transition from foolishness to
delusion, from imagination to crimeis intensified: "I had had unhappy occasion,
for many years, to deplore the trickery of audacious visionaries and enthusiasts
by design, and had wondered, with aversion, at the incomprehensible delusion of
excellent people when confronted with such impudent importunities. Now the
direct and indirect consequences of such follies lay before me as crimes and
semicrimes against majesty, all of them sufficiently effective, when taken
together, to shake the finest throne on earth." It was the most extravagant
refutation of the supposed success of the Enlightenmentand its most refined
punishmentwhen Cagliostro entered Paris in 1781 and celebrated triumphs of the
most absurd sort, among them the conjuring up of the spirits of Voltaire,
Diderot, and d'Alembert.
The appearance of meaningful things in reality as a product of physical
processes is improbable. That is why improbable distinctly marked [ausgeprägt]
forms become indications of meaningfulness. In the most familiar case: natural
beauty, which can be mistaken not for the beauty of art but for artificiality.
Perhaps symmetry is the elementary example of a figure that resists
interpretation as accident, that suggests meaning but that is not yet aesthetic. We
no longer perceive this immediately, because we inhabit a world of technical
mass distribution that conceals the concentrated improbability of the appearance
of symmetries. But we still notice such symptoms when they consist in the
unexpected coincidence of events, in the self-closing of a circle of vital events,
or in the latent identity of things, persons, even of fictive subjects, across wide
stretches of space or time.

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There is never anywhere a lack of readiness to acquiesce in the suggestion that

what is apparently meaningless contains meaningfulness. It does not have to take
as much shape as the question, What does that mean? It already means, without
any 'what.' When the faithless son and brother, precisely by means of his
infamous deeds and (what is still more) through the agency of a poet, pays his
debt, which he has certainly long since forgotten, by providing, through his
entirely unintended intervention in history, the material for a theater piecethen
that is a concentration of circumstances that could not have been anticipated but
that nevertheless proves to be possible. Fictional materials cannot achieve this
suggestion of meaning; but the significance of myth is not recognizable as
something fictional, because it has no nameable author, because it comes from
afar and does not lay claim to a particular chronological position.
Significance is generated not only by intensification but also by power depletion.
By intensification, as a supplement to positive facts, to naked data: as the not
merely rhetorical enrichment of the facts of the case; and by power depletion as
the moderation of something intolerable, the conversion of something unnerving
into a source of forward pressure and movement. What Goethe accomplished
between the near insanity of his glimpse into the abyss in the necklace affair in
1785, its first working up in Sicily in 1787, the moral improvement of his
curiosity (after his return to Weimar) by the solace he provided to the Balsamo
family, and the theatrical transformation of the material, and, finally, the late
reversion to the events in the second part of the Italian Journey in 1817 and in
the Campaign in France of 1824, was the depletion of the power of something
that had unnerved him dangerously. The world around him, on the other handhis
audience in the Friday gathering in 1792perceives the significance as an
intensification of events that were banal in themselves by latent identity and the
closing of a circle, as a result of a small supplementary assumption about the
publisher's fee. For they had not participated in the outbreak of the primary
alarm; in fact they had observed it uncomprehendingly.
Significance also arises as a result of the representation of the relationship
between the resistance that reality opposes to life and the summoning up of
energy that enables one to measure up to it. The reason why Odysseus is a figure
of mythical quality is not only that his return to his native place is a movement
of the restoration of

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meaning, presented according to the pattern of the closing of a circle, which

guarantees the tenor of the world and of life as order against any semblance of
accident and arbitrariness. He is so also because he accomplishes his
homecoming against the most incredible resistances, and indeed not only those
of external adversities but also those of internal diversion and silencing of all
motivation. The mythical figure imprints on the imagination something that, as
an omnipresent elementary fact of the life-world, becomes accessible to
conceptual formulation only at a late stage: the enhancement of the value of the
goal of an action by a mere increase in the difficulty of carrying it out.
In the process, something of what is iconically represented goes over into the
way in which one is affected by the icon. It is not only that we apprehend
[ergreifen], in the myth of Sisyphus, what the single reality that is imposed on an
individual has to mean to himthe reality of the block of stone that he rolls up the
mountain and that always rolls back, pushing him down itwe also are struck
[ergriffen] by the fact that in the image we grasp something that the concept of
'reality' is too pale and general to represent to us. It consists, here, in perceiving,
in the extreme case of mythical inescapability, what it means for something to
determine the character of a person's existence. Georg Simmel already described
this under the heading of 'significance' at the turn of the century, in connection
with the subject of value: "Objects are not difficult to acquire because they are
valuable, but we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess them.
Since the desire encounters resistance and frustration, the objects gain a
significance that would never have been attributed to them by an unchecked
will." 12Value is a specific functional form of significance, one that tends
toward the objectification of comparison and thus of the possibility of exchange,
without ever entirely giving up the subjective element that is contained in the
'felt' value of something that is desired. Sisyphus is a mythical figuration of
futility from which we could also grasp, and perhaps only at a late date, the
importance of not being occupied and possessed by reality only, and only by a
single reality at that, but rather of enjoying a moderate realism. Odysseus is a
figure of the suffering that culminates in success, but for that very reason he is
exposed to criticism and correction, first by the Platonists, then also by Dante,
and most of all by the modern despisers of the 'happy

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ending,' as a symptom of a possibly 'whole' [heil] worldwith a sidelong glance at

the 'happiness' of Sisyphus.
Stoicism's allegorical interpretation already fundamentally disdained Odysseus's
homecoming and only looked at the Odysseus who was not overcome by
external fortunes and internal weaknesses: This was how the wise man had to
live, even without the agreeable and enervating addition of the homecoming.
This is why even Cato can be a more indisputable model of the wise man than
Hercules or Odysseus. 13To the Neo-Platonist, Odysseus's return to his earthly
homeland of Ithaca no longer seems adequate to his endless afflictions; the basic
movement of existence has become one of flight from the earthly assignment of
sense, so that it now seems more nonsense than sense to return to the place from
which one set out. But this remains the image for flight to a place that is held to
be in a higher sense one's place of origin. Thus even flight is still a return home.
It flees the shadow and seeks what casts it, so as not to suffer the fate of
Narcissus, who confused the reflection on the surface of the water with reality
and thus plunged into the depths and drowned.14
In order to bring about this correction of the Odyssey, Plotinus makes a montage
with a quotation from the Iliad. When Agamemnon advises breaking off the
struggle for Troy, he cries, "Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland!" Plotinus
puts this in Odysseus's mouth when he is supposed to leave Circe and Calypso,
who are allegories here of the beautiful world of the senses: Odysseus was "not
content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of
sense filling his days. The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and
there is the Father."15It is instructive to note that the utterance cannot remain
attached to its original bearer. It has to migrate to the prototype having the
higher mythical pregnance. This alsothe violence in quoting Homer, which the
Egyptian Greek, Plotinus, cannot have taken lightlyis work on myth: The
Odysseus configuration alone, without the superimposition of the resignation
before Troy, could not enable Plotinus to indicate the "basic tone of his entire
philosophy'' by referring to the myth.16That just isn't mere decoration or mere
appeal to authority: It is the invocation of a commonly relied upon authoritative
agency [Instanz] to certify the human experience that supports a 'system.'
The New Testament parallel to the Odyssey was the parable of the prodigal son.
This too is the story of the closing of a far-extended

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circle, of which the point that is most distant from the beginning is designated by
the words: "I will arise and go to my Father." The parable is only found in Luke,
in the very Gospel that the Gnostic Marcion was to make the sole Gospel,
delivered to Paul, who for him was the sole apostle.
This parable in particular, of the return home to the 'father,' was one that
Marcion could not admit as genuine: His foreign god saves beings who are
entirely foreign to him, having been created by the god of the world. The
absolutism of grace that Marcion puts in charge in his story of salvation derives
its rigid purity precisely from the fact that it is not a father who takes an interest
in his lost children and wins them back to himself by the sacrifice of his only
begotten son; instead it is a divinity who owes the world absolutely nothing and,
in Epicurean distance, has no concerns, who by an acte gratuit ["gratuitous act":
Gide] interests himself in man. It is not the establishment or reestablishment of a
pattern of meaning for the world and for life, but an impenetrably heterogeneous
intervention, a legal transaction in which one god pays a blood ransom to
another. Those who are saved do not return home; they depart into an unknown
and undefined distance, into the third heaven that Paul had seen open. The
unknown is a source of salvation for the children of the god of the world only
because anything must be a source of salvation for them that does not belong to
this world and to its cosmocrator [world ruler].
Whatever is identified as having the quality of a homeland becomes the epitome
of what one turns away from. The same passage that the Bible critic Adolf von
Harnack had retained as the only original piece of the New Testament texts, not
reducible by analysis of sources, was a passage he was forced to see Marcion,
the rigorist whom he admired and stylized as the forerunner of Luther, abandon
to the dross of Judaizing adulterations.
The Middle Ages had to go even a step further in the deformation of the plan of
the Odyssey. Here least of all could it be believed that return to man's earthly
home might represent his wholeness [or "salvation": Heil]; redeemed man is
destined for a higher happiness than merely returning to the point of departure of
his fall. But the explosion of the figure is assisted by a further element as well,
the absence of the decisive presupposition of a Platonic interpretation: In order
to describe the story of the soul as a cyclical detour, a symmetrical drama, one
had to ascribe preexistence to the soul. This was the way in which

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Platonism had still been able to close the circle. Seen in the medieval manner,
Odysseus can no longer represent the new salvation, but only the old
wickedness. In Dante he becomes the figure of senselessness, fallen into the
power of curiosity about the world. 17
Even if the myth, in order to illustrate this, had to be completely distorted, it
nevertheless remained, precisely on account of this pressure, the unsurpassable
means by which to express the epoch's incipient doubt about the finality of its
horizon and its narrowness. Choosing the most daring adventurer as a figure of
the Inferno, Dante ventures the most daring variant of the myth: He does not
have Odysseus return to his homeland, but instead makes him push on beyond
the bounds of the known world, past the Pillars of Hercules and out onto the
world sea. There he disappears from view into the uncertain, driven by his
unbridled craving for knowledge and abandoned to his final shipwreck against
the mountain Eden, which is supposed to unite the earthly paradise and
purgatory.
If Dante wanted to provide his age with a way of expressing what were still
perhaps its hidden desires with the accent on their thoroughly bad character, the
easiest way to do this was to let his readers perceive the thrust that was
necessary in order to break open the circular pattern of the Homeric nostos
[return home] at the height of the world-spanning adventure. Dante saw
Odysseus more with the eyes of a Roman, and of Virgil's Aeneid, than anything
else. For it was the cunning of the Greek that had brought about the destruction
of Troy and had driven Aeneas to journey to Latium and found Rome, or
refound Troy in a foreign country. This was the Roman recasting of the
homecoming myth. It already fundamentally excluded any right to a nostos on
Odysseus's part. In Dante this fate does not end on Ithaca, nor even on the open
world sea, but rather in the eighth circle of the Inferno. In the chasm of the
deceivers, Virgil, the heir of the fate of Troy, confronts the flickering double
flame of Odysseus and Diomedes.
What sort of Odysseus was possible from this time onward? On December 25,
1796, again in the Friday gathering, Goethe reads from Hermann und Dorothea.
Böttiger, on whom we rely again as reporter, writes in this connection that the
poem's plot is so simple "that it is scarcely possible to tell it without
boredom."18But in this "seemingly simple, commonplace story," Goethe was so
"Homerically grand and new" that it would have to become a people's poem
[Volksgedicht]. The

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commonest understanding would be sensitive to it, the most practiced and

learned would admire it. The Homeric quality of the poem was that it was based
"on a colossal foundation: on the French Revolution." Besides, it portrayed
effects the extent and power of which could only be completely judged after
decades. "It was only through this terrible and unique ruin of countries that this
poem became possible; and yet one sees the terrors only from a distance, one
hears the storm only behind the mountains, one is never disturbed in the happiest
enjoyment of one's secure present situation." The order to which the poetry
belonged was not national but human. This justifies Böttiger in using the greatest
analogy: "It is the only Odyssey that still seemed possible in our times." But he
sees the comparability above all in the way in which individual fates are bound
up with the mighty background of world history, in the former case the history
of the struggle of the two halves of the world with one another, in the present
case that of the rising tide of war and emigration resulting from the Revolution.
Böttiger does not consider the relationship of the contemporary pattern of fate to
that of the mythical heroes. The short formula for that could be: Dorothea, the
refugee, finds a homeland in a foreign country through Hermann's wooing. The
subject of the poem is homecoming despite the impossibility of return. Dante
had not been able to furnish his doubly guilty Odysseus with this fulfillment.
Finally, James Joyce's Ulysses. In relation to its nominal prototype it stands, not
only temporally but also according to its own assignment of roles, at the opposite
end of world literature. This epic of episodes is a monument of the contradiction
of everything that had come down from its namesake. Even the titles of the
episodes, modeled on those of the Odyssey, were dropped in the final version.
Nevertheless, what was not least a result of the inability to maintain the identity
of a figure throughout does unintentionally comply with its archaic reference
subject. The latter also had no basis for the unity of its spontaneous elements, no
constancy of physiognomic definition, although Joyce himself says that what
always fascinated him was the "character of Odysseus." But the fate of the
mythical wanderer has little to do with his character; it is the result of the
division of powers, of the fluctuation of the forces that hold sway over it. Joyce
says that his intention was "to transpose the myth sub specie temporis nostri."
19These were not so much the adventures of a person; rather, each adventure, so
to say, was a person. For this the connoisseur of Scholastic subtlety finds the

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most striking possible comparison, by alluding to Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of

the identity of individuality and species in the angels. The episodes are originally
discontinuous with one another and "only fuse after a prolonged existence
together." He will repeat that statement with regard to Finnegans Wake: "These
are not fragments but active elements and when they are more and a little older
they will begin to fuse of themselves." 20
If significance has to be wrung from the indifference of space and time, Joyce
does this by reducing the spatiotemporal frameworkin ironic contrast to Homer's
expenditure of the world and timeto the arbitrariness of an exactly dated day in
June 1904, and to the provincially out-of-the-way city of Dublin, the "center of
paralysis," as he called it. For the reader there was no way definitely to possess
the knowledge that an acquaintance with Joyce's correspondence contributes
toward reducing the contingency of the date. June 16, 1904, is the day on which
Joyce first goes for a walk in Dublin with Nora Barnacle, who later becomes his
wife. She will never read Ulysses.
The text prevents the reader from sharing this knowledge, which is only secured
by the appended work of philology. For the reader, the arbitrariness of the single
day turns significance into a riddle. Such contingency practically demands the
irony of the mythical vis-à-vis the factual: It could also be any other dayand it
will be every other day. This reversal restores the mythical validity. What the
author withholds from the reader, what he expects the reader to accept as an
arbitrary choice, points to an 'everyday' quality that is to be taken in the literal
sense. Timelessness can no longer be represented by any means except this "a
day like any other." Each such day would be the residue of what had once been a
badge of the uniqueness of a world adventure.
At the end, the Odyssey of triviality that Leopold Bloom traverses in that single
day even refutes the closed circle as a pattern of meaning. His return home is the
least important and consequential station of all and concludes with the internal
monologue of Molly Bloom, expressing her unaffectedness by this return home.
Odysseus/Bloom, Joyce writes to Frank Budgen on December 10, 1920,
"romances about Ithaca . . . and when he gets back it gives him the pip." That
which occupies the position of home refutes what is still called coming home.
The day's tour of this Odysseus is not even turned into an adventure of the
imagination. A scenery of literary allusions and establishments

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of reference, outside the Odyssey as well, surrounds Bloom's movements and the
places where he stops. The hero has no need for expansion, whether deriving
from desire or from boredom, that can resist the shrinking of time and the
banalizing of the world. This ego did not really 'set out' [or "put to sea":
ausfahren] and neither, consequently, does it really return home. The
unpublished titles of the episodes have set in motion and kept in motion the
interpreters' efforts to get on the track of the transformations of the myth. Not
only was the exegetes' existence at stake: It had been put at stake. For it was for
them above all, if not for them alone, that the abundance of connections and
allusions was scattered and concealed.
That is not to deny the greatness of the work. Works of literary art have never
been written for everyone, however glad every author would have been to be the
first to achieve this. Ulysses has to be read in a way that responds to expectations
of integration and exhaustiveness, and can be read in this way only by born
hermeneuts. But in a world in which people are relieved of work by machines,
that is such a large group that it is increasingly worthwhile to write only for them
and according to the rules of their guild. With Joyce, a literature begins in which
even weaknesses in the classical skills of composing, inventing, constructing,
and storytelling have been converted into eminent skill in writing for initiates: an
industry of production for an industry of 'reception.' This professional public is
prepared for something that, in the history of mankind, has only been accepted
under the conditions of cults: for boredom.
The seaman's yarn from the taverns along the Ionian coast, turned into
hexameters, had been dressed up, for the old Hellenic nobility, into the Odyssey;
Ulysses is elevated out of the vulgar stuff of the Irish metropolis and, enriched
with movable literary scenery, addressed to the twentieth-century nobility of the
desk. Joyce himself repeatedly declared that what he lacked was imagination.
The conduct he expected of his readers was the same painful exertion that he had
spent on the book: "It is as difficult for me to write it as for my readers to read
it." 21And: "There never was such a tiresome book, I am sure."22H. G. Wells
will criticize this, in his famous or infamous letter to Joyce of November 23,
1928, as a disproportionate burden for the reader: "Your last two works have
been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read. Take me
as a typical male. Do I get much pleasure from the work? No. . . . "

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This state of affairs stands behind the most daring interpretation of the modern
Odyssey, the one proposed by Wolfgang Iser. He sees the author as fixed
exclusively on his reader and engaged in the endless task of keeping that reader
equally endlessly busy. Only, in his interpretation, supported by the theory of the
implicit reader, Iser has never asked what kind of contemporary it would have to
be who could match the author's concentration. 23It is no withdrawal of
legitimation from the work if one says that the reader whom it postulates would
already have to be able to remember a world of reading when reading it. On the
contrary, this, precisely, is the utopia behind the book: the conception of a world
in which increasingly the condition enabling people to be readers of Ulysses is
fulfilled. But what a contradiction: The author, who wants, single-handedly, to
occupy the reader for his whole life (and, what is more, for a life of
sleeplessness), already presupposes, for this exclusive relationship, a life's
acquired knowledge of literature for the mere understanding of his riddles and
mystifications, his allusions and reclothings.
The fact that the author occupies his reader so tyrannically does not mean that he
grants him pleasure. Iser seems willing to accept this. What Joyce has in mind is
the professional 'recipient,' which makes himaccording to the remark transmitted
by his biographer, R. Ellmannsee the professors occupied for centuries with the
riddles in Ulysses. For this, he said, was the only way to secure immortality for
its author. In contrast to this, Iser's answer to the question of the author's
intention seems to soften the issue, if not render it harmless: That intention is
directed, he says, at the reader's power of imagination. But this power of
imagination, if one follows Iser's description, must first and last be entitled labor
power. It is dominated by a single motive, that of the horror vacui [fear of a
vacuum]. The novel's numerous allusions to the epic do not become clear; rather
they lead one astray. For Iser they are empty forms [Leerformen] with indicators
for the distribution of rolesforms that the reader has to enter into. But would he
enter into them if they didn't already have their imprinted significance? Rather
than to the lacunae and inconsistencies and breaks in style of the modern work,
don't they refer us away from this work and its incapacity for meaning, toward a
no longer realizable ground plan in which meaning is validated?
From the distance of an unallayed nostalgia, Joyce described the city of his
father and, in it, the inconsequential daily tour and return

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home of the petit bourgeois, Leopold Bloom. He always speaks, too, of its lack
of proportion to the unaccomplished and unaccomplishable return home of
James Joyce. For Leopold Bloom, unlike Homer's Telemachus, does not seek a
father but a son. This inversion in relation to the reference myth seems to me to
be the key to Ulysses. Precisely in that case, however, the fulfillment is already
sure to dissolve. For when Bloom has brought home Stephen Dedalus, whom he
has found again, the reader must learn from Molly Bloom's 'internal monologue'
that Penelope is already meditating infidelity with the stranger. This offense
against the Homeric ethos is probably the most insidious form of the refusal of
meaning. Its irony is only recognizable, in the countermove to the mythical
superelevation of the dosing of the circle, as the piercing mistrust with which
Joyce torments himself by doubting his exclusiveness for Nora after that June
16, 1904, when she had simulated innocence with the question "What is it,
dear?"k
The "implied reader" who is created by Iser's theory and implanted in Joyce's
intention is the return of the 'creative subject' on the other side, that of reception.
Joyce's reason for no longer telling stories (regardless of the fact that the only
reason for his not doing it was that he could not) would have been to let the
reader's function, the function of making a story for himself out of given
determinants, dawn on him. In case the reader succeeded, would the ambush of
countermanding signals already be laidwould the refusal of meaning have
jumped over from the Bloom who comes home and brings Stephen home to the
subject of 'aesthetic experience'? It may be the case that confidence in his
creative power is the appropriate consolation for the perplexed reader, who is
supposed to impress himself to the point of being able to become his own
demiurge. As an intention, it contradicts Joyce's whole consciousness of
himselfthe Joyce who saw himself as the creator behind his creatures, and
enjoyed this in front of everyone, in solitary uniqueness, by making those
creatures into the riddle of a future audience that could be won all the more
certainly by the refusal of meaning, In spite of all his ridicule of the official God,
he had an implicit one, and that god's attribute was that of evading questioning
about the meaning of his decrees. Through the procedure of reversal the author,
who does not allow himself to be questioned either and who lets this be known
by his mystifications and deceptions, is promoted to the rank of a god or into the
position of his god. What we are dealing with is a myth of the author, not

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with that of his reader. It is difficult to imagine Joyce tolerating the reader as
another god alongside himself, to say nothing of installing him himself.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dedalus discusses with Lynch
questions about art and art forms: "The artist, like the God of the creation,
remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined
out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." 24This only moves his
companion to a remark about the disproportion between this "prating about
beauty and the imagination" and the "miserable Godforsaken island" on which it
is done: "No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after
having perpetrated this country." Was this frivolous reversal of the metaphor of
the artist as God meant to reflect on the aesthetic deiculus [little god] who leaves
the reader to repair the effects of his impotence in his work, or even to produce a
world from nothing but 'empty forms'? This could only run against the grain of
the ''artist as a young man," who wants to have made his work himself and alone,
in order, indifferent to its quality, to disappear behind it.
That the intention that Joyce himself defined, to "transpose the myth sub specie
temporis nostri," had to relate less to the material than to the formal structure of
myth is the upshot of Ulysses. This can already be grasped from the fact that he
immediately frees himself from the cyclical schema, denying its capacity for
renewal, as something excluded from his sense of life, when he elevates
Giambattista Vico to the status of patriarch of Finnegans Wake. That could have
no other meaning than to put the spiralVico's fundamental pattern of history as a
reconciliation of cycle and linearity, a tentative opening up of the finite scope of
history, too, nowin place of the nostos circle. Of course, he says, he does not
take Vico's speculations literally, but uses "his cycles as a trellis."25Joyce had
already begun reading the Scienza nuova [New science] when he was in Trieste,
and the possibility cannot be excluded that the dissolution of the Odyssey model,
the ironic reversal of poles of the nostos episodes, is a sign of its pressure on the
mythical pattern of meaning. Still, for his work on Finnegans Wake Joyce made
use of a metaphor for the inevitability of closure, the metaphor of tunneling, in
which two companies of diggers work blindly forward from opposite sides and
yet reach the meeting point where they break through.
The cyclical schema had been a basic pattern of trust in the world, and it is still
the same thing when it emerges again as an archaism.

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The reliability of every path and of each lifefulfillable, after delay, however
much it may be impeded by the gods' division of powersis imprinted in advance
in the pattern of the closed circle. Even in the horror of returning to an unknown
origin, as in the Oedipus myth, there is the element of the impossibility of
missing it, which points, even as a degenerate form, to the fundamental pattern
of a deeper precision. Of course it is delusion (ate *) that makes one adhere to
this precision; as the doom decreed by the gods, it is the agency by which
meaning is established through hidden processesa delusion that seems a mockery
of all meaning only to those who are also subjected to such dooms. Diogenes of
Sinope, the first Cynic, gave voice (according to the testimony of Dio
Chrysostom) to the plausible misunderstanding that this Oedipus was only a
simpleton who couldn't get done with his self-discoveries. Perhaps the Oedipus
tragedy that is ascribed to Diogenes, though called in question by Julian, was a
parodyfor nothing else is left when the conditions of seriousness in regard to the
mythical material have failed.
That still holds for the most audacious parody of this material, the
variantbreaking out of the genus of tragedyin Kleist's Der zerbrochene Krug
[The broken jug]. Both the tragedy and the comedy point to the same
fundamental plan, which one can regard as the pattern of a theory of punishment,
according to which the criminal himself, under the command of reason,
determines and demands his punishment, and the judge functions as the mere
bearer of the mandate of this reason. Both the accuser and the accused combine,
on this assumption, in one subject, who complies with the idea of justice as self-
punishment.26As the ruler, Oedipus is the judge as well. Like the village justice,
Adam,l he finds himself guilty and must execute against himself the public
reason that he still, apart from this knowledge, represents. The cyclical structure
of the process, which the myth prescribed to both the tragedy and the comedy,
allows the subject, in traversing the circular track, to see himself as it were from
behindwithdrawn, in this way, from identification, until he catches up with
himself.
Sigmund Freud's affinity to myth relates to the mythical cycle in a multiple
concentric fashion. Perhaps it already did this in the Italian experience that he
reports as part of the basis for his concept of the "uncanny." The weight that he
gives to the harmless event by its late insertion into his own work presupposes
that the point to which this circle, this repetition of the same, returned had a
specific 'significance'

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for him. It was an Odyssey experience of the type described by Joyce. On a

single day in a small provincial town in Italy Freud came into the "red light
district" three times, unintentionally, and the greater his dismay and his haste to
get free of this quarter, the more certainly the circle closed. Who else but Freud
would have experienced that in this way and would have been able to enact for
himself so impressively the fixation on sexual matters, with this trick of the id?
The third time, "a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny."
He explicitly performs the theoretician's most difficult renunciation, the
renunciation of all further curiosity, in order to get free of the feeling of a
helplessness that is otherwise peculiar to the state of dreaming. 27Freud
recognized the ambivalence of 'significance' in the coercive and fateful way in
which the closing of the circle is accomplished: the uncanny as the inescapable,
the meaningful as the unmistakable. That must be borne in mind in connection
with the renewed reference to Oedipus.
The Oedipus complex that Freud discovered or invented is not given that name
only because it reflects, on the moderate level of desires, the murder of one's
father and incest with one's mother. It is also, and above all, given that name
because it assumes, as an instinctive impulse of infancy, an unexpressed
inclination to return home to the mother, in opposition to the centrifugally
directed claims of reality, represented by the father. "Every new arrival on this
planet is faced by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex."28In other words,
he has to learn not to return home. Or, according to Freud's later insight, not to
return home right away. Freud gained access to this complex in the course of
self-analysis, and first associated it with the myth of Oedipus in 1897.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. Only one idea of general value has occurred
to me. I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now
believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood. . . . If that is the case, the gripping power
of Oedipus Rex . . . becomes intelligible. . . . The Greek myth seizes on a compulsion that
everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in himself. Every member of the audience was
once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfillment played out in reality causes
everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from
his present state.29

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It is not a correction of Freud's anamnesis of the Oedipus myth, but an

observation on his technique of 'reception' if one does not leave unnoticed the
way in which he fails to reproduce the pattern of the myth. He carried his idea of
the mechanism of the genesis of dreams from censored desires over to myth for
the first time in The Interpretation of Dreams. If Greek tragedy is still able to stir
the modern spectator just as deeply as it did the contemporaries of the ancient
poet, although elements and conditions underlying its material have, after all,
disappeared in the meantimesuch as the function of the gods and above all that
of the oraclethen such a continuous readiness for reception must be connected
with the constancy of the substratum of desires. The poet himself would already
have found the material ready to hand as the result of a process of selection that
would always be traceable to the tabooed desire for incest. But laying stress on
this element, one hits upon neither the core of the myth nor that of the tragedy.
What supports this configuration is not the type of guilt that Oedipus
unknowingly lays on himself through parricide and incest, but rather the way in
which he discovers it. Of course it was meant to be the worst conceivable crime,
but at bottom its casuistry didn't matter very much. The gods delude man into
doing atrocious things in ignorance and leave it to the infallibility of his fate for
him to discover this and expiate it according to the rules of his reasonwhich is
more a public than a private reason, so that it is determined entirely by the act
and not by the intention. What is disastrously uncovered are the past deeds of a
king, not the hidden underworld of desires that belong to a 'psychic apparatus.'
Kleist picked up this 'public' character of the subject; but it is not an accident that
it was now possible only in the form of comedy, because the post-Christian
concept of freedom no longer permitted one to be guilty of an unconscious
action, unless it was in the form of the public scandal of an official administrator
of justice. The fact that religious guilt is of a different type is something that we
are confronted with by the doctrine of Original Sin, which is anachronistic with
respect to this concept of freedom; its type of guilt is closer to a concept of
'impurity' that someone can incur, with all its consequences, without being guilty
of it by his actions.
For the tragedy, too, all that matters is how man can ignorantly prepare his
downfall. Oedipus discovers his guilt, not in a process of self-examination and
self-purification, but rather in pursuit of his official

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duty of complying with the oracle that assured the city of Thebes of freedom
from the plague if the murderer of Laius was driven from the land. To search for
this murderer and thus to get on the track of his own impurity is a political
proceeding, not one of self-knowledge and self-liberation. The atrocities that are
attached to Oedipus, more than being concealed in him, are exceptional in the
way in which they are adapted to the formal schema of the tragedy: The onetime
event that made Jocasta a widow and thus opened the way for Laius's murderer
to come to power at her side establishes the state of marital happiness between
mother and son over the abyss of their ignorance and sets it in contrast to the
public misfortune of the city, which compels obedience to any instruction that
promises to relieve it.
The royal incest on the throne of Thebes, as a mother-son monad, restores for a
moment the real, intact, primeval world, the enticing image of which stands
behind Freud's idea of the traumas and denials of both ontogenesis and
phylogenesis. In the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in 1932, he
still said that only the relationship to her son brought the mother unrestricted
satisfaction and it was "altogether the most perfect, the most free from
ambivalence of all human relationships."m In the myth it was the oracle, it was
affairs of state, that had put an end to this paradise.
Perhaps the most perfect consistency of the closed-circle pattern of the instinct to
return, in psychoanalysisthe complete figure of the flight from contingencywas
something that could only be accomplished symbolically. In his Theory of
Genitalityn of 1924 Ferenczi explained the sexual act as the symbolically
successful return of the man, represented by the penis, into the female
genitaliathus letting the relation between individuals, in the Oedipus complex,
dissolve in the symbolism of the gender relation. The logic of this conception
also implies that only the death instinct is the final intensification of the desire to
return, and in it the physical nonidentity of what one might call the "point
returned to" succeeds in expressing absolute noncontingency in pure form. The
old metaphor of the womb of mother nature acquires an unexpected reading in
the system of these instincts of flight and return.
The return to the point of departure and to the primeval state, which is
temporarily denied to the individualand is still more something that he must
deny to himselfhe must finally, nevertheless, accomplish in a more radical form,
when he abandons his exposed,

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improbable state and returns to the physically 'normal' state. He is only a particle
in the stream of the great return that life as a wholeas the episodic state of
exception to the entropy of energypasses through. Just this threatening finality
had remained forgotten in the early development of the principle of the
constancy of psychic energy by Freud, and in its application to the psychic
apparatus. The model for this apparatus was the open arc of the transmission of a
stimulus in the organic systemthe equalization of energy between the afferent
and the efferent sides with the continual tendency to keep the inner and bound
energy at the lowest possible level. The 'energetical' view of the psychic realm
absorbs the metabolic view of the physical. It sees the identity of the organic
system, maintained at huge expense against all destructive probabilities, as a
form of the flow-through of matter and energy. This risky outsider status of the
organic realm as a whole is merely reflected in the existence of the individual
outside the uterus, in the risky situation in which he is abandoned to his own
self-preservation and self-determinationthis most exposed state, to return from
which can only be the most secret of all wishes, because it offends against the
'ethics' of effort.
Every theory has the tendency to present itself as capable of broader application.
Thus also Freud's completion of the system of the psychic instincts with the
death instinct is on the verge of a cosmology of the highest level, the level of
Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence." It has the multiple significance that favors any
expansion. With the approach to the totality that is characteristic of a world view
[Weltansicht], and with the association of the psychic disposition to decay with
the thermodynamic one, the early discoverythrough Freud's self-analysisof the
impulse of the individual life to retreat takes on the cachet of a great myth. What
he had made into the foundation of his conception of the psychic apparatusthe
return of the level of instinctive energy to its initial state, through the discharge
of excitationbecomes, as the return of life (both individual and universal) into
death as the predominant 'what came before,' the circularity law of the universe
itself. If one regards what Freud called the "primary process" as the quickest
connection between the exciting stimulus and the free discharge of excitement,
then the "secondary process,'' with its ways of binding energy, is a still more
difficult and risky detourlike life itself, as a whole, in its relation to its inorganic
substratum. The optimal level of a physical state is that in which it is least
endangered. For life

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it would be the state of its definitive safetyand then all that is left to say is: life,
when one has it behind one.
Freud did not invent the total myth. He found it, in the process of interrogating
the instincts with regard to their functional meaning, when he finally came to the
death instinct. At that point he demoted the instinct for self-preservation and the
instincts for mastery and for self-assertion to the level of importance of aspects,
and incorporated them into the pattern of 'detours to death.' The new total myth
gives the evolution of the organic world the superficial appearance that a higher
plane of the world process has been arrived at. On the contrary, as Freud says, it
would contradict the "conservative nature of the instincts" if a state that had
never yet been attained were the goal of the development. Such a telos [goal] of
life can only be "an old state of things, an initial state from which the living
entity has at one time or another departed and to which it is striving to return by
the circuitous paths along which its development leads." 30
It is what Heraclitus first expressed in the paradox that souls delight in becoming
water, although this involves their death; for him even God has a longing not to
be God anymore, and when his longing is fulfilled, the world comes into beingas
it were, as the throwing off of the burden of being a god.31The death instinct is
not symmetrical and of equal rank to the pleasure principle, for it reduces the
power of the latter to an episode. It is absolute, because it implies the attainment
of a state of which the degree of security is absolutethat is, consists simply in no
longer being capable of being undercut.
It is not a myth of the eternal return of the same, but rather of the final return
home to the original state. To promise this is the great temptation of
comprehensive theories, the temptation to equal myth in the production of
totality. The death instinct completes this story of history and permeates it with
the tenor of the contingency of life, of its being an exceptional state, and of
circumstantiality as its fundamental form. The instinct reflects the physical
decrepitude in which organic life returns to its inorganic basis. It thus
compensates for its improbability, its only being able to maintain itself at the
cost, to the surrounding physical world, of its consumption of energy. The fact
that the second law of thermodynamics is reflected in the psyche as an instinct
constitutes the psychic realm's affinity to the circular structure of myth. Thus we
have a common source and basis for the death instinct and the Oedipus complex.
The latter is not primarily rivalry

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in a libidinous relationship, but the individual's tendency to revert to his origin,

to the womb of his own motherthe evasion of the expenditure that the maturing
of individuality requires. Thus the central mythical figures that Freud
reintroduced into general circulationNarcissus and Oedipusare representatives of
the 'significance' of myth itself. For narcissism, too, is a turning back: a turning
away from the reality outside the ego, an avoidance of the expenditure involved
in separation and the energy involved in existence. The death instinct, the
implication of the great myth, reflects on the other tendencies to return that are
characteristic of life, which appears as the redundancy of a detour from what is
not yet to what is no longer. The epitome of all difficulties is not yet to be what
is no longer.
Self-preservation is then a form of the refusal to return to the original state. If
one thinks of Heidegger's analysis of Dasein, which was presented only a few
years after Freud's discovery of the death instinct, then one is struck by the
analogous placement near one another of "Being toward death" and "guilt" [or
"debt": Schuld], this being called from afar to afar as "Being-the-basis for a
being which has been defined by a 'not.'"o Freud repeated this same connection
in the dictum "Thou owest nature a death,'' which is a quotation, with an
important alteration, from Shakespeare's Henry IV: "Thou owest God a death."
Freud had first used it for the dream of the weird sisters in The Interpretation of
Dreams. The configuration of the three women in a kitchen, one of whom is
making dumplings, leads him back to a memory from his childhood. His mother
wanted to prove to him that man was made of earth and had to become earth
again, by rubbing the surfaces of her hands together and producing the little rolls
of epidermis that children, too, so much enjoy makingthe same motion of the
hands that is made by the women in the kitchen making dumplings. The six-
year-old, who at first had doubted his mother's assertion about the return,
capitulates before this demonstratio ad oculos [visual demonstration]: " . . . I
submitted to what I was later to hear expressed in the words 'Thou owest nature
a death.'"
If one views Freud's remark in the light of his own accentuation of 'parapraxes,'p
then owing nature a death is different from owing God a death. It anticipates the
conception, in the great myth of the dualism of the instincts, that life owes nature
death as the reestablishment of the normal state, as making amends for the huge
cost of the energy expended in self-preservation.

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Under the primacy of the death instinct, the function of the subordinate
component instincts for self-assertion, power, and self-preservation becomes one
of "ensuring that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and warding
off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which
are immanent in the organism itself." One who saw this reordering in the realm
of the instincts before him for the first time could not fail to recognize how 'a
story' was in the process of formation here. Basic characteristics of life that had
hitherto been predominant were depleted in power to the level of merely
superficial phenomena. Thus from now on "the organism's puzzling
determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in
the face of every obstacle" only had to shield its return home to its origin [ins
Authentische]. As is also the case in myth, the rationality of the shortest path
becomes nonsensicalhere, it becomes a temptation that conflicts with the sense
of life, which is to delay the point where it becomes what is no longer.
Rationality, however paradoxical it may sound, would then become mere
instinctiveness. That is the opposite of a refusal that Freud calls intelligent
efforts [intelligentes Streben]. He himself speaks of the paradox that the
organism defends itself against all influences and threats that could after all help
it to achieve by the shortest path the goalwhich cannot be relativizedof being
what is no longer.
Not to choose the shortest path is already the basic pattern of sublimation. It
substitutes for the goals of instinctive energy other goal conceptions that are
marked out by culture. But what is set apart by culture is what is not included in
the death of him who produces it. That is why culture appears to us as the
imperishable things that man brings forth and leaves behind him, irrespective of
what becomes of man himselfindeed irrespective of what part of it is directed
against man himself. From the point of view of this cosmological speculation,
culture is hypertrophic self-preservation, an artificial asymmetry, to the
disadvantage of the death instinct.
One can perceive immediately the logical advantage of the dualism, conceded by
Freud at such a late date, between the constructive and destructive energies, the
eros and death instincts: Only now can a story be told that is homogeneously
natural history and cultural history, cosmology and anthropology in one. The
immanent tendency of every theory is toward the principle of unity, the highest
rationality that is possible for it. It was the defection of C. G. Jung that first
made the

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logic of monisms of energy evident to Freud. And still later, namely, in

Civilization and Its Discontents, he acknowledged that the implication of the
identity of the libido with the concept of instinctive energy really had been
inherent in his doctrine.
Freud decisively broke out of the blind alley of the principle of unity, in order to
keep open for himself the possibility of a storyultimately, the possibility of a
great myth. In hardly any other case have we had the genesis of a regression to
myth before us in such a transparent form, with all the needs marked out that had
been left unmet when rationality was nearly realized by a monism of energy.
As Freud himself described for us the introduction of the death or destruction
instinct, it was an extremely obscure speculation, for which he was only able
later to hunt up data gathered from analyses. This statement presupposes that he
thought he should only allow himself to generalize earlier results to the extent
that such generalization could be traced back to the findings of analysis. One
may doubt whether such speculation could ever be held suspended in the
heuristic element. But Freud strictly insists on the principle, which he defends
against Jung, of not abandoning the key of the prehistory constituted by the
individual childhood in favor of phylogenetic prehistory, and not letting the
former serve as a substitute for the latter, rather than the latter for the former.
32It is Moses and Monotheism, at the latest, that will show that there can be
collective latencies without evidence from individuals and that the storing up of
a story depends neither on the subjective unconscious nor on the objective
culture alone. Seen from that perspective, the question arises whether the theory
of the death instinct does not presuppose a conservative function extending
across the widest latency that is even conceivable. Instincts can only be
conservative at all because they contain a 'story' [or "history": Geschichte]
"stored up for further repetition," and only by giving ''a deceptive appearance of
being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely
seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new."33The death
instinct is conservative because it has stored up the story of life and, in that
story, the latency that stretches furthest of all, that of life's derivation from its
not-yet-existence in inanimate nature, in the maternal womb of matter.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle contains, in passing, an objection to suicide as the
"rational," that is, direct, accomplishment of the death instinct as opposed to its
"intelligent," that is, indirect and roundabout,

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form. Possibly Freud was thinking of the death of his student Victor Tausk in
July 1919. But for this case he had another 'story' in petto, that of the conversion
of instinct. It allowed him to view the event as indifferently as he was later to be
reproached with having done: One who kills himself, kills himself instead of
another, at whom his death wish was directed. This is another case of what
simply abounds in Freud: a piece of myth, or at least a reproduction of its mode
of thought. The idea that being the addressee of the death wish is something that
can be delegated or transferred had already played a role in Freud's story of his
childhood, in relation to the brother who came after him. Against it Tausk, with
his letter of farewell to Freudwhich is one of the most moving examples of this
German genusdid not have a chance. He wanted to tell the master that there can
also be rationality in the choice of death. It is the fate of myth possessors that
they always know too much to be able to believe that someone conceived of the
decision that he himself describes as the "healthiest, most decent deed" of his life
in exactly the way that he avows. 34Of course the death instinct had its own
logical force in the development and completion of Freud's total myth; but the
point in time, so close to a catastrophe in which Freud was involved in many
ways, may also have suited his need for consolation, a need that the new dualism
of the system of instincts could satisfy. In Freud, stages of his theoretical
development occasionally take on the function of paratheories that explain
personal defeats or relieve him of personal involvement, if they don't forbid him
such involvement. The success of Freud's myths is the result of, among other
things, the fact that they are the most complete guidelines to the formulation of
excuses that have been offered since Origen.
Here we have before us the way in which the formal renewal of mythas the
servicing of the need for significanceworks in one of its few successful cases: It
ties acute experiences and important current events into the context of long
familiarity and creates prefiguration, but also a decrease in the expectation of
freedom, a decrease in what is conceded to candor and ultimate self-knowledge,
since these come under the protection of the unrecognized preestablished
patterns [Vorgegebenheiten]. Even where healing is no longer possible, in the
case of suicide, tracing the catastrophe back to the ground plan of an eidetic
normality of what is fated in any case becomes helpful to the survivor, as a
means of exempting himself from traumatic impact. Where myth

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exists, history becomes a failure to fulfill its guaranteeing preindication. What is

provided for on the overarching specieswide level of the instincts is no longer
something that we must take in hand and take responsibility for. Once again the
oldest imperativeto be obedient to natureproved to be valid: as the device by
which to free oneself from the obligation to make history.
The entire need for significance is based on the indifference [or
"nondifferentiation": Indifferenz] of space and of timeon the inapplicability of
Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason to space-time positions, an inapplicability
that had driven Leibniz to the step, as desperate as it was daring, of denying
reality to space and time and making them into mere modes of ordering
employed by reason. Myth doesn't even let indifferences arise. Significance
makes possible a 'density' that excludes empty spaces and empty times, but it
also makes possible an indefiniteness of dating and localization that is the
equivalent of ubiquitousness.
In the case of space, myth can work with the simple means of distributing the
disputed locations of the birth and deeds of its gods and sons of gods uniformly
over the landscape. Christianity found the most elegant solution by which to
avoid the annoyance of the contingency of its saving events in space and time,
by making them representable everywhere through its cult. The descensus ad
inferos [descent to the dead] had accomplished the same thing, retroactively,
with respect to the manifest arbitrariness of the date of salvation. These are
mature products of long theological reflection, but also of practical prudence in
avoiding migrations of whole peoples to the specially distinguished place, as to
the Kaaba in Mecca, in the case of Islam. To that extent the Crusades, viewed
theologically, are anachronisms. Dogmatic religion, consolidating itselfafter the
dying away of the apocalyptic alarmin the canon of its texts and its cult, has to
make its peace with the indifference of space and time. It will finally conform to
it, instead of creating new significances.
Christianity strove for unlimited transportability by means of an increased
degree of abstraction in its system of dogma, as an increased distance from
myth. There is indeed the limit concept of a world religion that neither depends
on autochthonous familiarities nor refers back to them, but there is no concept of
a world myth, not even under the extreme assumptions of comparability in the
culture-circle theory and in structuralism. These comparisons are never more
than theo-

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retical analyses, which cannot successfully lay hold of the specificity of the
names and stories. Myth by its nature is not capable of an abstract system of
dogma that would leave local and temporal peculiarities behind it. On the
contrary, it is oriented specifically toward these.
Through its combination with ancient philosophy, Christianity was promoted to
the sole system of dogma that, however unintelligible its level of abstraction
may be for the common people, represents the rank of a world religion without
reservation. Even if it is not, as Nietzsche thought, ancient Platonism carried on
by other means and with a different audience, still it achieved the separation
from myth and the definition, through precise formulas, of its own rigorous
claim to truth, only by means of a metaphysics that, even through its negation,
was able to become the precondition of the idea of science and the theoretical
exactitude that has in practice, and in spite of all autochthonous resistances,
made the European attitude to reality the worldwide uniform of the intelligentsia.
Against the dogmatic mode of thought, with its claim to homogeneous validity
in universal space and universal timein other words, with precisely what
Platonism had invented, by virtue of its introduction of the 'Ideas' as timeless and
placeless validities, and as the imitation of which, as far as the claim to rigorous
truth is concerned, one can regard the dogmatic mode of thoughtagainst this
mode of thought, the characteristic differentiation of the mythical 'significances'
stands out as a structuring that is opposed to the intolerable indifference of space
and time. So demythologizingq must render the spatial and temporal distinctions
invalid, must deny the priority given to the directions of above and below: It
must deny the mythical element of an ascension of the messianic figure into
heaven just as much as the assignment of the Last Judgment to the valley of
Jehoshaphat. Nevertheless the Ascension, though in the New Testament it is
unmistakably a makeshift solution to the problems of contingency produced by
the Resurrection, is part of the Christian creeds. And this is not without rigorous
systematic reason. The God who has become flesh cannot return to the pure
placelessness and timelessness from which he came unless the permanence and
finality of his alliance with human nature are to become just as questionable as
the Old Testament covenant. When the Ascension solves the problem of what to
do with the Messiah quite unclearly and with untheatrical embarrassment, it
creates a means

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of entrance into a once again indefinite, open, homogeneous temporal

dimension, which may have been stretched out already by the hope of a long,
perhaps definitive postponement of eschatology. The mythical element serves to
mark the gaining of a new and unmythical time structure. The timelessness of
dogma and the omnipresence of the reality of God in the cult are aimed at
leveling off the mythical profile. The fact that what seems to work toward
rationality nevertheless counts as a renunciation, like the surrender of the
character of the world as a finite 'housing,' at the beginning of the modern age, is
something that can be felt as self-denial only after a long delay.
"Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?" With these
lines Thomas Mann begins his Joseph tetralogy. Instead of speaking of the
indifference of time they speak, using the metaphor of the well, of its
unfathomability. That is just as much uncanniness as it is the indifference, the
equivalence of every moment with respect to all others, just as the indifference
of space is the equivalence of every location in space with respect to all others.
The Magic Mountain had portrayed the subject of time as the cancellation of the
consciousness of time in the exotic situationthe ecstatic situationof people who
are doomed to death. In the parodied myth of Joseph, time loses its
unidirectionality. Between what is later and what is earlier, un-Platonic
relationships come into being, that is, relationships not of original and replica but
rather of mirror image and mirror image, relationships characterized by an
uncertain direction of reference. Even in Nietzsche's formalization of eternal
recurrence the question had remained open whether the present decides only for
the future of the worlds or for their past as well; if it did not do the latter, it
would itself already be determined, as a repetition. Instead of the new burden of
the cosmic responsibility of saying "Let it be this way," man would bear only the
oppression, which had horrified Schopenhauer, of ''unceasingly traversing a
circular path of burning coals."
We know something about the pathology of space. Such marked modes of
suffering as claustrophobia and agoraphobia present themselves as phenomena
that can be grasped instantly. The modes of suffering in time are otherwise; they
can be grasped only with difficulty and only over long periods. Even the morbid
boredom that periodically appears has found no pathologist of time; the mania
for saving time, together with perplexity as to what to do with it, may yet find its
discipline, if the self-appointment of the theoreticians of 'leisure' re-

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mains without effect. Insecurity and lack of confidence, as affective aspects of

the unfathomability of time, are phenomena that smoulder for long periods,
corrupting subcutaneously above all by constraining people to set up dividing
lines, turning points, indicators, and means of orientation to which expectations
and apprehensions are attached, as in the fin de siècle.
To give outlines to the homogeneous flow of time, rather than letting it have the
continuity of a mere 'and-so-forth'to synchronize it with the self-consciousness
of the successive generations and with their exclusive claim to realitycan appear
as a matter merely of decisive dealings, of pure action, of 'not-so-forth'. That is a
pattern that was created by the modern age. As a result of the need to posit a
clear and decisive beginning for itself and to found this on resolve and
radicalism, the modern age decreed the value of everything prior to it as nil. It
sought to defend this borderline against the leveling off and washing out
produced by the accumulation of historical material, which tends only toward
transitions and always has another prior stage and another forerunner to offerbut
which also, by virtue of its obligatory rationality, simply cannot deliver anything
else but this.
In historylessness lies the opportunity of every remythicization: It is easiest to
project mythical turning points into empty space. That is why the removal of
history from school curricula is not so much a mistake in planning or a failure of
understanding as, rather, an alarming symptom: Either mythicization is already
at work or it will immediately be induced by the loss of the historical
consciousness of time. It may be that we can learn nothing from history but the
fact that we have a history; but this already is enough to prevent us from putting
ourselves under the regime of wishesincluding the wish that the suspicion that
there is a 'repetition of the same' could make it possible for us not to will it, so
that instead, in what has become the empty space of time, other pregnant
significances [Prägnanzen] (not ones that history would ever confirm) can be
displayed, and offered for imitation and for the formation of expectations.
It is true that a sense of history is not yet a resolve to bring about a particular
future; but there is simply no other way of gaining sensitivity to a future than
through insight into the uniqueness and irretrievability of what is past. The fact
that the future is composed neither of the wax figures of the past nor of the
imagines [images] of utopian wishes is something that one can only learn from
the specific futures of the

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past times that already make up our past. Here, of course, nothing happens par
ordre de Mufti ['according to orders']. There is an antinomy between what we
need from history and what we find in history, an antinomy that we cannot
master, because it is only a part of the constitutive antinomy of wishes and
realities. In the wish structure of time, beginnings and ends play the most
important role. What we need from history tends toward indicators having the
clarity of mythical models, indicators that enable the individual subject, with his
finite time, to determine how he can set himself in a relationship to the large-
scale structures that reach far beyond him. As a result of its motivation in the
life-world, historiography also works against the indifference of time. That is
why it cannot abandon the concept of epochs, however often its right to that
concept is disputed. But the more it puts to work its technique of compacting,
allocating roles, dating, dividing up and describing conditions, the less it avoids
the suspicion of producing nominal artifacts in the service of the methodical
processing of the material. The mythical mode of thought works toward
evidentness in the articulation of time; it is able to do this because no one ever
asks for its chronology. Besides beginnings and ends it has the free use of
simultaneity and prefiguration, imitative execution and the recurrence of the
same.
The dogmatic mode of thought has to assert the irrelevance of time for its
definitions, but it cannot entirely reject manifestness in the articulation of time.
Christianity brought mythical and historical means close to one another in this
way by means of the most effective device in the articulation of time: the fixing
of an absolute temporal pole and point of reference for chronology. It is the
extreme reduced form of a multiple articulation such as was regenerated again
and again in chiliastic speculations. The dogmatic model of time is the correlate
of the ubiquitous representation of the saving events by means of the
sacramental cult. The one event is named toward which time, in fulfilling itself,
runs, and from which it unexpectedly expands into the interval of grace. The
meting out of that interval turns out to be so generous that it has to be measured.
The result is that it can never depart so far from its point of reference that the
memory of that point is lost in and with time.
How far the early Christian period still was from harmonizing the need for
pregnance in history with the requirement of historical definiteness can be
observed in the gospel author's carelessness in dating

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the birth of the Savior. Luke was not much concerned about the incompatibility
of the dates that were easily accessible to his contemporarieson the one hand,
from the census of Quirinius, and on the other hand from the end of Herod's
reignbecause, by somewhat neglecting that inconsistency, he could give a
plausible explanation for the locations of Jesus' birth and of the progress of his
childhood. 35Much more important to him than securing the historical point in
time against chronological objections was his concern to make connections with
the important reference points that were authenticated in the Old Testament. The
birth in Bethlehem, in spite of the family's being originally from Nazareth, was
indispensable for Jesus' descent from David, and the repetition of the great Old
Testament movements between the Nile and the Jordan was the most imposing
way of elevating this childhood story.
At the beginning of the fourth century the founder of the historiography of the
Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, has a view of the initiating date of the story of
salvation that accentuates an entirely different aspect. His view has become
solicitous about state policy, about the preservation of the world. His dating
takes on a relationship to the form of governance of the Imperium Romanum
[Roman Empire]. Erik Peterson has shown the importance, for the self-
understanding of politics in the age of the caesars, of Christianity's offer to set
the unity of the new God alongside the unity of the empire and the ruler.36In
that case, for one looking back from the time of Constantine, the assignment of
Jesus' birth to the point in time in which Judea, after the removal of the last
Herodian, Archelaus, had become a Roman province, had to become significant.
The integration of the empire should also have taken place in the area from
which salvation had comeat the same moment that a meaning for history, as yet
unknown to the surrounding world, was coming to pass. Such establishment of
simultaneity is a favorite way of bringing about mythical significance. When
Eusebius accepts chronological difficulties with the biblical text as the price of
this simultaneity, he decides in favor of a different mode of thought from the one
that would have given anything not to introduce more doubtful questions into the
dating of Jesus' birth than the text of Luke already raised for concerned or
mocking contemporaries.
The indifference of time to what occurs 'in time' forces itself upon us in every
anachronism as a source of annoyance in the relationship

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to time. The simultaneity of things that do not seem to belong together and
whose meaningful structures collide in time, as material objects do in space, can
become a challenge to bring about the synchronization that can be produced by
acceleration and retardation. But this holds more for states than for actions, that
is, it holds for realities that cannot be sharply delimited and dated, and the
chronological simultaneity of which is often only a matter of the kind of rhetoric
that encourages or wards off.
Loss of accurate datability requires compensation in the form of pregnance. For
as soon as the search for significance operates within the realm of documentable
history, it is already a piece of our exhibition to ourselves of the fact that history
can be made. Events then require actions. The exaggeration of the uniqueness
and special quality of the event, which is supposed to be taken as representing an
aggregate of actions, is also a way of mythicizing it. When pregnance is lost,
however, the basis for a conception of how and by whom history is made is also
lost. That is why misgivings, or at least a feeling of loss, are induced when
doubts arise about the reality or the function of Luther's nailing up of the theses,
as a datable event, or when the storming of the Bastille becomes the side effect
of changing conditions or of a causal chain that bypasses the event.
The consolation we derive from giving precedence to conditions over events is
based only on the hypothesis that conditions are the result of the actions of an
indeterminate large number of people instead of just a few whom we can name.
But it is just as natural to suppose that history then becomes a process in nature,
a sequence of waves, a glacial drift, a tectonic fault movement, a flood, or an
alluvial deposit. Here, too, science works against elementary needs and
therewith in a way that favors susceptibility to remythicization. The more subtle
the theoretical knowledge, the more it nourishes the suspicion that history does
not take place and is not made in its 'great' moments and that no causality
attaches to those of its scenes that are ready for engraving, but rather the chains
of their motivations have already run out when the hammer is raised to nail up
the theses, when the breaking of windows takes place or the trumpet is blown for
the day of reckoning.
Where the idea of the sole dominion of action in history is still far from people's
thoughts, it is more likely to be the natural framework of all actions, set by birth
and death, that is marked out for special interest. Plutarch expresses his
admiration for Alexander with the

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note, which was hardly verifiable for him, that Alexander was born during the
same night in which Herostratus set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus. That
is full of meaning because it also points toward what was impending for Asia as
a result of this birth. But then Plutarch heaps further coincidences on top of this
one: the arrival on the same day of the news of the victory, for his father Philip,
of a racehorse at Olympia, as well as that of the victory of his general Parmenio
over the Illyrians. Simultaneity with a victory in a battle or at Olympia does not
awaken acute historical doubt, but simultaneity with the beacon fire at Ephesus
already attracts critical attention. This differentiation is a criterion for
'significance,' which is not something with which we readily credit history.
Characteristically, since Bayle, simultaneity as a means of enhancement has
been regarded only from the point of view of deceptive and deceitful traditionas
calling for mistrust. 37The simultaneity that connects the decisive private date
with the 'great' public event has found refuge in the unverifiable realm of the
literature of memoirs; while, if it is heaped up, it does make the recollection
suspect, at the same time it satisfies the desire that reality should still contain
signs drawing attention to important things.
In the field of asserted simultaneities, those of great historical events with
spectacular cosmic phenomena stand out. The most prominent instance is the
appearance of the star at Jesus' birth, and the eclipse at his death. The possibility
of retrospectively checking this old instrument for the production of significance
has fallen into the laps of historians as a by-product of later scientific exactitude
in the calculation of solar eclipses and of the paths of comets. Tradition had
dated the founding of Rome at April 21, 753 , and equipped the day with the
B.C.

cosmic distinction of a solar eclipse. To be sure, the coincidence required only a

small displacement, once one had to recognize that the nearest solar eclipse
happened only three years later, on April 24, 750 Still, can one call this a
B.C.

'mystical dilettantism,' as Bayle would still have judged it, giving the victory to
the Enlightenment? It is more nearly another form, besides human action, of
enhancing the event: The founding of the city could not have been subject to the
arbitrary decision of those involved, if the universe had cooperated in it so
publicly.
When Luke writes in his Gospel that the solar eclipse at Jesus' death extended
over the entire earth, this exaggeration was already recognized by Origen and
excused as a corruption of the text. But the

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evangelist shares this kind of exaggeration with other ancient authors, who not
only raised partial eclipses to total ones, so as to distinguish an event, but also
moved eclipses that didn't occur at all, or that could only be observed elsewhere,
to the place of the event, as well as moving the dates together appropriately. As
A. Demandt has shown, the ancient reports can be classified according to their
deformations, with the help of the concept of the "tendency toward pregnance"
[Prägnanztendenz] that was produced by Gestalt psychology. The result is a
piece of historical phenomenology. There are three directions in which
alterations can be seen to have been made: quantitative increases in what is
stated to have occurred; changes in the type of event, where the phenomena
weren't fully defined; and synchronization of what were temporally distant
events. All that remains open to question is whether the function of enhancing
pregnance is not underestimated when all that the modification of the facts is
supposed to have accomplished is to have made "the historical picture more
impressive, clearer and more easily comprehensible." 38
When Thucydides writes that during the Peloponnesian War solar eclipses
occurred more often than in the past, the result is that the event is thrown into
relief against everything that went before it. Cosmic phenomena also mark
'smaller' world downfalls when they accompany events with which irretrievable
material has passed away, as with the darkening of the sun at the death of
Caesar. The language used for "darkening" in Mark and Matthewin contrast to
the specific statement in Lukein connection with the phenomena at Jesus' death
leaves open the possibility of an atmospheric cloudiness being intensified into an
astronomical eclipsean elevation that might satisfy the expectation of a
conformity between the cosmos and man's need for salvation, and the augury of
the apocalyptic events that were thought to be near.
The darkening at the death of Caesar, which as a longer-lasting atmospheric
impediment to the shining of the sun could explain the failure of the crops to
ripen that was noticed, was connected by Virgil with the fear of eternal nightthat
is, it was related eschatologically to one of man's elementary uncertainties. Only
later commentators then did not hesitate to deduce from the dimness of the light
a darkening of the heavenly body, which would in any case still have been
permitted to the poet as a metaphor. The most extreme exaggeration of what
happened at the death of Jesus is accomplished for the first time by

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Tertullian, who is not only rhetorically zealous, as a jurist, but also expresses his
affinity for the end of the world when he imposes the title of casus mundi [world
disaster, end of the world]. At the same time anyone could know already, or be
aware of as the objection that Origen had brought against Luke's account (and
for which a deep knowledge of astronomy was hardly necessary), that at the date
of Jesus' Passion, during Passover, there had to have been a full moon, so that a
solar eclipse was out of the question.
The superelevation of historical events by means of simultaneous cosmic
spectacles has something to do with the expectation or suggestion that history
was made, if not by man, then at least for man. That could still more easily be
expected of it if man appeared, not as the subject of the great and fateful events
but rather as a cooperating figure in a broader context. That is why the accent of
the supposed cosmic corroborations or warnings falls chiefly on birth and death
as the 'natural' portion of history, the pre-given scope of which is, as it were,
merely filled up by actions. So oracles and augurs had to be consulted. Even
astrology contains more than the fatalistic finding of inescapable determinism,
namely, an element of cosmic participation in human fates, a defense against the
indifference of time. That defense lies already in the fact that astrology made
increased demands on dating and chronology. Its limit accomplishment is
contained in the attempt to cast the horoscope of the world as a whole by
reference to the calculated date of its creation.
Girolamo Cardano introduces his biography with his own horoscope, but without
thereby leveling off the historiography of his own life as that of an experience
that was still to be had. Goethe parodies this opening with the beginning of
Dichtung und Wahrheit.r Precisely in a case in which the astrological prognosis
is not taken as complete, a combination of heavenly bodies that is interpreted,
perhaps not without irony, by its means can receive a 'significance' that is
rendered strange, as though it were taken literally, by the calculation. Goethe
makes the clumsy midwife who is involved in his birth struggle in vain against
the goodwill of the stars; in vain because "my horoscope was propitious: the sun
stood in the sign of the Virgin, and had culminated for the day; Jupiter and
Venus looked at him with a friendly eye, and Mercury not adversely; while
Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the moon alone, just full, exerted
the power of her reflection all the more, as she had then reached her planetary
hour."s This is no piece of

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cosmic determinism, but more nearly the demonstration of a friendly consent, on

nature's part, to an existence that nature itself was not able to bring about by
force. It is not that the stars determine the life that takes up poetry and truth
[Dichtung und Wahrheit], because it happened to begin under such a
combination, but rather that a convergence exists, which lays claim to meaning,
between the astrological pattern and the beginning of the life, a convergence that
becomes evident in the minor detail that even the unfortunate midwife was
unable to cause the event to miss the auspicious hour, which, after all, was alone
supposed to favor everything that followed. The life is already significant in its
first moment.
The astrological quotation is an element that is directed against the leveling off
that is produced by science. Since the atomism of Epicurus, to make natural
phenomena not only indifferent to man but a matter of indifference for him, by
reducing them to the homogeneous level of his purely theoretical interest, had
been the essence of a philosophy that freed the spirit from fear and hope and was
consequently the only means of enlightenment. If the falling and the vortexes of
the atoms, alone, had produced all the phenomena in the world, and man as well,
then there was no longer anything in nature that man could relate to himself as a
sign or a portentous intensification of his own history. After such enlightenments
it is pure anachronism when our heroes still have attendant meteorological
phenomena: the thunderstorm that is vouched for as having occurred at the hour
of Napoleon's death on Saint Helena, or the oneuncommon for the end of March,
but similarly attestedat Beethoven's death. To people at the time, the world
seems for a moment, contrary to all science, to take notice of man, at least in his
most outstanding specimens.
The leveling down of significance by the Enlightenmentand with it already the
provocation of Romanticism to oppose thatfound what may be its finest
illustration in the young Fontenelle's Histoire des Oracles [Story of the oracles]
of 1686. This brilliant polemic makes the object of its historiographical
enlightenment, modeled on Bayle, no less impressively evident than it does the
Enlightener's scrupulous care to seek the principal target of his destruction
indirectly. That the pagan oracles fell silent at the moment of Jesus' birth is just
as much a myth of simultaneity as the tale of the death of the shepherds' god Pan
at the moment of Jesus' Crucifixion; the only difference is that the end of the
oracles is a public state of affairs that is fixed to an institution.

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After all the concentrated erudition he expends on the story of the oracles' falling
silent, Fontenelle has none left over to investigate the need for such significance.
He considers the one disposed of along with the other and restricts himself to
declaring his nonamazement at the impressiveness of the myth. In Gottsched's
translation: "Dieser Gedanke fliesst so ungemein artig, dass es mich gar nicht
Wunder nimmt, dass er so gemein geworden" [This idea is so uncommonly
pleasing that I don't wonder that it became so popular]. 39As secretary of the
Paris Academy he himself was to be untiring in seeking out striking theoretical
accomplishments of the epoch, as in the case of the refutation of the origin of
thunderbolts. In the pamphlet on the oracles he concentrates entirely on refuting
a demonstration used by apologetics, according to which competition between
two epoch-making agencies of revelation was supposed to have been terminated
by the admission of defeat by one of themby falling silenteven before it had
begun. But the successful Enlightener nevertheless seems not to be entirely
insensitive to the fact that the legend of the oracles' falling silent had offered
people's minds something that, after its destruction by science, would not be easy
to replace.
After people had been enlightened by science, by the establishment of
lawfulness in place of signs, the kind of simultaneity that was still possible was
the coincidence of events of different types, of personal with world historical, of
intellectual with political, of speculative with coarse realistic dates. It is the
Romantic return of simultaneity, without the cosmos and only on the level of
people conducting their history, when Hegel completes the Phenomenology of
the Spirit during the night before the battle of Jena and already under the thunder
of its cannons. His century was not motivated to criticize this coincidence from
the point of view of historiography. Only when the connection of the principal
work of German Idealism with Napoleon's victory had become troublesome for
the thinker's reputation and for his national reliability was the discernment found
that was able to dissolve it again.
In a note to his preface to his edition of the text based on the first edition,
Johannes Hoffmeister turns against all those "who still again and again assert
with the air of knowledgeable people that the German Idealists were, as it were,
a corps of unpatriotic, politically indifferent stay-at-homes who did not allow the
greatest historical events to tear their noses from their books or their pens from
their hands."t The Hegel, then, who was supposed to have both comprehended
and put

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his seal upon the great hour of the 'world soul on horseback' by completing his
principal work was now abjured by science. The picture of the contemptible
stay-at-home who had not hastened to the flag so as still to turn the fortunes of
battle, if not by his arm then at least by the force of his speech, was notit is
trueretouched, but rather taken down. The myth of simultaneity is replaced by
that of a patriotic involvement that was at least not neglected, that was in any
case not supplanted by something supposedly greater. What Hegel really was
doing at the time, however, the learned editor is not able to establish either. The
correction is itself a source of insight not for our knowledge of Hegel but in
relation to the moment in which it seemed necessary to renounce what had
previously been significant. Even to a Robert Musil, Hoffmeister's correction of
the myth can appear as a vindication of Hegelagainst a reproach, however, that
only became explicit through people's considering it necessary to refute it. 40
Significance can exceed what is aesthetically permissible. The Dane
Oehlenschläger was a nonparticipant observer at the battle of Jena. He tends
toward ironical distance and he knows that he can also presuppose this as
Goethe's private attitude. He writes to Goethe on September 4, 1808, from
Tübingen, about the plan of a novel and his fear that the result would
unintentionally be a description of his own life; and one would not be permitted
to make that even as good as it was in reality. There is no feeling, he says, more
peculiar than the feeling that one must place what occurs in real life above
poetry, even though the role of poetry is to represent ''the ideal concentrated
beauty and meaningful content of life." This particular feeling had never been
stronger for him "than when I read Smollett's Peregrine Pickle in Weimar while
the French were winning the battle at Jena and capturing the town."41It is the
problem of aesthetic probability: Fiction cannot allow itself the significance that
reality produces without losing credibility.
In spite of its derivation from Romanticism, historicism further dismantled
history's profile of significance, if only by the increasingly fine-meshed screen
that it applied in analyzing 'events' and 'actions.' The more subtle historical
comprehension becomes, the less serviceable and the less potent is the
attribution of simultaneity. Again, the point is to realize the loss that is involved,
as well, in order to understand the weariness with "passatism"u that arises
toward the end of the nineteenth century. This is an indication of how difficult it
is to get

 Page 109

by without marked means of orientation in the indifference of time and how

quickly the sober understatedness of the advice that history is what becomes of
"dealings" when one views what has happened retrospectively "in a certain way"
42is worn out. Or when one sees those ''dealings" themselves, which one day
will make up history, from too close up, too intimately, reducing them to the
level of a Sunday excursionon the plane of, for example, the famous postcard
that Rathenau wrote to his mother from Genoa on April 19, 1922: "Today, Easter
Sunday, I made an excursion to Rapallo. Details in the newspaper. . . .
Affectionately, W."43
Significance as a defense against indifference, especially indifference in space
and time, becomes a resistance to the tendency toward conditions of higher
probability, of diffusion, of erosion, of entropy. To that extent one can
understand why "significance" gains a role in the philosophy of life
[Lebensphilosophie].v It portrays life as the self-assertion of a reality that resists
probability. As such it does not relate to the distinction between theoretical and
practical needs; in fact it lets one avoid deciding between a theoretical attitude
and a practical onea distinction that tends in any case mainly to be between
'theory of theory' and 'theory of practice.' But what could be acquired from this
category from the philosophy of life is a greater degree of definiteness in regard
to what it excludes and wards off.
That remains the case when Heidegger takes over the term significance from the
philosophy of life. What he designates with it is the result of the device of
tracing a differentiated way in which the world is given for Dasein back to an
elementary and unified way. "Significance" [Bedeutsamkeit] then becomes the
quality of the world for the Dasein that is in it, as the functional specifications of
which "significations" [Bedeutungen] first become possible. To have something
signify something to someone, but also to have Dasein signify something to
itself, presupposes a 'significance' that supports the relational totality of
signifying. It is "what makes up the structure of the worldthe structure of that
wherein Dasein as such already is."44The terms familiarity (with the world) and
significance (of the world for Dasein) correspond to one another and assist in the
suppression of the separation of subject and object (a separation that has
supposedly been left behind) by the unity of Being-in-the-world. It is the
unannounced return of Bergson's pre-epistemological données immédiates
[immediate 'givens'] of 1889, the

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fulfillment by a coup de main of the expectations aroused by the philosophy of

life.
This does not exhaust the foundational relationships that Heidegger's
"fundamental ontology" offers as orientation for efforts to gain access to the
'work of myth.'w The intertwining of significance and familiarity is a foreground
appearance and disguises something that one is not supposed to become aware of
in its subjective-objective ambivalence: the way they correspond to nullity
[Nichtigkeit] and the production of anxiety [Ängstigung]. If significance is the
quality of the world as it would not originally have been for men, then it is
wrung from a situation that produced anxiety, the forcing of which into
concealment is brought about and confirmed by that very significance.
Significance is the form in which the background of nothing [des Nichts], as that
which produces anxiety, has been put at a distance, whereby, without this
'prehistory,' the function of what is significant remains uncomprehended, though
present. For the need for significance is rooted in the fact that we are conscious
of never being definitively exempted from the production of anxiety. Care, as the
"Being of Dasein," which is supposed to be disclosed especially in the basic state
of mind of anxiety, is the source not only of the totality of the structure of
Dasein but also of its wanting significance in the world, in its experience, in
history. The 'naked truth' is not what life can live with; for, let us not forget, this
life is the result of a long history of complete congruence between [man's]
environment and 'signification'congruence that is only shattered in its most
recent phase. In this history life itself continually deprives itself of an immediate
relation to its abysses, to what would make it impossible, and thus refuses to
obey the summons of its terrifying "authenticity."
This would be an example, taking advantage of movable descriptive scenery
from the stock belonging to the philosophy that follows the philosophy of life, of
the attempt to arrive at a phenomenology of significance as an 'apotropaic'
[averting] quality with respect to the stupefaction that is delivered over to the
'absolutism of reality.' Even if great historiographical errors may have resulted
from yielding to significances, nevertheless we are continually getting further
away from the all-inclusive suspicion, promoted by a negative analysis of myth,
that it was misunderstandings of significationsespecially metaphors that were
taken literallythat helped myth's great self-deception to get under way in the age
in which, according to Auguste

 Page 111

Comte's classification of stages, it was dominant. Only an assessment of the risk

involved in the human mode of existence makes it possible to discuss and to
evaluate functionally the behavior that was serviceable in mastering it, and to
take seriously the tentative inclination to be able to avail ourselves of such
serviceability again.

Translator's Notes
a. Anschauung is "intuition" in the old sense of knowledge attained by visual or
quasi-visual contemplation of the object, as opposed to the indirect relation to
reality that is mediated by hypotheses. Physics and hypotheses here are the terms
used by Schlegel.
b. See translator's note h to chapter 1, above.
c. From Latin sanctio, from sancire, to make sacred or to consecrate (cf.
"sanctity"); to ordain, decree; to enact penalties against.
d. The debtor's oath that he has revealed all his assets.
e. This sentence is a translation, not of the original text, but of a revision that the
author intends to insert at this point in future printings.
f. "Satz der Bedeutsamkeit." See his Zur Genealogie des menschlichen
Bewusstseins (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966), p. 44.
g. "Ein subjectiv enteignetes theoretisches Interesse." In translating
Heideggerian terms like Bewandtnis "involvement" or vorhanden "present at
hand," I have followed Macquarrie and Robinson's translation of Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). The scare quotes
are mine, to set off terms that might not otherwise be recognized as 'technical.'
h. " . . . geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt"the well-known final line of
the first part of the poem "Urworte: Orphisch" (1818). The last two lines, in
Walter Kaufmann's translation (Twenty German Poets [New York: Random
House, 1962], p. 37), are: "No lapse of time nor any force dissolves / a form,
once stamped, that through its life evolves".
i. Prägnanz. The author clearly intends us to connect Prägnanz with the verb
prägen (to stamp or imprint)which gives us Goethe's "geprägte Form"rather than
understanding it as meaning "pregnancy" in the sense of being with child (or,
metaphorically, "laden with meaning"). I have nevertheless followed translators
of literature in Gestalt psychology, and Ralph Manheim's translation of volume 3
of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1957), pp. 191ff., in rendering it as pregnance (even though
that obsolete form in fact referred to the usual kind of ''pregnancy"), because (a)
the author's usage is certainly closely related to those in Gestalt psychology and
in Cassirer; (b) we do have an archaic sense of pregnant, meaning "pressing,"
"compelling," "cogent," or "clear" (O.E.D.), which derives from Latin premere
rather than praegnans and which could presumably have been turned into a
substantive as pregnance; and, finally, (c) the only available alternative
rendering of Prägnanz, "precision," does not have the connotation of stamping
or imprinting at all. The obsolete form pregnance, plus occasional use of scare
quotes, should remind the reader that this is a somewhat unusual usage.

 Page 112

j. Cagliostro was a highly successful fortune-teller and medium who had

initiated many prominent people in Germany and France into his "Egyptian"
Masonic lodge. He was an accomplice, in the "necklace affair," of the Countess
de la Motte, who duped Cardinal Louis de Rohan into thinking that he could
regain Marie-Antoinette's favor by acquiring a famous diamond necklace for
her. When the intrigue was exposed, the trial caused a great scandal and the
monarchy's reputation suffered (even though Marie-Antoinette was in fact quite
innocent in the case) because a cardinal had thought that he could, in effect,
bribe her.
k. See Joyce's letter to Nora, August 7, 1909, in Letters of James Joyce, vol. 2,
ed. R. Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 232.
l. The protagonist of Der zerbrochene Krug.
m. Freud, Complete Psychological Works, vol. 22, p. 133.
n. See translator's note g to part 1, chapter 1.
o. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 329 (p. 283 of German editions).
p. Fehlleistungen "faulty functions," as translated in Freud's Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 6: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
q. Entmythisierung, the effort to free Christianity from mythical 'accretions.' The
concept was made especially prominent, in Germany, by the work of Rudolf
Bultmann (who usually employs the longer form, Entmythologisierung).
r. "Poetry and truth," Goethe's autobiography.
s. Truth and Fiction: Relating to My Life, trans. J. Oxenford (Boston, 1883; rptd.
New York: Horizon Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 9.
t. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Leipzig: F.
Meiner, 1937), p. XXXVI, n. 1. (This footnote is omitted from the 1954 reprint
of this edition.)
u. Passatismus, coined from the Italian tempi passati ("past ages"), was a term of
abuse that was applied to Romanticism's enthusiasm for history by various
nineteenth-century writers who prided themselves on their concern for the
present or the future, or both. It thus prepared the way for the 'antihistoricism' of
existentialists, logical positivists, neo-Thomists, et al. (Information supplied by
the author.)
v. Lebensphilosophie is represented in Germany above all by Wilhelm Dilthey,
who gave the term Bedeutsamkeit ('significance') the special sense in which it is
used here.
w. The author distinguishes between the "work of myth" [Arbeit des Mythos]
and the "work on myth" [Arbeit am Mythos] that is referred to in his title. (See
paragraph 13 of part 1, chapter 4, which contains the book's first reference to
Lucretius [see the index], and paragraph 7 of part 2, chapter 4 [see Fichte in the
index].) The former refers to the essential and original function and
accomplishment of myth as such; the latter to the ongoing reworking of inherited
mythical materials, which is the only form and the only way in which we know
myth.

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4
Procedural Regulations
The river delegates its fear of the sea to many arms.
Helmut Lamprecht, Delta

To project myth onto the schema of progress would be an ill-considered way of

providing it with contemporaneity. It has its own procedure by which to exhibit a
directed process, by telling of the gaining of space, and the change of forms in
the direction of human ones between the night and chaos of the beginning and a
present state that is left undefined. In one sentence: The world ceases to contain
as many monsters. In a sense that initially is not ethical at all, but more nearly
physiognomic, the world becomes 'friendlier.' It approaches what the man who
listens to myth needs: to be at home in the world.
It is true that the generations of the gods supplant one another, in dominion over
the world, by means of deception, cunning, and cruelty, but as power becomes
consolidated, its exercise becomes more bearable. Here the question of what this
process may 'reflect' in the history of religion is immaterial. The fearsome
generations before Zeus could have been simply invented or combined in the
myth in order to bring into relief, against that background, the mildness and
friendliness to the world of the last member of the dynastic sequence. Or,
equally, phases that have already been lived through in dealing with the powers
and the gods could be reflected in the mythical genealogy. What is decisive for
the function of myth is that something that one could call the 'quality' of the
divine is represented as not originally being given,

 Page 114

from the beginning or from eternity. What is made sure of for consciousness is
something that it is supposed to know that it has behind it once and for all. That
could be the meaning of every story; but only myth can afford to subject the
facts, which may in any case be lost, to the demand for 'significance.'
The young Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, inspired to philological combat by
Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, denied that the Titans who were overthrown by
Zeus in the myth of the Olympians had ever ruled the consciousness of the
Hellenes, in an age "where the dark forces of nature are in charge, before the
appearance of their conquerors, the forces of nature that are friendly to man."
Such an age, he says, "which satisfied their religious needs only with the former"
[the "dark forces"], never existed; and so neither did "a revolution of faith that
banished the first and symbolized their downfall in its own faith by a change of
sovereign in heaven." 1That is directed against Nietzsche's mythical realism,
which interprets the stratifications that can still be apprehended in the epics and
the tragedies as marking out antithetical concepts of existence. In order to defend
an original purity of the Hellenic spirit as a form of belief, Wilamowitz denies
that myth has this kind of value, as a document that reflects what happened. His
scorn is directed at any idea of a laborious removal of monsters, whose distance
could be exhibited and made secure in myth. Genuine serenity simply excludes
original darkness. Homer stands for the early morning of the Hellenic faith
rather than for a position, already that of an onlooker, on this side of the
seriousness of myth. In the classicist-philologian's view of the Hellenes, their
natural gift for greatness and for serenity may of course decline in the end and
dissolve into lower forms that are distasteful and consequently uninteresting to
the discipline, but none of this reaches back to the 'origins.' We will have to
return to this in connection with Nietzsche's account of myth.
Even Olympian Zeus still has traits of ill will toward man, of scorn for those
who are not his creatures, whom he had to take over, from the Titans, into his
cosmos, and whom he considers inadequate inhabitants for his world. But each
of his attempts to make them disappear from his nature fails and each failure is
combined with the exhaustion of his measures against them. This gives
Prometheus his unforgettable position in mythical anthropogenesis. He is the
only one of the Titans who, as Zeus's former ally in the battle for power, is still
prominent in Zeus's epoch and can prevent him from destroying the Titans'

 Page 115

creatures. His myth demonstrates the possibility of restricting Zeus's power over
men, when he challenges Zeus and survives Zeus's punishment. That is why the
Prometheus who is hacked at on the Caucasus, who knows the secret of Zeus's
vulnerability, is the outstanding figuration of the mythical division of powers.
What is left of Zeus's disfavor toward men is his inventiveness in entangling
them in deadly conflicts among themselves. Even Hesiod allows this to show
through: "Now all the gods were divided through strife; for at that very time
Zeus who thunders on high was meditating marvellous worksto mix confusions
over the boundless earthand already he was hastening very much to diminish the
race of mortal men. . . . " 2Helen, who will cause such deadly complications, is
the daughter of Zeus with Ledaalmost a counterpart to Pandora in the
Prometheus myth. It is the oath that Helen's suitors swear among themselves to
guarantee the successful wooer's possession of her that finally leads to the
expedition of the allies to Troy. If one follows Herodotus's view of the story, it
was the beginning of the long, many-acted confrontation between Europe and
Asia. It is the "great event" that Zeus devised for men.
There is also a difference between Prometheus and the demigod Hercules, who
is clearly a bringer of salvation, not that he purifies men but that he purifies the
world for them, like the Augean stables. Even in the New Testament the
question has still not been left behind as to whether salvation comes through the
removal of Satan's power or through the removal of men's guilt. The mythical
formulation is the myth, one sentence long, in Luke [10:18]: "I beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven." Myth's mode of functioning is to certify that the
decision occurs at a remote place or time, in a theatrical rather than a moral
form.
Wilamowitz believed in the faith [or "belief": Glaube] of the Hellenes.a Where
there were no traces of a cult, there was no faith. The personnel extending from
chaos or Nyx [Night] to the Titans drops out of myth; it does not fit in a world of
faith. But Homer makes Zeus himself fear Night, the "subduer of gods and men,"
and shrink from displeasing her. For it was she who had begun the deceitful and
gruesome process of generational change in the rulership of the gods when she
pressed into the hand of her son Cronus the moon-sickle with which to castrate
Uranus when he came to their nightly bed and thus to put an end to the begetting
of monsters. Lovely Aphrodite arises from the bloody

 Page 116

semen-foam of the castrated god as a confirmation of the extinction of the

monstrous power of begetting giants, Cyclopes, Hundred-handed Ones, and
other deformities.
If one makes 'faith,' with any similarity at all to the post-Christian conception,
into the criterion, then this is all sheer fairy tale, not the fanciful representation
of processes of overcoming, of getting and having something behind one. Nor
will we be allowed to make comparisons with late abstractions like Phobus and
Deimus [literally, Flight and Terror], the sons of Ares and Aphrodite in Hesiod,
whom Homer puts on Agamemnon's shield in an allegorical configuration as
drivers of Ares's chariot. The name "Phobus" for the snake on Zeus's aegis could
be archaic, even if it is not the demon Phobus. 3For the finding of names, for
demons too, is a process that reproduces itself the more names have already been
found.
One who looks Medusa in the face must die. The most extreme intensification of
the terrifying quality of a being is when its mere face drives out life. All other
dangers are founded on more than optical encounter. A modern anthropologist,
having in mind the 'vagus death,' formulated this in the proposition " . . . when a
subject dies in a situation from which there is no way out, then its death is
caused by meaning."4Each of the details collected by Apollodorus makes
Medusa more harmless: instead of hair she had snakes, her tongue hung out
between an enormous set of teeth, she had hands made of iron and wings of gold
as well as a head covered with dragon scales. She is one of the Gorgons, whose
derivation, like that of most of the figures of terror, points to primeval times, to
the transitional area between the formless and the formed, between Chaos and
Eros. Among Freud's literary remains, from as early as 1922, there was also an
explanation of the experience underlying the Medusa story as that of being
paralyzed by a mere look. The myth puts the Gorgon in the neighborhood of
Poseidon, like so much that emerges from the depths of the sea, where what is
formless or beyond form is at home. It is a later coordination with the Olympian
system when Medusa's ugliness is described as the punishment administered by
Athena when she discovers Poseidon lying with Medusa in her temple. From this
combination arisesat the moment of Medusa's decapitation by Perseusthe winged
horse Pegasus, who was later to be the steed of poets. A monster like Medusa
could only be overcome by means of cunning. Cunning must be seen, against the
background of coarse cruelty, as already a step in the

 Page 117

refinement of means. This still holds for Odysseus, the one who is full of tricks,
when he has to deal with monsters like the descendant of Poseidon, Polyphemus.
Myth represents a world of stories that localizes the hearer's stand-point in time
in such a way that the fund of the monstrous and the unbearable recedes in
relation to him. This includes the transitional forms between beast and man, even
though philological protest has been entered against seeing the Olympian world
of anthropomorphic gods as a late form of early animal forms that still
sometimes show throughanimal forms such as are characteristic of Egypt, where
Anubis has human form but still has a dog's head. Mixed forms of this kind are
distributed worldwide in cult and myth. 5Cassirer's observation is certainly
accurate, that only Greek sculpture put a sharp end to theriomorphy, and did this
less by doing away with masked and mixed forms than by "helping man to find
his own image,"6by suggesting to self-consciousness, through what it saw, the
'roundabout' path via the god. In any case the personnel of the Classical
Walpurgis Night,b in many combinations of snake and horse, ass and swan, lion
and dragon, with parts of the human body, presses toward an exclusive and
finally an exalted human form.
Both phenomena, that of the elimination of monsters from the world and that of
the transitional forms on the way to the human eidos [form, figure], must have to
do with myth's function of producing distance from the quality of uncanniness.
The mental schema of distance still rules the Greeks' concept of theory as the
position and attitude of the untroubled observer. In its purest embodiment, in the
attitude of the spectator of Greek tragedy, this schema paves the way for the
conceptual history of "theory." In one of the most influential treatises of the
century of German philology, Jacob Bernays reconstructed Aristotle's theory of
the functioning of tragedy as catharsis through fear and pity as a unique
metaphor drawn from medical purging practices, which leads the spectator in the
theater, precisely by means of his passage through the terrors on the stage, to
release from the passions that entangle one in tragedy.7"Relief, together with
enjoyment" is the formula that Aristotle coined for music, one that for the first
time describes aesthetic enjoyment as the gaining of distance. Sincein a way that
seems intolerablethe mimesis, or representation, is composed 'merely' of
experience, it is in a 'homeopathic' dosage that,

 Page 118

while it does treat like with like, removes it from the locus of its excess and
permits the peace of mind of having it behind one.
Bernays noted correctly how foreign to Aristotle is the characterization of the
theater as a moral institution, because he just does not carry the principle of the
equality of cause and effect over to the spectator, as Plato had done with his
critique of music and of aesthetic mimesiswith what was then the unavoidable
consequence of excluding them from his state. With regard to the metaphor of
purging "relief," Bernays has to warn the contemporary reader expressly not to
decide to "turn up his nose in hasty prudishness."
The same advice applies in a different way to Lucretius's much reviled simile in
the proem to the second book of his didactic poem, where he represents the
philosopher contemplating the world of atomistic accident as a man standing on
a solid rock who, out of danger, watches a shipwreck at seanot, indeed, enjoying
the destruction of the others, but nevertheless enjoying his distance from it. 8But
he does this only because he is not a god, although he is aware that the only way
to be happy is to be like the gods in the intermundia [spaces between the
worlds]. They do not need to apply discipline against fear and hope because they
never learn anything of what we glimpse, metaphorically, in the shipwreck. For
the philosopher, physics has taken over the distancing function of myth: It
neutralizes everything, without exception. But above all it lets us comprehend,
for the first time, what had been at issuewith the inadequate means of myth,
tooall along. Only work on mytheven if it is the work of finally reducing itmakes
the work of myth manifest.
Even though I distinguish, in discussing connections that are evident in
literature, between myth and its reception, I do not want to leave room for the
assumption that 'myth' is the primary, archaic formation, in relation to which
everything subsequent can be called reception. Even the earliest items of myth
that are accessible to us are already products of work on myth. In part, this
preliterary phase of work has passed into the compound of myths, so that the
process of reception has itself become a presentation of its manner of
functioning.
Alongside the monsters from the depths of the sea and the earth, in Hesiod's
Theogony, Poseidon himself is a figure of uncanniness and of doubtful goodwill,
of dangerous irritability. If his power explicitly goes back to an act of division of
powers between the sons of Cronus, in which Zeus acquired the heavens, Hades
the underworld, and Po-

 Page 119

seidon the sea, then the listener realizes with a shiver what any of them, but
especially this one, could have done with men if he had been alone and without
any countervailing power. Poseidon is perhaps called earthshaker because the
earth was thought of as floating on the sea. Earthquakes have always been men's
most extreme experiences of insecurity. This background makes significant for
the first time the fact that the altar on Helicon, which had originally been
consecrated to Poseidon, was rededicated to the worship of Zeus. Thus this
becomes a piece of secured preference for the cosmos: The earthshaker had to
yield to the thunderer. The terrors of the latter are indeed more theatrical, but
less uncanny, less unsettling to our consciousness of the world.
The stories of those who returned from the siege and destruction of Troy are
largely composed of reports of misdeeds committed by Poseidon through storms
and shipwrecks, shipwrecks that are domesticated by the role they play in the
stories of the founding of cities around the entire perimeter of the Aegean. It is
also a form of the separation of powers that though the god can still violently
shake the life that goes on on terra firma, he can no longer break it. He can delay
Odysseus's return home, but cannot prevent it; that return is the successful
assertion of the world's familiarity, in opposition to the embodiment of its
uncanniness. As a receiver of human sacrifices, Poseidon belongs to the stratum
of those who have been overcome. This fact is represented by the myth of
Idomeneus, who during his return home from Troy believes that he can only
escape the storm by vowing to sacrifice the first person he encounters to the sea
god, and then is only prevented by a higher intervention from offering up his
own son. Such myths, like the prevention of Abraham's obedience, are
monuments of the final leaving behind of archaic rituals, a leaving behind such
as Freud saw in the alliance of the sons against patricide. One sees from this how
questionable it is to speak of a "humanization of myth," since after all myth itself
testifies to the intolerability of what becomes obsolete in it. Humanization as
myththat, too, is a valid principle.
When Hesiod calls Zeus "the greatest in strength," it is not only favor-seeking
and rhapsodic glorification but also a concentration of the need for security on
the figure who represents the strengthening of trust in the world and who has
been pushed forward by the mythical process. The rededication of the altar on
Helicon is a mythical signal

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of the same sort as the liberation of Prometheus by Hercules, which Hesiod has
not heard of because it expresses the contingency even of Zeus's dominion.
The fact that Poseidon has not finally relinquished terra firma is revealed by tidal
waves. But even less than they accomplish is accomplished by his throwing his
trident onto the Acropolis of Athens, by which he wants to take possession of the
territory of Attica. This yields nothing but the spring of seawater. A contrast to
this is presented by the other method of annexing land that is demonstrated by
Athena, who plants the first olive tree next to the spring. Zeus prevents the two
from fighting and hands the conflict over to a court of arbitration, which decides
by a majority of one vote in favor of Athena's claim because her olive tree will
be the more important gift of agriculture. This myth stands in the background
when it is reported, in connection with Xerxes' conquest of Athens, that after the
temple of Erechtheus on the Acropolis was burned down, the olive tree next to
the sea-water spring sent up a sprout from its stump as soon as the second day
after the conflagration. 9The polis is founded on the taming of foreign might.
Zeus did not exercise power himself, but regulated the procedure that was
decisive for the reliability of the ground on which life and history take place.
The consolidation of the state that the world has arrived at, as a 'cosmos,' and the
restriction of every absolutism that arises in this process are interwoven as
antithetical motives in myth. Without setting Prometheus free, Zeus would have
lost his power; after the concession of setting him free, he will never be able to
exercise it to the utmost extent of his will. He had not been able to conquer
without assistance either the Titans or the giants whose bodies were partly
snakes; and every assistance means a sort of constitutionalization of power.
In the Iliad, Achilles tells a story that he knows from the mouth of his mother,
Thetis, of the revolt that Hera, Athena, and Poseidon carried out against Zeus
and that Zeus only puts down because Thetis makes the arrogant giant Briareus
take up a position next to him. Zeus can no longer do to the rebels what he had
done to the Titans and the giants, to Typhon or to Prometheus. His power must
be great enough to prevent monsters and rebels against the world order from
arising, but it may not be so great as to secure the realization of his every wish.

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Both Homer and Hesiod are opposed to any magical attitude toward gods, and
they can be so because myth is not anthropocentric. It involves man only
marginally in the story of the gods. Man is a beneficiary of this story, because he
is aided by the change in conditions that it involves; but he is not its subject. In
this respect, too, Epicurus's gods are the ultimate logical result: They don't even
know of man's existence.
I regard the proposition that the dynastic generational succession of the gods is
to be ascribed to Oriental influence as a free, but characteristic conjecture of
philology, as a discipline that simply does not believe it can exist without
something in the nature of 'influences.' One should try, just once, to imagine
what stories could have been told about the gods without such succession. Their
division into two sexes and the web of relationships based on that are firm
preconditions for stories getting under way at all. But then it is already natural
that there should be generations just as much as there are ambitions and rivalries.
I cannot see that special 'influences' would have been necessary in order to
introduce something of that sort. The term influence suggests that it is a matter
of an addition to a system that in other respects was original and self-supporting.
But this system would not be recognizable if it did not exhibit, with the logic that
is built into the premises of plurality and sexuality, the lessening of man's utter
dependence on higher powers that it contains. Only thus does it make one
understand every current dominion as not necessarily the final, the only possible,
and the unsurpassable one. The fact that Zeus remains, if not threatened, at least
capable of being threatened makes it impossible for him to be an absolutely
threatening agency himself.
Myth produces conditions of familiarity not only by means of its all too human
stories of the gods, by means of the frivolous unseriousness of what they
undertake among themselves, but also above all by its lowering of the scale
against which their power is measured. If this could not have been invented
within the mythical framework itself, with the means proper to the mythical
talent for invention, then it ceases to be possible to speak of invention at all and
everything is pushed off onto 'influence.' In view of the tinge of disrepute that
the term invention has in the regions of religion and art, which are too sublime
for that, it is not permissible to impute 'invention,' even where nothing [logically
or genetically] prior [vorgegeben] is evident, when a higher rank of necessity
can be ascribed to the

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spirit or faith of the Hellenes. Here, 'Oriental influence' is only an intermediate

ad hoc solution that shifts the question of origin into still older cultures but
would always still leave open the question why people were inclined to have
recourse to 'essentially foreign' Orientalisms.
How serious is the conflict between the gods? Undoubtedly, what is at issue in
the stepwise ordering of mythical epochs is no longer existence, totality, and
finality, but it is power, precedence, advantages, positions. The relationship
between immortality and the possibility of defeat in battle is in any case, even
for the archaic stories, hardly capable of clarification: Banishment to the Isles of
the Blessed is what happens to Cronus; what had become of Uranus after his
castration remains obscure.
In the Iliad there is a conflict whose seriousness or unseriousness is only
reflected in the way in which Zeus perceives it:
But now strife fell on the other immortals, hatred
Both heavy and hard, for the spirit within them was blown
In conflicting directions. As fiercely they clashed with a deafening
Roar, the wide earth re-echoed their din and the huge vault
Of heaven resounded as if with the blasting of trumpets.
And Zeus, from where he sat high up on Olympus,
Heard the clashing and laughed to himself, delighted
To see the immortals at odds with each other. 10

The fact that the God of monotheism, continually occupied with the uniqueness
of his rank and his power, may not laugh is no doubt related to the difference
between myth and dogma. Jean Paul formulated this in the single sentence ''Gods
can play, but God is serious."11
The interdict against laughter originated in philosophy. It descends from the
political utopia of Plato, who in his attacks on Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus
objected not only to equipping the gods with hatreds and crimes, lies and tricks,
metamorphoses and concealments, but also to their laughter. Not only because
they are gods, but also because pleasure in laughter is objectionable in
general.12In his republic, at any rate, youth would not be allowed to be brought
up with the frivolity of Homer. According to Suetonius's account, the emperor
Caligula still appealed to this passage when he thought of extirpating Homer.
Burckhardt connected this rigorism of Plato's with his preference for worlds
beyond this one: "Now the complement to all of

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this is the next world, of which he enjoys talking just as much as Mohammed
did." 13
One must see it against this background when the Gnostic art myth seeks
precisely the violation of the philosophical precept [i.e., of the interdict against
laughter] by the demiurge. The quality of the demiiurge's creation is discredited
when, in the Gnostic Cosmopoeia in Leiden, he creates the world by laughing
seven times, that is, by expelling the sound "ha, ha, ha." With each eruption of
this laughter he produces a divine being, and specifically in the sequence Phos,
Hydor, Nous, Physis, Moira, Kairos, Psyche [Light, Water, Mind, Nature, Fate,
Measure, Soul].14The violation of the philosophical precept is also an
expression of the fact that the agency that is active here is itself meant to be put
in an ambiguous light. This already holds because the text is inclined toward
Gnostic magic and presupposes this in order to pass over the normative and the
actual prior 'givens' of the world as those of an illegitimate order and to oppose
to it a different will. That is the basis of the innermost connection between
Gnosticism and magic: depreciation of what is actual as a legitimation of
disregarding it in favor of one's own will. The fact that magic is essentially a
kind of 'cunning' [List], that is, that it corresponds to a mythical category,
removes it from the fundamental conception both of the cosmos and of the
creation. But laughter also appears as an elementary form of generation else-
where in Gnostic systems where no preparation is being made for magical
intervention.15No doubt this also includes mockery of the biblical form of 'high
and mighty' establishment of the world by means of the word of command.
It is significant that Zeus, in the story of Poseidon's tossing his trident onto the
Acropolis, chooses a court of arbitration as his means of resolving the conflict.
The introduction of quasi-legal transactions into myth is characteristic of Zeus's
epoch and of the means he employs. But what law endures without means to put
it into effect? Can a god who does not submit to the rule of law still be punished,
especially in the pantheon of amoral gods? It is characteristic of the gods, whose
private morality was to give offense to all the critics, that they are open to the
rule of law. This is one of the presuppositions of the system if those cannot be
punished who, by their definition or at least thanks to their enjoyment of nectar
and ambrosia, are immortal.
For the preparation of the cosmic order in regard to which Hesiod is an
enthusiast, the punishability of the immortals is indispensable in

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one case: the instance when an oath is broken. The sacredness of the oath for
gods, too, is Hesiod's great concern, just as it is that of the Old Testament
authors in regard to their God's fidelity to the covenants and promises, in regard
to his remembrance of the mutual choice of people and God. For Hesiod there
would be no reliability in the world if gods could not swear with an effective
sanction. So they swore by Styx. While Hades, a son of Cronus and brother of
Zeus and Poseidon, is a member of the most recent generation and becomes lord
of the underworld when the responsibilities are divided, Styx, to whom Hesiod
devotes a conspicuously extensive description, is one of the children of Nyx, the
night. In form she is scarcely distinguished from the river in the underworld,
which is an arm of Oceanus [the 'world sea'] and surrounds Hades as the world
river surrounds the world above it. It is significant that Styx, together with her
children, put herself on the side of Zeus even before the decision between the
Olympians and the Titans.
We know how gods are punished for breaking oaths from a fragment of the
philosopher Empedocles, in which we hear of a dictum of Ananke [necessity], an
old decree of the gods. Among them, too, a perjurer must be banished from the
seat of the blessed for three times ten thousand horae (years or seasons) and
must traverse an involuntary sequence of metamorphoses through all the
possible forms of mortal beings: transmigration of souls as the sanction of oaths
among gods. 16
The swearing of oaths does not harmonize with myth, where no deception is
excluded. "God does not renounce deception, which belongs to him by right,"
Aeschylus still says. Consequently the oath becomes the most important element
in the production of distance from the status naturalis [state of nature], whose
overcoming is part of the logos of myth. For an immortal, the sanction must be
powerful, and this is represented by its relationship to the oldest origin of the
genealogy of the gods, to the children of Nyx. In the case of the oaththis one
time, one might sayit is not enough that he who is in fact preponderant binds
himself; it is necessary to go to the roots of the whole race of gods, 'to the
mothers,' to the 'origins' that are so misused by enthusiasts of myth.
Here an elementary dichotomy appears among the ways in which man can
arrange matters with superior powers, so as to live without anxiety or only to be
subject to definable conditions of 'fear of the Lord.' There must be a weakening
of the superior power which is not

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carried out only by man, and there must be proofs of its reliability, at least
preliminary forms of lawfulness and of fidelity to agreements. The technique of
weakening operates through the division of power; the exclusion of
omnipotence; rivalry and entanglement in affairs; the mutual jealousy and envy
of the powers; their precinct and department mentality; the complication of their
genealogies and successions; and the god's defined weaknesses and capacities
for distraction. The procedure by which reliability is demonstrated is more
historical in nature. What is to be demonstrated is the god's continual adherence
to his vows, for example, to God's vow in the Bible, which is confirmed by the
rainbow, not to carry out a second extermination of mankind by water, and not to
let any faithlessness on man's part drive him to break his oath.
Before the pistis theouc becomes man's faith vis-à-vis God, it is the latter's form
of historical identity as a named subject with its capacity to enter into
agreements. It is the God who has held to what he promised to our fathers who
possesses a basic form of provenness, a sort of character, that is evident in the
telling of the story. Bringing out this element of divine fidelity in agreements is
more than confirming a juridical capacity to enter into agreements. Faithfulness
to a covenant is something that can be demonstrated and held fast, and
summoned up as a prophetic rebuke to the unfaithful party to the covenant, to
men, only by telling a true history, not a myth. What matters is not that the
written history is true but that it has to be true.
In connection with this basic form of the historiographical demonstration of the
god's identity, indefiniteness cannot be permitted. One might say: Above all else,
the chronology has to be in order. This is the basis of one of the most important
differences between the Old Testament literature, along with the biblical
theology that finally emerges from it, and myth: the insistence on the reckoning
of time, on datability by means of the lifetimes of the patriarchs, by means of the
years the kings governed, by means of genealogical constructs. The destruction
of the first Temple of the Jews (588 ) becomes the fixed reference day of a
B.C.

study of chronology whose culminating point is the calculationby Rabbi Hillel

the Second, around the middle of the fourth century of the Christian eraof the
date of the Creation of the world as falling on October 7, 3761 This date is the
B.C.

reference point of the simply unsurpassable homogeneous calendar a mundo

condito [from the Creation of the world].

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Compared to this, the Greek attempts to 'historicize' myth chronologically

remained feeble, for example, reckoning time from the Trojan War. But here too
the fact is not without value as an indicator that one such attempt relates to the
trial of Orestes before the Areopagus and relates a chronological series of
generations (geneai) to that. 17For in the Attic state myth this is above all an
event that makes the work of myth pregnantly evident as the bringing to an end
of something that is no longer supposed to exist. But what matters is the
configuration, the eidos, not the dating (which is to be integrated into one's own
history in a somewhat careless manner). I am only anticipating my discussion of
the differentiation of the dogmatic from the mythical mode of thought when I
note here that negligence in constructing chronology is one of the things that are
inexcusable in dogmatic observance. The compensation that observance
furnishes in return for this is that the 'history' it regulates is from the beginning a
history of man, which is preceded by nothing except the mere preparation of the
world for his entrance. He stands at the focus of God's actions, and everything
depends on God's behavior in relation to man exclusively. Consequently the
[comprehensive] history of histories must possess continuous identity, reliable
chronology and genealogy, localization and dating. This produces an entirely
different pathos from what can be characteristic of myth.
In myth there is no chronology, there are only sequences. Something that lies
very far back, but in the meantime has not been contradicted or pushed aside, has
an assumption of trustworthiness on its side. The contest with the Titans, which
was necessary in order for Zeus to assert his power, lies far back, if only because
at that time Prometheus had betrayed his brothers and stood on the side of Zeus,
whereas since then he had had to give vent to, to work out and suffer the
consequences of his titanic disposition in the long confrontation with the
cosmocrator [ruler of the world]. It is only the extent of the material that is fitted
in between the earliest and the latest events that gives the impression of
extensiveness in time, of an undefined temporal background and a foreground
that did not come about overnight.
Pushing things to a distance is also the way to bring about the suspension or
deflection of questionability. Myths do not answer questions; they make things
unquestionable. Anything that could give rise to demands for explanation is
shifted into the position of something that legitimates the rejection of such
claims. One can object that in

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the end all explanations are of this type, however much trouble they take over
constants, atoms, and other ultimate magnitudes. But theoretical explanation
must be prepared for the fact that it is compelled to take the next step, to allow
atoms to be followed by protons, neutrons, and electrons as well as their variants
and not to be able to ward off the suspicion, in connection with these, that every
relationship that can be measured in whole numbers points to yet another level
of elementary building blocks. Myths of creation avoid this kind of regress: The
world is very much in need of explanation, but what explains its origin comes
from a great distance and tolerates no questions about its origin. With the
concepts of philosophy, theological dogmatics systematically consolidated this
effect of making things unquestionable. Eternity and necessity as attributes of
the "highest being" entail that it has no history.
In myth the prevention of intuitiond serves this purpose. Chaos, in the language
of the Theogony, is not yet the disordered mixed state of matter, of the plastic
original material of everything that comes later. "Chaos" is the pure metaphor of
the gaping and yawning opene of an abyss, which requires no localization, no
description of its edges or of its depth, but is only the opaque space in which
forms make their appearance. Where they come from cannot be further inquired
into, just because to do so 'leads into the abyss.' The gaping or yawning
openeven if it is supposed to have been the opening of the silver shell of
Orphism's original eggdoes not in the least 'explain' the fact that the abyss
becomes populated, that out of the darkness that fills it Nyx and the children of
the night arise.
The entire generative power of mythical potencies is described by the fact that
for them Aristotle's principle that like always produces like, man produces a
man, does not hold. Out of the night, all sorts of awful and formless things can
emerge, to occupy the edges of the abyss so that one cannot see into the void.
When anything can be derived from anything, then there just is no explaining,
and no demand for explanation. One just tells stories. A late prejudice claims
that this does not produce anything satisfying. Stories do not need to push
forward to ultimate conclusions. They are subject to only one requirement: They
cannot run out.
Although myth refuses, and must refuse, to provide explanations, it does
'produce' another life-stabilizing quality: the inadmissibility of the arbitrary, the
elimination of caprice. That is why it cannot be

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allowed to fall under the suspicion of being an artifact. It must be accepted as a

"psychological product of nature." 18The descriptive report that "it is not
affected by the arbitrary action of our will" can confidently be treated as
equivalent to the enthusiast's predication that it is the "Word of God,"19for that
means simply that it is beyond what man is capable of. Myth can derive anything
from anything, but it cannot tell just any story about anything. This depends on
the fact that mythical powers are not capable of doing everything, though they
are capable of something that goes beyond everything elsethey are kreittones and
kreittona [stronger, superior].20Cassirer is entirely correct when he says that
least of all within mythical thought can one speak of lawless caprice; but it is
misleading when he describes this as "a kind of hypertrophy of the causal
'instinct' and of a need for causal explanation.''21The offensiveness of the
consciousness of accident is eliminated, in mythical rationality, by connections
that are not causal and are not explanations. The need for explanation is
suspended; the empty positions into which it could penetrate are filled to a
degree of density that finally made myth irritating to Thales of Miletus:
Everything was full of gods.
Myth, then, does not speak of the beginning of the world, any more than it
speaks of its being bounded by Oceanus, which as the boundary river would
after all have to have another bank as well. What is more, it not only leaves in
obscurity what is obscure in any case, it generates this obscurity and
concentrates it. This is also why in the myths of many groups of cultures
[Kulturkreise], the diverse demiurges and culture heroesthat is, the original
founders of world history and human historydo not at first occupy an outstanding
position and are sometimes subordinate and comic figures. Prometheus is still a
'trickster' in Greek comedy and satyric drama. That is also why the question
remains undecided as to who takes first place in the genealogy, whether it is Nyx
or Oceanus, darkness or the depths of the seas. Both are suitable for the
emergence of the next generation, with its monstrosities.
The horizon of myth is not identical with the philosophical limit concepts; it is
the margin of the world, not its physical demarcation. This finitude, rich in
forms, is a different one from that of the cosmological spheres. Schopenhauer
conceptualized this procedure of rendering things unquestionable. Myth, he says,
"never became transcendent," and that is precisely why the ancients "always
remained mythical": "Their theogony, like the sequence of causes, went back

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in indefinitum [indefinitely], and they did not posit, with wooden seriousness, a
Father of everythingif someone inquired curiously further and further back, he
was put off with a joke to the effect that first there had been an egg, from which
Eros was borna joke that was founded on a critique of reason that only lacked
consciousness in abstracto [abstract consciousness]." 22It is the avoidance of the
dialectic of pure reason, of its cosmological antinomies, that is erroneously
shifted back into myth's mode of functioning. Rather than that, that mode is a
procedure by which to avoid the 'and-so-on' of the generation of problems before
it even gets started.
Still, it is correct to say that myth allows itself incompatible variants in
abundance, without ever risking the combined state of contradiction, of
antinomy. It is evident how incautiously one can see the late problems of
philosophy preformed (apart from their degree of abstraction) in myth, as long as
one is in possession of a philosophy of history that assumes the constancy of the
great questions for mankind, that assumes a rationality of all mankind [die
Menschheitsvernunft]. And beyond that: A philosophy of history that assumes
that where concepts do not yet define the limitsand by their Greek appellation
they are limit definersthere the full seriousness of human consciousness cannot
have begun to operate yet.
Monotheistic dogmatism will compress everything together into the pointlike
quality of the beginning in the Creation. It will use even the six days' work of
creation only as an allegorical way of making omnipotence's momentary act of
command comprehensible. In its tendency, this is all decided in what Augustine
calls the "thrust of creation" (ictus condendi). The ambiguity and indefiniteness
of the mythical mode of thought's account of the beginning is not the result,
perhaps, of its having achieved as much clarity as it could, and then halted;
instead, it is an expression of the way it thinks. When it returns in the form of the
'art myth,' it revels in its liberation from pressing questions, from the discipline
of avoiding self-contradiction, and, above all, from definitiveness.
The Gnostic myth can attack Hesiod's chaos as an error, insofar as it was meant
as a description of 'the beginning.' What stands at the beginning is not chaos but
a shadow that is thrown.23A shadowthat is a good Platonic idea, and fits the
Gnostic idea of the cosmos as a cave. But in Plato's story the shadow is, after all,
a secondary phenomenon; a shadow requires a light, and a figure that casts it,
and

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something on which it is cast. What pushes myth along is not the effort of
explanation but the relation to a scenario. In Gnosticism this means that the
Pistis Sophia ['Faith Wisdom'] mischievously and wantonly generates a figure
and that this figure, placed before the light of the good, casts the shadow, which
hypostatizes itself as the wall on which it is cast, that is, which becomes the hyle
[matter]. The gods do spring from the abyss of chaosin that respect the ancient
myth is correctbut they no longer do so as the firstborn products of the world
process but rather as its late and malformed offspring, as consequences of the
aping of the father's original self-production, by his creature, the Pistis Sophia.
A new interest distinguishes this shifting of the beginning to a time before the
chaos from everything that had been important to the Hellenic imagination. The
central issue for Gnosticism is to situate badness and wickedness, as identical, in
the world, so as to compete with the biblical story of the Fall. Unlike in the
latter, in the Gnostic myth the guilt for producing the world [die Schuld an der
Welt] precedes guilt in the world [die Schuld in der Welt]. Man moves out of the
center of guilt, since he no longer has a god to exonerate, because the origin of
the world is, as such, from the bad. This too is a way in which myth diverts
attention away from man; its drama remains the story of the world, and the
importance of that story reduces the superior powers' interest in man. He is not
the great sinner, but a piece of the world containing a hidden spark of
unworldliness. Nothing can be allowed to depend on man if the attention of the
foreign powers is not to afflict and overwhelm him.
The figure of man is not associated with the beginnings. In myth man is, judging
by his derivation, more illegitimate than legitimate, whether because he is still a
descendant of an earlier dynastic phase and does not fit into the new god's 'world
picture' or because his very creation and being kept alive are to spite this god. To
that extent, the fact that the gods in the end have human form themselves is a
surprise, rather than being the kind of preestablished premise that is created by
the biblical story of Creation when it has Elohim create man according to his
own image. How is myth's predilection for a background of animal figures to be
explained, when after all it tends so unremittingly toward anthropomorphism?
The simplest answer would be: Because it could not display this tendency, in
particular, without making man

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the topic, when he is after all only the beneficiary of the softening, the depletion
of power, and the processes that render harmless.
The fact that almost everywhere in the world the cults of gods with human forms
have animal cults in the background would seem to be most readily explicable
by the fact that the act of giving names, in a life-world that is characterized by
nature, first applies to those impressions that represent Gestalts that are strictly
reproduced according to a form or species, and therefore make the most modest
demands in terms of the construction of concepts. Nature demonstrates for man
the concrete reproduction that he achieves only with such difficulty in his own
products and that is imitated, as it were, in the reverse direction, in the
accomplishment of concepts. It is more difficult to conceive of and give a name
to the identity of a numinous power that manifests itself in thunder and lightning
than it is to grasp and attach a name to the combination of strangeness and
familiarity in the genetically reproduced physiognomies of animals. The trueness
to type of the animal figure creates, as it were, something that one can address.
Mythical gods are typical gods. What one can refer to [as a fixed quantity] is not
their moral identity, an identity connected to past actions and pointing toward
future ones, but rather the sameness in kind of the characteristics and effects that
are bound up with a particular area of competence. One can only count on it,
refer to it, in connection with the particular episode in question. Nothing like a
lifelongto say nothing of a nationalrelationship can be established.
Zeus is never described as remembering an act he had engaged in previously; he
has no history. Looked at over the long term, he is unreliability incarnate. Only
his situation within the complex of the gods' powers indirectly determines in him
a kind of reliability in spite of everything. Only the fact that he cannot do
everything makes him bearable, for he is a god of storms who has risen in the
world, just as Yahweh is a god of volcanoes. Still, in this very respect the Old
Testament God is the most exact antithesis of Zeus, because he is conjured up
with the reminder that he led the people out of Egypt and gave them the
promised land of Canaan. By virtue of his identity, he is the guarantor of a
history and of the political constellations that have grown out of that history. His
primary demand, entirely in accordance with this characteristic, is that his
partner should be true to the alliance, to the covenant, to the history. He forgets,
as though intentionally, what he promised in case the other side was unfaithful.

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In myth, none of the stories leaves traces in the stories that come next, however
well they are subsequently interwoven with one another. The gods produce
stories, but they have no history. What is eternal is a matter of indifference to
them, just as it can be a matter of indifference to those to whom their stories are
told. What distinguishes dogma from myth is just this, that it claims to contain,
and institutionalizes, what amount to 'eternal facts.' Although, in return for that,
it also contains eternal entanglements that no atonement can blot out entirely,
unforgivable offenses to the divinity like the mysterious sin against the Holy
Ghost, of which no one has ever discovered what it could consist of.
As long as gods do not have human form, they have behavior, but no motives.
To that extent, Aesop's Ionic animal fables are a late transfer of the
anthropomorphic world of the gods back onto their preliminary theriomorphic
stages. It is a way of dealing with what is typical that has become relaxed. As in
the epic the gods are made to fit the human norm, in the fable men are reflected
on the level of the animals. The Phrygian, Aesop, prefers animals as bearers of
stories that point to the aspect of man that already, in the Ionic culture, begins to
seem like a strange and inhuman quality: his typicalness.
I don't mean to make any assertions about the origin of fables here, any more
than about the origin of myth. But the omnipresent influence of Aesop's fables in
Hellenic civilization, extending even into Socrates' prison cell, is amazing.
Perhaps the subjects of Aesop's fables were old animal gods in whom the
mythical characteristics had been further humanized, but where 'man,' instead of
being made heroic as in the epics, was moved forward to his bourgeois condition
[Bürgerlichkeit]. Then the animal subjects would already be parodies of Homer's
gods, who had still been heroic because they were modeled on the Hellenic
nobility. Instead of the frivolity of a life of leisure, which will be disciplined for
the first time by theory, they would have a disposition to respectability
[Biederkeit], which trails morality behind it. That would be, beside the epic,
another form of work on myth: beside the undemonized and poeticized gods, the
urbanized ones. With them man for the first time discovers in himself the
strangeness of what has still escaped individualization. Then the fable, though
related to the residues of the mythical transformation of monsters into animals
and men, would at the same time be opposed, as a type, to the all too easily
accomplished poetic humanization of the gods in the epics. The fact

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that something in the supposedly easy 'enlightenment' that took place in the
culture of the Ionic coastal cities, which also produced early 'theory,' had not
been successful or carried through is most readily demonstrated by the fact that
after a delay of three centuries the power of myth was still able to generate and
sustain the whole world of Greek tragedy.
The way in which work on myth presents itself in the ancient epics is in its
formand not only in the content of what is narrateditself the successful result of
this work. It becomes evident for the first time what aesthetic modes of operation
could accomplish against the uncanniness of the world; to put it provocatively,
too, lightning had not struck the singer who had no longer taken Olympus all
that seriously. The one who suffers at the hands of the gods is Odysseus, who
has long since reached home, and not the singer who makes the gods compete
with each other over him.
Parody is one of the techniques of work on myth. In it the main features of the
ways in which myth functions are exaggerated, driven to a limit at which their
yield in terms of form expires. That this is characteristic of late forms of the
displacement of myth hardly needs to be demonstrated; but the fact that it also
already appears in the early literary evidence that is still accessible to us is
something that is easy to overlook if one wants to keep it as source material for
the "faith of the Hellenes." Someone ought to have written about the unbelief of
the Hellenes.
Proteus is proverbially a figure representing the impermanence of appearance,
the unlimited capacity for transformationhe is the comical epitome of the
phenomenon of metamorphosis. He is a god of the sea, by his name alone an old
and original one, related to the babel of forms in the depths. No doubt as a result
of having the same name as a prince of that region, he comes to Egypt, to the
little island of Pharos, near the Nile Delta, a taking-off point for voyages and
perhaps also an important oracle for fixing times of departure and probable
winds. This can be inferred from what the Odyssey tells us about the experience
of Menelaus, who was driven ashore therean experience Menelaus recounts to
the young Telemachus at the palace of Sparta, in the company of Helen, whom
he has brought home again. 24On his voyage home from Troy, the gods had
already kept him on Pharos for twenty days, for lack of wind. In his perplexity
he turns to the Nereid Eidothea for help. She tells him to consult her

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father, Proteus, the ancient of the sea, an Egyptian, who knows the depths and
the future.
The very old gods are always suspected of being capable of and knowing more
than the younger ones, in whom, along with power, knowledge too has
diminished. But Proteus is not to be held, for "it is hard for a mortal man to bend
an immortal to his will"especially Proteus, because he is not fixed to one form
but can take on any of them at a moment's notice. His daughter describes the
secret of his omnipotence over forms like this: "He will seek to foil you by
taking the shape of everything (panta de gignomenos peiresetai *), of every
creature that moves on earth, and of water and of furious fire." If one knows the
sequence of changes in advance, one does not become confused about his
identity and one is able to hold him fast until he returns to his original form
(which remains unspecified). That is what happens, too, and "the ancient god
had not forgotten his craft and cunning. He truly became in turn a bearded lion, a
snake, a panther, a monstrous boar; then running water, then a towering and
leafy tree." But his conquerors hold him fast, and when his repertory of
transformations is exhausted, he lets himself be induced to give up his secrets.
It goes without saying that the plastic and graphic arts are not equal to the
challenge of this parody of a category of myth, any more than they are to that of
the Gorgon Medusa; in the vase painting, Proteus is represented as a man with a
fish's tail, from whose body a lion, a stag, and a snake emerge all at once. Plato
subjects him to one of the early allegorical interpretations, in the Euthydemus,
seeing him, with his substanceless capacity for transformation, as a prototype of
the Sophist. The eighteenth-century mythologist explains the piling up of
metamorphoses in connection with one figure as follows: "Happening to be very
learned in astronomy and the knowledge of winds, he must have occasioned the
story of his transformations by frequent changes of his clothing and especially
his headdress."25
One would have thought that for a poet who takes metamorphosis as the central
quality of myth, because it is only through it that the myth becomes something
that one can narrate aesthetically, the figure of Proteus would have to be
practically the pivotal point of all of his variations. But that is a hasty inference.
Ovid mentions Proteus only in passing. Proteus appears to him as one of those
"quibus in plures ius est transire figures" [who have the privilege of changing
into many forms].26He had been seen both as a young man and as a lion, as a

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wild boar and as a snake and as a bull, as a stone and as a tree, as flowing water,
a broad stream, and, by contrast, as fire. The figure lacks what is necessary for a
storynamely, identityat least within an episode. It is pure differentness
[Anderssein] to such an extent that it no longer has any selfhood [Selbstsein], so
that it explodes the principle of myth's narratability. At the extreme limit of
parody, myth destroys itself.
Proteus also participated, with his wise counsel, in the union of the Nereid Thetis
with Peleus, which was to produce the hero whose terrible wrath Homer
celebrates in the Iliad. Zeus had had to relinquish his own erotic interest in her
after he had heard from Prometheus (in return for setting him free) the oracle of
his mother, which prophesied Zeus's downfall at the hands of any son produced
by his union with Thetis. Moderation with respect to the protector of mankind
had saved him from the thoughtless act that would have begotten a greater one
than himself. So Peleus is supposed to receive as his wife the nymph who was
deprived in this way of the role of mother to a new generation of godsa
generation that Achilles can represent only by distant approximation. It is not
surprising that in this connectionaccording to a variant of Hesiod's Catalogues of
Womenhe meets with refusal. It is not easy to replace Zeus as a lover,
particularly when Poseidon too is putting in claims. Consequently Peleus has to
accommodate Thetis with a wrestling match on the coast of Pelion. The joke in
this contest is the Nereid's relationship to Proteus, because she can change her
exterior rapidly, taking on terrifying formsbut like Menelaus on the shore at
Pharos, Peleus refuses to be daunted. He also has the help of an intermediate
being of the mythical world: the centaur Chiron. 27That Thetis, in spite of this
echo of her relation to the inhabitants of the sea, becomes the mother of Achilles
assures us retrospectively that the human form is her normal one.
Proteus's normal form remains undetermined. That is why this figure has an
unsettling effect in relation to the tendency of myth toward anthropomorphism.
In that connection we must not lose sight of the fact that while the function of
myth does depend on its figures being anthropomorphic, the whole accent is on
their having become anthropomorphic and still bearing the marks of this
becoming. Precisely because the function of myth is centered on man's security
in the world, the complex of its forms and stories is not anthropocentric. Man's
status as beneficiary is always multiply indirect, being mediated

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by the quality of the world, which is the theme of myth. Arnold Gehlen has the
most concise statement of this situation: "The anthropomorphic god is precisely
the god who does not operate anthropocentrically; he is not an Ariel." 28
Proteus is also involved in the story of Helen and of the mischief that Zeus
causes through her. According to a version preserved in Apollodorus, Zeus's
disputed daughter was not realiter [in reality] held by Paris in Troy but was
secretly carried off to Egypt, to the king of Pharos, Proteus, who made a likeness
of her out of clouds and foisted it on Paris in Troy, while keeping the real Helen
concealed for the duration of the war. It was Menelaus, then, who again came
into possession of the genuine Helen without knowing about the intervening
substitution. This would explain the fact that he could still use those violent
measures against Proteus.
Docetism is the ontology appropriate to myth. It supports a kind of evidentness
that does not depend on the distinction between appearance and reality, and it
makes possible any detour around the center of seriousness. Helen's presence in
Troy leads to the shedding of the blood of the noblest of men; if, following
Apollodorus's version, she were only the lovely illusion of beauty, the myth
would graze the border of cynicism. The Trojan War takes place although the
object of the dispute, the object at issue, is not located in the center of pain and
sorrow, qualities that elsewhere are the stigmata of unmistakable reality. In myth
precisely that cannot be the case; but it is nevertheless instructive that Homer
had not ventured into this kind of docetism. In his poem, Helen strokes the
wooden horsethe machine constructed by Odysseus's cunningand tries to tempt
the Greeks who are hidden within it into imprudent utterances by imitating the
voices of their wives. Everything would be lost if this were not, in person, the
woman around whom the battle had raged for ten years and was now about to
end.
It was Romanticismintended as a reconciliation of the supposedly oldest
revelation with the newest one, rediscovered after the Enlightenmentwhen
Schlegel said that the divine desires incarnation. Even though the inhabitants of
Olympus have human forms, they spare themselves everything that would make
this a reality in earnest: pain, grief, old age, and death. Even when they appear in
human form, there is an 'echo' of animal form and animal countenance. It is not

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always possible to distinguish with certainty between metamorphosis and simile,

particularly in Homer. 29
The quantity of 'realism' that has been applied to this unresolved dispute by
philologians over a century and a half is amazing. Protecting the 'dignity' of the
Greek gods would have become a test of one's humanistic seriousness even if
Homer had imputed no other form to them but that of birds. At least Hermann
Fränkel cannot have been wrong in ascribing to the poet a kind of indecisionf;
only one should not equate that with diminutions of his level of consciousness,
to a "kind of half-consciousness." Couldn't he also have played with the
theriomorphic background, or even alluded to it ironically?
Homer handles the expressions "cow-eyed" (for Hera) and "owl-eyed" (for
Athena) lightheartedly; but it must be assumed that cult images and texts were
still known to him in which the animal form was fully present, which now only
gives them the trait associated with the eyes. The later Wilamowitz was correct
when he said that we would "not conclude from the Homeric poems that the
Hellenes imagined the epiphany of their gods in predominantly animal
forms."30At the same time he makes the important observation in a note that
while, in the Iliad, the gods do take the form of a particular man known to one of
the heroes when they want to talk to him, at the same time this is also the
expedient adopted by their cunning, and is foreign to their authentic reality:
"When a god does not want to be recognized, he appears to the one he addresses
as a man"not as one whose form belongs to him, but as one whom he wants to
appear as. It is only for that reason that, in reverse, "a god can be suspected when
an unknown man is suddenly noticed and causes astonishment.''31The Locrian
Ajax recognizes a god in the shape of Calchas, from behind, by his gait; nothing
is more plausible to the singer than this, since "Gods are, indeed, easy to
recognize."32
We should not read the poet as though it were his job to sum up the state of
belief of an epoch for us. He does vacillate between simile and metamorphosisas
even the authors of the New Testament do in the passage where the Holy Ghost
descends on the baptism in the Jordan in the form of a dove: for Mark, Matthew,
and John, like a dove (hos* peristera*), for Luke, in its bodily form (somatiko*
eidei); but in Homer it is not a sort of uncertainty of his convictions or even just
of his opinions, but rather the playful reflection of the forms of worship and of
storytellingregulated by no dogma and by almost no priestly

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disciplineof the entire Greek world. Precisely because all of this does not have
the utmost seriousness, it stands ready for the poet's frivolous use. The pluralism
of ideas and imagesthat is, of what he takesbecomes the ambiguity of what he
gives back. In connection with this, he also expected that his public would not
take at its face value the superficial habit by which the Olympians were
represented as men.
The Hellenic myths know nothing that goes beyond the presentthey have no
utopia or eschatology. What would have been the result if Zeus had not heard
Prometheus's compelling warning to avoid the bed of the Nereid Thetis, and not
to beget a superson, is never said. The other almost-super son, Hercules, allows
us to conjecture that the Greeks would have conceived the more powerful one as
one who could free the world from oppression and filth, on a grander scale. The
cosmos, then, would probably not have been at stake if Prometheus had let Zeus
procreate. But would this have benefited man, whose character would then have
become still more 'antiquated' than it was for Zeus's world?
Nevertheless, the burdensome question, here as elsewhere, is, What is still
possible, or possible again? What recurrences are excluded, what can still come
about if the brightenings-up miscarry? Must one regard metamorphosis as
suggesting that at least an episodic return of the gods to the circumstances of
their origin and history is possible? They do seem, in each of these acts, to be
able to have recourse to their earlier opacity and thus recklessness with respect
to man, and to allow themselves complete liberty to revert to irresponsibility.
Each metamorphosis nourishes the suspicion that worries us with the question,
What is the superior power still ableor again ableto do to us? Can there be, here,
the kind of breaking out by things that were locked up that is illustrated by
Pandora's box?
Monotheism also has its problem with regression, a problem that presents itself,
from the perspective of monotheism's self-understanding, as man's weakness for
the lower gods and for their (in comparison to the God of the universe) moderate
demands. While Abraham, when he left Chaldea, had already turned his back on
the animal-faced Elohim and made his decision in favor of the One God, the
totemistic figures come through again and again, as in the ram as the substitute
sacrifice for Isaac, in the [literal] scapegoat of the Day of Atonement, and no
doubt also in the golden calf, amalgamated with the Egyptian Apis. 33Assuming
this speculation about the Elohim background to be

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correct, the threat of Egypt to the developing system of the high God would be
that much more comprehensible and the rigor of the forty-year-long wandering
of a whole generation in the desert in order definitively to exhaust the mythical
gods would be an understandable therapy against the continual threat of
regression to the preliminary and transitional stages characterized by
theriomorphic and teratomorphic [animal- and monster-shaped] divinities, so as
finally to reach a point of no return. This finality of the decision against myth's
'rule of many' [Polykratie] was itself deposited in a canonical myth by which it
can be recalled. "Up, make us gods, which shall go before us," cry the people, at
the foot of Mount Sinai, when Moses does not return from the mountain. When
he brings the tablets of the law down from the mountain and sees the golden ox
idol, what had seemed to be secured by the exodus from Egypt goes to pieces
before his eyes. What Pharaoh had failed to doto bring back the people who
were fleeing from himApis, the bull god of the Nile valley, had succeeded in
doing. "And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw
the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out
of his hands, and broke them beneath the mount." 34
The destruction of the idol has a magical power and parodies the longing to have
a god whom one can entirely incorporate, with whom one can become identical:
"And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it
to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink
of it." Then he has the men of the tribe of Levi slay the idolaters. The great
decision is made visible as the reversal of the totem meal. The rule for the latter
is that the favor of an ancestor or a tutelary spirit is tested and ensured by the
exceptional eating of what normally cannot be killed or eaten or even injured or
touched. Here lies the limit concept of the intention of all ritual and of the
mythical, interlinear interpretations belonging to it: to eat the god. Moses
demonstrates to the dancers around the golden calf that every false covenant
brings only death.
The bloody restitution forms a transition to the agelong discipline of the Law,
the impossibility of complying with which Paul will explain as entailing the
necessity of a different justification. But the worship of the invisible One in
Israel, is never the entirely unquestionable reality that it appears to those who
come later. In a last effort to restore the unity of the Davidic kingdom and the
centering of worship

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in Jerusalem, King Josiah of Judah (who died in 609 at the battle of Megiddo,
B.C.

against the Egyptians) not only had to rediscover and proclaim the book of the
Mosaic law but also once again had to destroy shrines of bull idols, still of the
Egyptian type. More than half a millennium since the desert wanderings had not
been enough to make people satisfied with the impossibility of seeing or making
an image of God.
Instituting this had meant instituting a great self-denial, even if it was to prove
unexpectedly true, over the long term, that an invisible God who spoke out of
books had unlimited transportability insofar as dogmatic rigorism preserved his
definiteness as a Gestalt composed of attributes. The loss of the Temple at the
beginning of the sixth century deprived the Jews' relationship to God of its last
B.C.

remnant of visibilitythe cultand reduced it to the possession of his name and of

the Law. The Chaldean exile returned them to the place by leaving which
Abraham had renounced Elohim and followed his elective God. This first exile,
which ended with the reestablishment of the Temple in Jerusalem in 516 and
B.C.

the completion of the restoration by Ezra and Nehemiah, was the paradigm of
the second; it created the (once again) mythical quality of the certainty of the
fact that, and the way in which, one could maintain the identity of a history
without territory and without a national cult, merely on the strength of the divine
name and the book. The draconic catharsis of all visibility became the origin of
the God of theology, and of his image-free metaphysics.
This cannot be regarded as a triumph of pure spirit if only because the longing
for the old gods remained awake precisely under the pressure of the requirement
that they be forgotten, and again and again provided itself with images and
stories. One may hesitate and feel reluctant to say that Christianity, unexpectedly
and contrary to its antecedents, went halfway to meet this pressure and enriched
the invisible One with elements of a perceptual and narrative character. True, it
did not need to go back to animal physiognomies again in order to prevail over
the Hellenistic world; but for more than a millennium it created combinations of
dogma and image, of concept and perceptivity, of abstraction and narrative. The
God to whom marriage and family were forbidden, because they would have led
him again into stories rather than into history, 35nevertheless now had a Son,
whose Incarnation as man seemed to combine both of these. The

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threat to this 'hypostatic union' no longer lay only, or primarily, in a reversion to

images, but rather in the absolutism of transcendence, in the imperative
metaphysics of divine autarky and the abstractions of dogma.
The gods whom the one God does not want to have beside himself are not
deprived of their existencequestions of existence in general being something that
first arise in philosophical discussion and in the determination of what deserves
philosophical proofbut remain the gods of others, foreign gods, or become
demons. As such, and this is not accidental, they take over the qualities of myth's
mode of functioning, but now with the sign inverted and in grotesque caricature.
Satan, in the Christian tradition, is, like Proteus, a figure that exaggerates the
mythical repertory, summing up all the means that can be employed against a
theological authority characterized by reliability and commitment to man. The
devil's nature is freedom from any nature, the omnipotent self-disposition of
metamorphosis, which allows us to glimpse animal attributes. It has not been
sufficiently recognized that in the whole way he is equipped, he represents the
opposite of dogma's substantial realism. In the figure of Satan, myth has become
the subversion of the world of faith that is disciplined by dogma. The devil's
animal-like extremities and attributes, which are all that the imagination has left
on which to exercise itself freely, are symptoms of the precarious readiness to
regress into myth that characterizes every stage of its overcoming.
The timid polytheism of the Renaissance, which remains mostly on the level of
costume, can be seen as a tamed version of the demonology that, toward the end
of the Middle Agesin the thirteenth and fourteenth centuriesbroke through the
realism of Scholasticism, which was growing tired, and took on luxuriant forms.
There, aesthetic grounds were sufficient to award precedence to the ancient
gods. True, they had been immoral and they again made their appearance in the
nude, but none of them had been suited to the role of the evil principle. The way
in which metamorphosis functions as an antithesis to the Incarnation was
described as early as the first half of the thirteenth century by a great theoretician
of demons, the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach, in his Dialogus
Miraculorum. The devilswho easily go over into the pluralacquire bodies, as
horses, dogs, cats, bears, apes, toads, ravens, vultures, or dragons, or they
acquire the grotesque mask of a human being, in a way that insidiously mocks
the Incarnation:

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They collect human sperm that has been dissipated in ways contrary to nature
and use it to make bodies for themselves. Thus, says the demonological
specialist, they can be seen and touched by human beings. That would be
Proteus as a parody of metamorphosis once again, if it did not have the
blasphemous thrust aimed at the central kerygmadeprived of all docetism by
centuries of effortof Christianity. The antithesis to dogma is an artifact, as a
means by which to imagine an antiworld.
If one looks for a universal instrument to describe myth's modes of procedure,
"circumstantiality" will do as at least an approximation. What this can point to or
at least outline must again be considered against the background of the
absolutism of reality. The feeling of utter dependency implies the wish that the
superior power might hold still, remain occupied with itself or at leastif its
goodwill cannot be establishedoperate with the delays involved in
circumstantiality. Our age, in which rapid decisions and striking dealings on a
large scale are admired, has lost touch with the experience that circumstantiality
can be merciful. The illustration of this that simply cannot be exhausted is the
sudden change in the fundamental mood of the early period of Christianity from
an impatient anticipation of the impending and abbreviated summary
proceedings of the apocalypse to fervent entreaties that it should be delayed. To
know that one is not yetand is continually less and lessequal to the demands of
the end is to come to terms with the world again. This is not the kind of
circumstantiality in relation to which absolute power would turn out to be finite,
but it is the kind with which that power confirms the 'constitutional' limits it has
vouchsafed to us.
The powers of myth simply cannot be pictured as able to have what they want in
whatever way they like. They have to submit to procedures, however
questionable these may be from a moral point of view. Without artifice and
disguise, without metamorphosis and compromise, without checks to and
retardation of arbitrary power, it wouldn't come off. Even the punishment of
others by turning them into things is an index of the resistance that the intention
of sheer annihilation would encounter.
Even the most irate god is forced into circumstantiality: Zeus cannot destroy
with a thunderbolt the thieves who have stolen the honey of the sacred bees in
the cave where he was born on Crete, because Themis and the Fates prevent this;
it would not be in keeping with

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the sacred (hósion) to have someone die on this spot. Embarrassed as to how to
carry out his will, Zeus turns the thieves into birds. Burckhardt remarks,
regarding the criticism of this characteristic of myth, that if "the highest justice
was demanded of the gods, and their failure to implement it was criticized, then
people should have imputed omnipotence to them as well." 36
Burckhardt finds a relevant bit in Apollodorus, which he describes as an
"incomparably remarkable story." In it Zeus is "just powerful enough to help
fate, which has gotten totally muddled on account of two animals, to escape
from its dilemma." The Theban fox was fated never to be caught, while the lot of
the Athenian hound was to catch everything that he pursued. Thus, when the two
animals met, the result had to be a most distressing situation for a reliable
administration of the world. Zeus resolves the dilemma by abruptly turning both
animals to stone.37It is a typical paradox of the kind that hypercritical late ages
devise in relation to their obligatory contents. It is certainly not below the level
that the Talmud or Scholasticism were to reach with their difficulties regarding
omnipotence. Only, the solution generated by a theology of attributes would
have been of a different kind.
One only needs to imagine how the entanglement would have looked in the
theological language of the schools: Can God create a fox that cannot be
captured by any other animal? Necessarily yes, otherwise he would not be
omnipotent. Can God create a hound that catches everything he pursues?
Necessarily yes, since he must be able to do anything that is free of
contradiction. But what if this hound is put on the trail of that fox? No great
imagination is needed to frame the formula of acumen that would resolve the
problem: A God whose omniscience had foreseen the dilemma of a world in
which this fox and this hound were present could arrange the world in such a
way that the hound would never encounter the fox. Since Zeus does not unite
such far-reaching capabilities, he uses metamorphosis to prevent the motion that
is presupposed by the paradox from occurring in the first place. In the opposite
case, the far-flung fate of Odysseus as he is driven about can be described by the
formula that only the incapacity of the Earthshaker [Poseidon], who is angry
with him, to bring about his destruction, as well as the powerlessness of the other
gods who favor him to secure him his homecoming against the Earthshaker's
will, takes on the lasting form of merely keeping him distant from the goal of his
desires. So the basic pattern of the Odyssey, too, is laid

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down by polycracy [the rule of many], as is declared immediately at the

beginning of the epic.
The archaic division of powers also means that the competence of each of the
gods in relation to human life is only partial. In the course of time or from place
to place that life moves from the competence of one to the competence of
another. When, in Tartarus, one has finally passed the ferryman Charon, the
watchdog Cerberus, and the judges of the dead, one is beyond the reach, under
the authority of Hades and Persephone, of the goddesses of fate. This is the
reference of Socrates's obscure answer, in the Phaedo, to Cebes's question
whether one is not obliged to cling to life so as not to escape from the power of
the gods: Socrates hopes in death to meet, no doubt, different gods but good
ones. That is a formula that mixes mythical and philosophical material; that they
are different gods is myth; that they are good is philosophy. As early as his
dissertation on Socrates, Kierkegaard dealt this compound the lapidary
counterblow: "Only when one comes to know that it is the same God who has
led one by the hand through life and who at the moment of death releases one, as
it were, so as to open his embrace and receive the soul filled with longing. . . . "
38This formulation renders harmless the problem of the identity and ubiquity of
the One against whom nothing can stand. It is too obvious to Kierkegaard that
his God always has the same significance for human life, despite the fact that the
risk involved in the quality of this One, once he has permitted doubt regarding
the certainty of salvation, is an absolute risk.

Translator's Notes
a. Der Glaube der Hellenen [The faith of the Hellenes] (cited in note 20 to this
chapter) is the major work of Wilamowitz's maturity.
b. This is the title of a scene in Part Two of Goethe's Faust, which (unlike the
traditional 'witches' Sabbath' Walpurgis Night of Part One) is full of such
'classical' monsters as sphinxes, griffins, sirens, and centaurs.
c. Pistis theou could originally mean the faithfulness of God, or an assurance of
his faithfulness, as well as man's faith in God.

 Page 145

d. Prevention of Anschauung "viewing," "contemplation," "intuition." See

translator's note o to part 2, chapter 3. The point is the origins are not presented
as something that one can 'picture.'
e. Chaos, in Greek, derives from the verb chainein, to yawn, gape, or open wide.
f. See Hermann Fränkel, Die homerischen Gleichnisse (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1921).

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PART II
STORIES BECOME HISTORY

 Page 149

1
The Distortion of Temporal Perspective
Was will Er denn mit der ungeheuren Zeit all anfangen?
Büchner, Woyzeck
[What does he think he'll do with that monstrous stretch of time?]
Iconic constancy is the most characteristic element in the description of myths.
The constancy of its core contents allows myth to appear, embedded as an
'erratic' element, even in traditional contexts of a different kind. The descriptive
predicate of iconic constancy is only a different way of expressing what
impressed the Greeks in myth as its archaic antiquity. Its high level of durability
ensures its diffusion in time and space, its independence of circumstances of
place and epoch. The Greek mython mytheisthai [to tell a 'myth'] means to tell a
story that is not dated and not datable, so that it cannot be localized in any
chronicle, but a story that compensates for this lack by being 'significant'
[bedeutsam] in itself.
The early Christian authors still believed that the reason a story could become so
old was simply that it enjoyed the special protection of memory as a result of the
truth that it contained. The patristic practice of allegorical interpretation is
founded on this assumption. It is the procedure by which one reestablishes the
archaic truth content. Thus mneme [memory] becomes the unerring organ for
determining, if not what is true, at least what is significant.
The assertion that myth could not be invented is just another way of describing
this situation. Myth, according to Schelling's dictum, is

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''one of the primeval ideas that force their way into existence." This is said in
connection with Prometheus's theft of fire. It would not, then, be "an idea that a
human being [could have] invented." 1
A unit myth is a ritualized body of text. Its consolidated core resists modification
and, in the latest stage of dealings with the myth, provokes it, after peripheral
variation and modification have increased the fascination [a] of testing the
durability of the core contents under the pressure of the altered circumstances of
their reception, and [b] of uncovering the hardened, fundamental pattern. The
more audaciously this pattern is overtaxed, the more sharply [prägnanter] what
the attempts to surpass it relate to must show through.
In the end, only inversion, only firm negation, is possible. When Paul Valéry
wants to be able, in Mon Faust, to offer a conclusively final realization of the
modern myth, he can indeed reverse the fundamental pattern of the relationship
between Faust and Mephistopheles, but only by allowing it to continue as a
relationship of 'temptation.' He who was once the tempted now becomes the
tempter of his outdated confederate: Let him [Mephistopheles] take over what
has already become the "Faustian" role. To make it possible to write not just
'one's own' but a 'final' Faust, the figure of curiosity can himself become the
opposite figure, one of satiation with knowledge, in other words, of immunity to
seduction by the elemental enticement of the modern age. The result is that it is
the devil who needs to be rejuvenated. In the confined space of the constant
configuration, all of this could not be brought into relief against the tempi passati
[times gone by] if the names and attributes were not familiar of old and had not
penetrated deeply into the fundamental stratum of our culture [den
Bildungsgrund]. Bringing the myth to an end [das Zuendebringen des Mythos]
fortifies its survival in a new, overall state. Valéry presents the Faust motif as an
exhausted form: "J'espère bien que le genre est épuisé" [I certainly hope the
genre has been exhausted], he has not Faust but Mephistopheles say. But the
comedy in which the author wants to make his subject play itself out is wrecked
by the hermit's high alpine maledictions on the world.
If one asks oneself the question what is the source of the iconic constancy of unit
myths, then there is one answer, an answer that sounds trivial and all too simple
to satisfy our expectations: The fundamental patterns of myths are simply so
sharply defined [prägnant], so valid, so binding, so gripping in every sense, that
they convince us

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again and again and still present themselves as the most useful material for any
search for how matters stand, on a basic level, with human existence.
Is this answer too simple? And if it is not, how do we explain the amazing fact
that in the early morning of our tangible literary history those icons appear that
turn out to be capable of this improbable survival all the way to the presenta
survival that can be identified throughout a tradition that put such materials
under the pressure of its upheavals, its almost total losses, its exertions aimed at
innovation and newness? Tylor spoke, in ethnology, of "survivals." 2But what
causes survival? A model explanation of such phenomena is the explanation in
terms of innate ideas. It does not return for the first time in depth psychology's
notion of "archetypes," but already in Freud in the assertion of universal infantile
experiencesin other words, of universal experiences that are archaica for the
individual. Thus one understands "the gripping power of Oedipus Rex" precisely
because the psychic basis of this myth is familiar to everyone: " . . . the Greek
myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt
traces of it in himself."3In this type of explanation, the capacity for survival that
a fictive material possesses becomes a piece of 'nature,' and thus something into
which further inquiry is impossible.
To create space for a different explanation, we must free ourselves from an
illusion of temporal perspective. Homer and Hesiod are our first and, at the same
time, most lasting authors of fundamental mythical patterns. Homer is this, if for
no other reason because our written literary tradition begins with him. But
because he is also one of the greatest members, if not the greatest member, of
that tradition, the scandal of the fact that we have to accept something so
imposingly mature as its very first item remains concealed from us. This is the
opposite of our need to see such an accomplishment only late, only on the high
point of mankind's path at which we have arrived.
Here we can be misled by our experience in historiography. For in fact what
appears on the basis of the written evidence that has come down to us as
something very early and old must be regarded from the point of view of the
history of man as something very late and already coming close to us in time.
Here writing makes the accidental difference. Its range cannot furnish the
standard of what is necessary for a historical identity that already extends into
and was taken up in those earliest works of Homer and Hesiod. Writing un-

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doubtedly promotes permanence, but it did not produce what it was given the job
of preserving. For a culture of writing, what is more characteristic is the
corruptibility of the sources, which arises from the copyists' lack of
understanding of what they have to transmit.
The mode of writing makes it possible for variants to have a point of reference.
What is new in each case does not take the place of what it goes beyond, and
make it disappear, but is simply superimposed on it, and producesthe history of
literature. At the same time it produces the stimulus to make one's bold venture
visible in the form of a variant. Transfiguration is made possible only by contrast
with a configuration that is enduring.
One can and must proceed from the assumption that the age preceding the
writing down of the early epics, the age in which their contents and forms
originated, was several times longer than the passage of continuous written
tradition that has been annexed to it. Much more important is the fact that that
nonliterate prehistory must have enforced a more fine-textured and intensive
testing of the reliable effectiveness of all the ingredients than their whole
subsequent history in the form of 'literature'especially in the form of material
canonized for reading in schoolcould accomplish. The age of oral
communication was a phase of continual and direct feedback regarding the
success of literary means. It is most nearly comparable to the situation in which
rhetoric originated, in which, however, the concrete function [of the delivery]
determines the interests and the choice of listeners. Nothing is more unsparing
for a text than oral delivery, especially before a public that wants to have a
festival and knows how to implement that claim.
It must already have been a moment of fatigue, in that age of incubation, when
Homerwhoever and however many he may have beensat down or had a scribe sit
down before him to write down, and thus to finalize, the ancient inheritance,
what perhaps seemed to him to be the endangered ancient inheritance, of the
stories and poems that were carried from place to place. I imagine him as a
person who was full of anxiety about the continuance of the world in which he
lived, and who perceived himself as the preserver of what was best in it from
destruction. Even if that should be an exaggeration, in any case it illustrates the
way our temporal perspective is corrected by the realization that what is earliest
for us was already, in its immanent history, something late. Herodotus was still
to deliver his historical

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narratives to the public by means of oral recitation; but Thucydides already

reproached him for the frailty of this impermanent mode of proceeding and
contrasted to it his own turning toward the future as the audience for his work.
The asymmetry of these superepochs of human historythe epoch of word of
mouth and the epoch of the written worddraws attention to the difference of the
conditions under which traditions are developed. In a culture characterized by
writing, the selection accomplished by the word-of-mouth process is
fundamentally lost to view; canonical complexes arise, obligatory quotations,
original texts, and finally critical editions of those texts. The primacy of a
religion that is based on written texts creates an exemplary way of handling
written material. The obligatoriness of dogma is founded on and operates
through the agency of writing.
In this mode of transmission only corruption remains possibleno longer
optimization. Early Christian authors saw the spiritual 'prehistory' constituted by
the ancient world as a period characterized by the misunderstanding and
degradation of very old knowledge of the Pentateuch and its history of origins. If
the pagan authors had acquired biblical materials through forgotten contacts,
then this was supposed in the end, after a long process of corruption, to spur
them to seek access to the authentic material of revelation again. Thus, according
to Lactantius, the creation of man from clay, in the Prometheus myth, is
authentic tradition, in which only the name of the creator is a spontaneous and
by no means unimportant falsifying addition. The impression of the facts of the
case survives more easily in the medium of frivolity than does the memory of the
name. 4But where everything depends on the action being ascribed to the
'correct' agent, the fact that the name was forgotten is inexcusable. What had
been spoiled by oral transmission is at least recognized and regainable for the
person who approaches the written texts that are cared for by the church.5
Transmission by word of mouth favors the 'pregnance' of what is transmitted, at
the expense of historiographical or supposedly historiographical precision. It
creates no obligatoriness except what is contained in the outcome of its
processes of testing, in the fact that what has been preserved has been preserved.
The memorability and impressiveness of what it was capable of [producing] are
not present from its beginning, but only at its end. Thus the unique context
conditioning the testing of contents and forms, a context that can never be rees-

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tablished, is prior to the application of writing. Everything depends on whether a

materialas a work, or not yet as a workis already, in the broadest sense,
canonized for the process of reception and can hold its own on the strength of
that, despite any dislike and reluctance on the part of apathetic schoolboysor
whether it has to be offered and tendered, by an author or a transmitter who
seeks applause and reward at all costs, to an audience that is free to make any
judgment and react in any way. The antinomy of the melancholy author and the
audience that is intent on pleasure is the strange phenomenon produced by an
Alexandrian cultivation of professionals that, putting its authors in a protected
reserve composed of media and critics, permits and pays them to set themselves
against their audience and even deride it if it is not willing to be displeased.
Tacitus nostalgically reports to his audience, which has been spoiled by writing,
on the Germans' cultivation of oral memory. 6When Wilhelm Grimm presented
his edition of Old Danish Heroic Songs, Ballads, and Tales to Goethe, he
explained the quality of the material he had discovered as follows: "The fact that
these songs have remained alive through such long periods, have moved,
delighted, and touched so many hearts, have been sung anew by so many people,
is also the reason why they remain invulnerable to modern criticism and can
very well endure being called inferior by an individual today."7In this
connection one should also think of the history of New Testament texts within
the early Church, for instance, the story of the birth of Jesus in Luke, which, if
not the narrative of a miracle, is certainly a miraculous narrative and must have
surpassed a large part of the apocryphal material to such an extent that it could
not itself become apocryphal. Something like that, once it had been heard, could
not be forgotten, nor, I daresay, could it any longer be excluded from the canon.
No wonder the rigorism that makes feelings inadmissible accomplished precisely
this, without any trouble: In the first 'Bible criticism,' carried out by Marcion, the
text on the birth of Jesus is set aside.
But this congregation was not the author of its texts. It accepted and rejected
what it could never have made up. In the course of the destruction of the
principle that men or personalities or geniuses make history, New Testament
textual criticism also went over to making the congregation the subject of history
and the source of its stories. But it was not even able, with its late Romantic
postulate, to confront

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Albert Schweitzer's old question, "Why shouldn't Jesus be able to think

dogmatically and to actively 'make history' just as well as a poor evangelist who,
being compelled to it by the 'theology of the congregation'
['Gemeindetheologie'], has to put what Jesus does on paper?" This rebuke is just
as applicable when the question is shifted to the poor evangelist himself, who is
only supposed to be able to write down only what the collective dictates to him.
The idea of collective invention [or "making up": Erfindung] is an individual
invention made up by the Romantics, who longed not to be what they were and
what they were expected to be. It was supposed to be the spirit of the people
[Volksgeist] that had made up the folk songs and written the people's book. We
can see from the example of Luther's chorales the limits of what a congregation
is able to do: It does not sing along, among the endless number of verses, with
those that evidently diverge from the others and that don't seem to it
convincingly to belong in the chorale. Ministers or organists who diverge from
the canon of their congregation's favorite verses make themselves unpopular.
In other respects the texts prescribed for ceremonies of worship are distinguished
more by monotony and by disregard for the lay people, who find in the
ceremony no possibility of resisting the texts that are chosen by the priests. The
Greeks had the good fortune not to have to receive their myths from the
cultivation of their priests. Otherwise they would perhaps have had the same
experience that the modern audience has at inaugural festivities: the experience
of having to accept, under the sanction of a metaphysical aesthetics, almost
anything that is demanded of them by their 'priests.'
The rhapsodist of the early Greek epic appears to me absolutely as one who
offers pleasure and amusement, one who adapts himself with precision and
flexibility to his audience and its desires. The fact that he can draw in and
transform myths and make Olympus accommodate itself even to the desires of
his listeners is not only his own daring vis-à-vis sacrosanct materials, it is also
the disposition of these materials to such deformation, a disposition that is given,
and grows, with the 'late' condition of myth. For selection, and the readiness to
engage in it, there are favorable factors, such as the combination of oral delivery
and the darkness of nighttime. Homer himself makes us conscious of these
factors as the situation of his Odysseus at the court

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of the Phaeacians, when he has Alcinoüs urge him to further narration of his
adventures and sufferings:
. . . The night is long and lies before us,
Indescribably long, nor is it yet time to retire.
Continue, then, if you will, your account of these thrilling
Adventures. Truly, I could sit right here
In the hall until bright morning, if you were willing
To go on telling this marvelous tale of your woes. 8

This night is only one of the infinitely many long nights that there were before
the technology of lighting freed at least its intellectual beneficiaries from
reliance on recitation by others. "Nyx hede* mala makre* athesphatos . . . " [The
night is very longindescribably long (Odyssey XI, 373]. Alcinoüs explicitly
compares Odysseus with an expert singer who has to recite a myth. But the
circle of his wanderings is not yet closed. Only when it is, in the first night of his
return to his marriage bed with Penelope, is the identity of adventurer and
storyteller complete as the epitome of effectiveness:
. . . And Zeus-descended Odysseus
Described all. . . .
She listened with keen delight,
And no sweet sleep fell on her lids till he
Had finished his story.9

At the same time it is a scene of the highest 'realistic' legitimation, which the
singer of the epic provides for himself; for the material of the singer's poem is in
fact precisely what Odysseus has to tell his faithful wife in this night of the most
confidential truth.
If one looks back at the singer of the epic and at his audience, there is hardly
anything comparable to the author of the work of art, in a late age, on whom the
aesthetics of Idealism laid the burdenor to whom it gave the distinctionof total
responsibility for his work. Not accidentally, however, oneperhaps the
onlyapproximation to the poetic trials of strength of the early times is again
connected with the name of Homer. The act is entitled "Voss Reads His Homer
in Weimar." In 1781 his translation of the Odyssey, after failing to attract enough
subscribers, had appeared with the note, "Published at the author's expense"; in
1793 the translation of both epics appeared in four volumes. The year after that,
Voss was in Weimar, where the

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authority of the great translator into German, Wieland, already stood against
him. So far, his efforts would have been "wasted, as far as the gentlemen in
Weimar are concerned," was his response to Herder when the latter invited him
to read from the Iliad; his translation was intended "for live recitation, to be
taken in by the ears, not by the eyes." Thus it comes to a trial of strength
between Herder and Wieland. Herder's verdict dismisses all accusations of
artificiality and instances of excessive daring: " . . . he thought he was listening
to Homer himself." 10Voss couldn't have asked for more. Or, actually, for only
one thing more: for Goethe's concurrence.
That he receives on the following day. He reads, in Goethe's house, the storm in
the fifth book of the Odyssey and the whole story of Nausicaä. "Goethe came
and shook my hand and thanked me for such a Homer."11The success was so
impressive that now Wieland, too, was convinced: " . . . he didn't understand
how he could have failed to appreciate me. It was only from me that people
could learn how Homer ought to be read. . . . " Voss may have learned
something about the situation of the Homeric singer from his own success.
When, the year after that, he speaks against the denial that the two epics were
written by the same poet, he appeals not to philological arguments but to the
singer's situation in relation to his audience as one of immediate feedback: "But I
don't find it incomprehensible that an extraordinary spirit such as shines forth
from every detailamong Greeks, such as we know them from his poemsbeing
occupied entirely and solely with his art, which is admired, and returning more
inflamed and more familiar with himself from each performance that has been
understood and sympathetically appreciated, was finally able to develop such a
great work from such a simple germ, and to fill it all with life."12
What Voss calls the justification of his Homer, which "our public would no
doubt follow in time," was accomplished in an oral 'performance,' one that may
have been all too successful when one considers the vague and shopworn quality
of the formulas that Voss came up with. It was the end of an enormous
disappointment. In 1779, when he had already published two books of his
translation of the Odyssey, he was forced to acknowledge that he was "probably
not working for the audience of today," and consequently intended only to finish
the present job: "For what is one supposed to write for a people that is indifferent
to the grandest of all poems?"13Expressing

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his resignation in the language of one who sells at a booth at a fair, he says that
he expects "such a small audience that I won't make enough to pay for the booth
and the lights." People pay for private lessons in grammar, but "no one wants
Homer"; philological learning is more respected than what it is supposed to
enable one to enjoy. "If Homer were alive today, I think Ernesti and Heyne
would sneer at him not a little for concerning himself with such useless
amusements for idlers, and that out of a conceited thirst for fame." 14In 1791,
with the work on the Iliad before him, he still speaks of his audience's dislike for
Homer, of the disposition's inadequacy to the object, like this: "But first the
Germans must become less political, less philosophical and less precocious;
otherwise the childlike old man will still always come too soon."15
Of course the origin of the epic is not identical with that of myth; on the
contrary, the former, as work on myth, already presupposes the long work of
myth on the primary matter of the life-world. But even if the market for stories
and songs did become more refined and ritualized, still the technique of selection
and testing in the sphere of oral communication was hardly capable of great
differentiation. Some things are made tangible by the institution of the contest of
singers, the high point of which, according to the Legend of Homer, the
Travelling Singer, was supposed to have been the imagined competition of
Homer with Hesiod.
For Melesigenes, who only later comes to be called Homer, the situation of his
initial success looked like this: In Cumae he sought out "a place in the hall,
where the old people sat and gossiped; he recited to them the epics he had put
together; and he delighted his listeners in conversation and excited great
admiration among the people."16Observing that his art pleased the people, he
proposed to them "to make the name of their city famous, if they would provide
him with his livelihood." But the promise of fame was not sufficient for that, and
the city council refused to provide for him. In Phocaea he experienced the other
fate of the singer, being defrauded of his work, and in fact precisely by the
schoolmaster of the town offering to give him free room and board in return for
permission to put his successful pieces into written form. The schoolmaster then
decamped and disappeared with them and tried out the stolen goods as his own,
for "much praise and good pay."

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The reason given by the umpire in the contest with Hesiod for putting the victor's
wreath on Hesiod's head is not without charm: "It was just and reasonable, he
explained, that the victory should belong to the man who calls us to agriculture
and peaceful work, rather than portraying wars and battles." But in Aulis, only
the king could decide the contest that way, because it was contrary to the
decision implied in the favor of the public. The Greeks knew that the crucial
prerequisite for this story of the contestthat the two poets should have lived at
the same timewas missing; but to them the gain in 'pregnance' that the
confrontation in Aulis made possible and that made it an often renewed and
varied myth was sufficient to justify the sacrifice of historiographical accuracy.
17
As long as writing is not available, stories are told; and the only stories that
survive are those than can be told again and again until the time comes when
they are written down. If the muses did what Hesiod says they do, if they
conferred fame, then many people emulated not only the singer's art but also his
proven selection of materials. And here, the connection to myth's stories of the
gods was already established by the fact that rhapsodists were active
professionally in the great festivals and local cult celebrations, where, indeed,
material that was full of potential connections had presented itself as the
occasion [for the event in the first place]. The singer and his audienceneither of
them could afford to fall entirely out of step with the other.
When the honorariums became abundant and gave evidence of increased fame,
someone also turned up who had the ability and the desire to write it down. That
sounds like a delayed instance of 'economism' but is more nearly, to say it
outright, a piece of Darwinism in the realm of words. It is a process of the kind
that produces institutions and rituals having a durability that is incomprehensible
in retrospectthings that have impressed and constrained men while, and
although, scarcely anyone knew any longer where they came from and what they
meant. What they suggest is that they could not have been invented, and, to that
extent, also that their rational basis cannot be givenbecause they have no need of
a rational basis. Here what is at stake is not only the call of da capo that every
performance and recital seeks, as in the child's elementary petition, "Tell me the
story you told me yesterday!"which means that the story has been found that can
be retold every evening. For the singer does not offer

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only amusement and diversion; he also offers some of the assurance and sanction
[Bekräftigung] that will one day be called cosmos.
The topic of cosmogonies and theogonies enters the rhaposodist's recital as a
way of conjuring up the stability of the world, because the gravest threats to it lie
far back in time and the dominant god has overcome his own dangers. He has
tempered his rule and relin-quished parts of his former arbitrariness. The muses
celebrate the stability of the world; their work is directed at calming people's
sense of the world. The subject of Hesiod's Theogony is not the primeval times
but rather the quick passage through them and the overcoming of them in the
later age of consolidation.
Consequently it is questionable whether Ernst Cassirer is right when he says that
the true character of the mythical ''is first revealed when it appears as the being
of origins": "All the sanctity of mythical being goes back ultimately to the
sanctity of the origin. It does not adhere immediately to the content of the given
but to its coming into being. . . . " 18The question is whether this 'original'
quality is not identical with the contents and forms having passed the test of
selection, that is, with their durability over against time's processes of attrition.
Thus it is not as a result of the fact that a certain content is "thrust back into
temporal distance" and "situated in the depths of the past" that it gets its mythical
quality, but rather as a result of its stability through time. Then Cassirer's
proposition would be entirely correct, that "time is the first original form of this
spiritual justification" but it would have to be interpreted differently from the
way Cassirer interprets it. Otherwise, every "Ossian" that has not been unmasked
would share the same sanction deriving from mere temporal transportation.
No disquiet is calmed by the fact that one can point to the primevalness of an
event or the status of a content as original. On the contrary, it is the proving of a
content over a long period of time that confers on it the quality that is attributed
to the origins, to the immediate relation of the primeval time to everything we
can experience. Why is that? It is because what is subject to time's wearing away
and slurring together can only have survived as a result of a capacity for
impressing itself strongly.19Of course we credit and attribute to the beginning
what hasand has been able to preservethe evident quality of something that could
not have been invented, and it is easy to overlook the fact that what would still
receive the title of originality can only

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be a meager 'remainder' of what was there in the beginning. The confusion

between resistance to the effects of time and 'timelessness' belongs among the
almost metaphysical forms of carelessness: How glad we would be to find that
what has come down to and remained for us is also what most deserved this, as
the truth itself, the 'ancient truth.' But it is only undated material of indefinite
duration, and its indifference to the expenditure of time, that parades under the
title of immortality.
It is only with these qualifications and reformulations that one could agree with
Cassirer when he sees the concept and effect of the mythical in the absorption of
questions of rational explanation: "The past itself has no 'why': it is the why of
things. What distinguishes mythical time from historical time is that for mythical
time there is an absolute past, which neither requires nor is susceptible of any
further explanation." Almost all attempts at remythicization originate in a
longing for the compelling quality of those supposedly early discoveries of
meaning, but they were frustrated and will continue to be frustrated by the
unrepeatability of the conditions of their genesis. The belief that the imagination
must be able to accomplish in one stroke what the selection operating through
the long nights accomplished once and uniquely is an illusion. This also holds
when the late mythologist makes us believe that the success of the archaic singer
was the result of his being marked out and equipped for the job by the godand
why couldn't what happened once be repeated by thinkers or poets?
It is an illusion engendered by reason. Reason conceives the idea of free
variation within the horizon of the infinite possibilities that are limited only by
the condition of freedom from contradiction. When it was announced from the
walls during May 1968 in Paris that the imagination should and now would
come to power, it was immediately clear to the late grandchildren of aesthetic
Idealism that this guaranteed that everything would become different and thus
better. No one thought they needed to askno one would have been permitted to
askwhat the imagination had to offer, what it had ever offered. We can
confidently invert Baudelaire's statement that the imagination created the world,
asserting that it could never have accomplished it. With the coup de main of
negationwhich is a thoroughly contingent element in logic, since a kind of
thinking that would lack negation is at least conceivableall that reason has left
open to itself, in each case where something is given, is to think of it as
nonexistent, as totally different.

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The example of the literary genre of 'utopia,' with its (reluctantly admitted)
poverty, demonstrates what the imagination's capacity to pursue and break
through the opening created by negation really amounts to. In this field it is
better to throw off the burden of proof and to continue to 'owe' it. The author of
Negative Dialecticsb was sufficiently intelligent to assign a positive value to this
remaining in debtas the quality proper to the thinking that is 'owed' [des
geschuldeten Denkens]by means of a paratheory: Imagination's poverty of
accomplishment only establishes that in its historical position, under the power
of delusions, all that it can accomplish is the consolidation of the existing state
of things [des Bestehenden]. Therefore, the imagination has to await the success
of negation, rather than anticipating it. If only the obstacle of the existing state of
things is removed, then the projection of a new totality, by the process of the
negation of the negation, will proceed creatively after all. This has the fine
irrefutability of philosophical propositions that is so easily mistaken for their
truth.
What we find empirically presentand not only in organic naturedistinguishes
itself, in contrast to the accomplishments of imagination, by the wealth of
unexpected material in its forms and modes of behavior. No imagination could
have invented what ethnology and cultural anthropology have collected in the
way of regulations of existence, world interpretations, forms of life,
classifications, ornaments, and insignia. All of this is the product of a process of
selection that has been at work for a long time, and in that respect, in this
analogy to the mechanism of evolution, approaches the stupendous variety and
the convincingness of the forms of nature itself. No aesthetic theory would credit
the imagination with having invented what has been developed in human history
in the way of institutions. The Neptunism of selection always has a head start, in
relation to the Vulcanismc that Idealist aesthetics expects of the imagination, as
a result of its having shaped the latter's elementary possibilities. So the aesthetics
of the 'imitation of nature' was not all that mistaken when it included the canon
of the mythical materials in its normative realm: The evidentness of myth would
have arisen 'in the manner of nature' and would be equal to nature in the validity
of its patterns.
Therefore, the symmetry between utopia and myth that is readily claimed, on
account of their powerful effects, does not exist. Myth would still be an
'institution'd even if it had not arisen in the way described by the model, deriving
primarily from Egyptology, of the

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narrative interpretation of rituals. The scandal of contingency that every

institution produces as soon as it is pressed (which is an everyday sport) to
demonstrate its legitimacy is increased by myth's refusal, if not to continue to
give reasons at every barrier where it is stopped for questioning, at least to
promise them. Consequently myth has appeared to every historical formation of
'enlightenment' as more an encumbrance than a treasure. That is not such a
matter of course as it can seem to be under the impression produced by the
Enlightenment's agitation against myth as the exemplary compound of
prejudices. For with regard to the effortwhich spans all of human historyto
overcome anxiety relating to what is unknown or even still unnamed, myth and
enlightenment are allies in a way that, while easy to understand, is reluctantly
admitted.
There is a reason for this reserve: Every economy of ideas for which no rational
foundation is given becomes suspect when it presents itself as the demand for
submission to something for which no rational foundation can be given, and thus
becomes the center of new anxieties. It can be rational not to be rational to the
utmost extent. But as a means by which to express this circumstance, myth
would be much too risky, because its pragmatic implications cannot be
unambiguous. One would not be justified in 'setting it up,' if that were possible.
On the other hand, rationality is all too ready to engage in destruction when it
fails to recognize the rationality of things for which no rational foundation is
given, and believes it can afford to get carried away by the process of
establishing rational foundations. Descartes thought that the best way to build
dries rationally was to begin by razing the old dries. Not even World War II
yielded proof of this prospect for rationality. There are moments in which the
outcomes of centuries and millenniums are thoughtlessly sacrificed. What had
been held fast and passed on by a loyalty shielded from all reflection becomes a
source of offense and is gotten rid of. One does not need to be conservative,
however, to see that the demand for 'critical' destruction, and then for a final
rational foundation, leads to burdens of proof that, if they were really accepted
and undertaken as seriously as they are asserted and demanded, would no longer
leave room for what is supposed to be gained, by this process, for the intelligent
movement of existence. Thus the selection of constants over long periods of time
is, in fact, a condition of the possibility of running the risks of "trial and error" in
parts of one's behavior.

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There is an extravagant attitude toward the establishment of rational foundations

that assumes from the beginning, or at least accepts, that only those who are
professionally commissioned or self-commissioned to carry it out can afford to
engage in it. If, however, enlightenment allows thought to be legitimated only by
the fact that everyone does it himself and for himself, then thought is the only
thing that has to be excepted from the human capacity to delegate actions. From
that, in turn, it follows that something that everyone unavoidably has to do
himself and for himself simply must not be an 'endless task.' As such, it stands in
indissoluble contradiction to the meager finitude of the life that the thinker-for-
himself has disposition over.
Reason, as what cannot be delegated, must then reach some accommodation
with this fundamental condition of our existence: Here is the breach through
which certainties that must simply be accepted make their entrance. This is
unquestionably a serious gap in the protection provided by rationality; but if the
only way to close it were to give everyone's thinking-for-himself to a small
avant-garde of professional 'thinkers-for-themselves on behalf of everyone' as a
mandate, then any danger would be worth confronting at this point in order to
avoid having to pay that fatal price. Philosophy has to keep this antinomy of life
and thought in mind in connection with all the self-addressed demands for
rationality that spring from its own womb.
A Darwinistic morphology cannot uncover in every detail the accomplishments
of fossil and contemporary organisms in adapting to long-disappeared
environments. But the validity of the theory is not affected by the fact that the
original functionality, the selective advantage, of characteristics and features
cannot be demonstrated in every case. Even the unexplained strangeness of a
resultant form remains something that has proved itself over long periods of
time, that has been refined as the product of countless rounds of selection, but
also something that did not at least immediately lead into fatal dead ends, that
did not operate as a liability detracting from success in life. Does myth fall once
again and even more into disrepute if its consolidation as a surviving figure, as
an iconic constant, is explained by a mechanism comparable to this one?
The application of the theory of evolution to man gave rise to doubts from the
beginning, not only on account of its establishment of affinities with the animal
realm but also especially on account of the possibility of translating an
explanatory theorem into a useful legitimating prin-

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ciple for individual and social behavior, a principle such as is designated with
the catchword social Darwinism. The misconception that developed, however,
consists precisely in the narrow interpretation of the concept of selection that
restricts it to its performance in biological explanation. One notices this
immediately when one makes use of such an apparently manageable expression
as the development of man. Its ambiguity is made evident by the completely
undisputed thesis that the factors that conditioned the development that produced
man were made superfluous and nonfunctional precisely by their evolutionary
success. The organic system resulting from the mechanism of evolution becomes
'man' by evading the pressure of that mechanism by setting against it something
like a phantom body. This is the sphere of his culture, his institutionsand also his
myths.
If we can speak of a development of human culture taking place over
millenniums, in doing so we imply that the conditions of selection no longer
reach and have an effect on man as a physical system to the extent that he has
learned to subject his artifacts and instruments, instead of himself, to the process
of adaptation. The world we live in is a less Darwinistic world the more theory
and technology are (objectively transposed) Darwinistic worlds. It is to these,
rather than to their producer, that the "survival of the fittest" applies. Human
culture is a front line of confrontation with natureas well as of the obscuring of
nature's superior power, by the scenery of myththat is pushed out far ahead of
the frontiers of the body, a front line at which the action of selection on men's
physis and psyche [nature and soul] is intercepted. Only a manner of thinking
that has intentionally made itself incapable of genetic and historiographical
consideration of the past can deny that by this criterion there has been, and there
is, objective progress. Even a decisionistice interpretation of institutions (in the
widest sense) reflects only the late and almost momentary finding of a
contingency that any effort on the part of rationality could supposedly easily and
quickly lift it above. Unhistoricalness is an opportunistic way of easing our
march, with disastrous consequences.
This is especially true of unhistoricalness in the disguised form of an exclusively
'recent' historysince 1789, since 1848, since 1918, or even since 1945. For
history, whatever else it may still be, is also a process of optimization. In order
to recognize this fact, one does not need to deny that there can be inconsistencies
in the system of the objectifications produced by selection, inconsistencies that
impair the

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overall result. They are due precisely to the isolation and rendering autonomous
of partial systems in the historical process; the history of science and
technologyboth severed from the continuity of life as a result of unavoidable
specializationis an example of this. Thus conflicts arise between technological
optimization and modes of behavior and and thought structures that have been
stabilized by selection.
But even if the term optimization can never claim to be applicable to a
synchronic cross section as a whole, it does establish a definite distribution of
burdens of proof for what wants to give itself out as rationality. At least
arguments of the kind that assert that something can no longer be accepted
because it has already been accepted for a very long time without examination
do not have the rational plausibility that is granted to them at times. What the
heading "institutions" covers is, above all, a distribution of burdens of proof.
Where an institution exists, the question of its rational foundation is not, of itself,
urgent, and the burden of proof always lies on the person who objects to the
arrangement the institution carries with it.
In the etiologial explanation of myth, which is so evident at first sight and which
always presupposes that myth is already secretly on the road to science, the
recognition of myth as an archaic accomplishment of reason has to be justified
by its having initially and especially given answers to questions, rather than
having been the implied rejection of those questions by means of storytelling.
That this in particular involves qualitative requirements of the highest order, if it
is supposed to have made people forget the process of questioning, is no longer
something one can see by looking at the outcome of the process of selection. The
mechanism of selection is precisely of such a kind that, in its results, it does not
provide the explanation for their usefulness in life, but rather, so as to shield its
functionby means of the 'premodality' of matter-of-coursenesswithholds that
explanation from one who is precisely not supposed to think about anything
except what is represented to him.
The fact that the choice of world interpretations, the decision between forms of
life, has already been accomplished is what constitutes the circumstance of
having a history. It is not only on account of its requirement of written
documents and sources that historiography comes late in human development.
When historiography begins, the proceedings in regard to elementary
commitments are already concluded, the deadlines for lodging objections have
passed, the papers

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have been shelved. The burden of proof lies on the person who demands that the
proceedings be reopenedon, for example, the Milesian protophilosopher of the
first half of the sixth century with his dictum that everything was full of gods,
B.C.

if that was supposed to mean that everything was sufficiently full, without being
satisfying. One, then, for whom this had become a source of boredom and
discomfort had to argue for the visionary effort of a theory asserting that, instead
of that multiplicity, everything was a unity by virtue of having arisen from the
single element which up until that time had been given the name of Oceanus. He
who asserted or accepted this did not yet need to know what a chain reaction of
the production of theories he would set in motion, in the late phase of which one
could finally say, modifying his dictum, that now everything was full of theories.
Of course, theories have a process of succession and success that is different
from the process of the development of pregnance, though with his concept of
the "paradigm switch" Thomas S. Kuhn has transferred the psychological
discovery of the "Gestalt switch" to the history of theories and thus provided the
latter with an (actively disputed) analogy to the process by which dynasties
succeed one another in myth.
Cassirer, too, developed the concept of a "symbolic form" from sources in
Gestalt psychology into a system of categories that makes it possible to
understand myth as a form of perception and also as a form of thought and of
life. The approach to the authentic comprehension of mythical perception is by
way of the phenomenon of expression, or, more precisely, by way of the
"primacy of expression-perception over thing-perception." 20While thing-
perception tends toward unambiguousness, and in that respect prepares the way
for the theoretical attitude, the reality of expression involves the ambiguity
(Vieldeutigkeit, literally, "multiple meaning")of one and the same thing over
time, that is, the same ''Gestalt switch" by means of which Kuhn tries to
comprehend the change of paradigms. For Cassirer this is what is presupposed
by the mythical category of metamorphosis: "Every shape can metamorphose
into another; anything can come from anything." But since the face that the
world exhibits in each case depends on the affective state of the person to whom
it exhibits itself, it is impossible to interest oneself in it intersubjectively except
in the mode of communicated subjectivity, that is, through storytelling. Here
Cassirer's theory stops short of the most important step, which is to tell us how
this fundamental form of subjectivity nevertheless attains its

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specific acceptance in history. What can be granted to myth is certainly neither

theoretical nor prescientific objectivity, but it is nevertheless an intersubjective
'communicability' that stands, in its form, incomparably closer to the kind of
acceptance that goes with objectivity than to any affectively tinged experience of
expression like that typified by amazement at a 'momentary god.'f What Cassirer
and others have overlooked while demanding a theory of the origin of myth is
the circumstance that the entire stock of mythical materials and models that has
been handed down to us has passed through the agency of reception, has been
'optimized' by its mechanism of selection.
The reason Cassirer was not interested in the question of the reception of myth,
but exclusively in that of its origin and its quality as an origin, is precisely that
he considered it from the point of view of the terminus ad quem [limit toward
which the process is directed]. As a way of ordering the world of experience
that, while in principle it is equal in status to science and art and cannot be
deprived of its value by them, nevertheless tends toward them historically, myth
is the defining characteristic of an epoch to which the philosophy of history has
to ascribe a preliminary status. Its origin only betrays what first becomes
possible when it is suspended. In spite of all the affirmations of the autonomous
quality of this symbolic system of forms, it remains, for Cassirer, something that
has been overcomeovercome, to be sure, in that it itself points to the experience
and the achievement of order in which its surrender of its position, together with
the conclusion of history itself, would have to be found. There is a final system
of symbolic forms; on this assumption any recurrence of mythical 'categories' is
out of the question, or to be regarded as an aesthetic anachronism. 21My
opinion, in contrast to this, is that in order to perceive myth's genuine quality as
an accomplishment one would have to describe it from the point of view of its
terminus a quo [limit away from which the process is directed]. Removal away
from, not approach toward, then becomes the criterion employed in the analysis
of its function. It would be not only, and perhaps not even, a "symbolic form"
but above all a 'form as such,' by which to define the undefined.
This abstract-sounding formula is meant to be understood anthropologically, not
epistemologically. Understood in terms of its origin, 'form' is a means of self-
preservation and stability in the world. Once he has emerged from the regularity
of a condition in which his behavior was determined by his environment, the
hominid creature has to deal

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with the failure of the indicators and determinants of his behavior, with the
indeterminacy of what the constituent parts of his reality 'mean'g for him. He
begins to set up 'significances' [Bedeutsamkeiten] over against the disappearance
of strict meanings [Bedeutungen]. It may be that discovering and attending to the
daily and yearly recurrence of the same was the earliest access that man had to a
reliability surrounding him, contrary to the appearance of reality as a sheer
superior power. On the other hand there is the view that sees phonetic/ linguistic
exclamations in response to uncanny and uncomfortable phenomena as the
source, perhaps still accessible through etymology, of the names of gods. It may
not be important to decide between approaches that focus more on ecstatic
aspects and others that focus on normalizationwhat is important, it seems to me,
is that even the most trifling invention [or "discovery": Erfindung] required
acceptance, to avoid being immediately annihilated again. 22
If reliability can be found [gefunden] in repetition, it can also be invented
[erfunden] in the form of repeatability. Even if the kind of experience that is
associated with theory cannot be founded on the causal interpretation of
repetition, still this does not by any means prevent it from being the case that,
genetically, repetition and the production of repeatable material accomplished
the same thing. Every name that becomes accepted, every network of names as a
result of which their accidental character seems to be suspended, and every story
that presents the bearers of these names as endowed with characteristics enriches
definiteness over against the background of indefiniteness. To know on whom
one has to depend is always a source of security in one's conduct, a source that is
not without advantage for life, and the systems of which can hardly be less old
than man himself, if we have to proceed from the assumption that his origin was
in a loss of biological security.
As for the reception of names it is worth considering a note that Kant made in
connection with his Anthropologie, a note thatwithout engaging in the realism of
names that is treated with irony in Plato's Cratylus, and also without language
mysticismadmits that a name may have a specific quality: "I seek, first of all,
what lies behind the giving of names. For a new word does not immediately gain
acceptance, unless it is very apt."23The importance of the apt giving of names
can be verified from the fact that in the systematic field of technical innovations
it sometimes fails entirely to take place, in spite of a

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pressing need and the most widespread experience of the lack: lieber
Fernsehzuschauer [dear TV viewer] still remains a painful embarrassment,
whereas Tonband[tape] has successfully emerged from the long-winded
Magnetophonband [magnetic recording tape].
The question of what reason will accomplish in relation to man's self-
preservation has hardly been decided yet. To the extent that it presents itself as
the agency that establishes things rationally, it is this even before any of its
claims have been fulfilled, above all as the authority that revokes things. As such
an authority, philosophy embodied a break with myth. It will not be possible to
maintain that this break was successful from the beginning or even in its early
stages. The proposition that everything is made of water is indeed different, but
that does not yet make it better than the proposition that everything rests on
Oceanus. What everything is made of is still an open question, the only
difference being that it is now of interest only in the form of an endlessly
subdivided list of questions. Fundamentally, philosophy's break with myth took
on the historical interest that it has today only after it had made it possible to
recognize a triumph, delayed for millenniums, of the supposedly antithetical
principleand it took on that interest because it was that interest. The reason that
defines an object for itself to study makes itself into the principle of the reason
that it defines: Logos comes into the world through the break with myth. The
significance of the fact that reason would have to contradict itself, once more, in
order to free itself from what contradicts it, has not been sufficiently appreciated.
One can still perceive the full extent of Kant's astonishment at his observation
when he writes with regard to "The Discipline of Pure Reason"summing up the
whole first Critique"But that reason, whose proper duty it is to prescribe a
discipline for all other endeavors, should itself stand in need of such discipline
may indeed seem strange; and it has, in fact, hitherto avoided this humiliation,
only because, in view of its stately guise and established standing, nobody could
lightly come to suspect it of an idle game. . . ."h That this was seen as having
befallen old reason at such a late date once again reveals the distortion of our
temporal perspective; but it also makes questionable a concept of reason that can
afford always to support itself only by the final contradiction of everything that
went before it.
Kant's requirement that reason stay within the horizon of experience stands
under the principlediscovered with the aid of the Scholastic

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concept of the veritas ontologica [ontological truth] that is proper to God, and
carried over to man by the modern agethat the truth of a thing is only accessible
to him who made it, and only to the extent that he made it. Under the premises of
a mechanistic view of the world, that is perfectly clear: The inventor of a
mechanism is plainly unrivaled as theorist of that mechanism. But does that hold
for every kind of authorship? Is truth about history gained in such a way that one
need only find out the intention and the comprehension belonging to the person
who made it or at least helped to make it? It is with this kind of counterquestion
that the position that carries the title of "hermeneutics" and contradicts that
modern principle of truth makes its entrance, the position that ascribes to
creative authenticity a potentiality that was not (or would not be) accessible and
intelligible to any author, but was in fact (or would be) predominantly
unrecognized and missed by authors, and is only disclosed and unfolded by the
work of reception, by criticism and interpretation. Here the paradox of
Romanticism is very close by, in which only the 'critic' is empowered to deal
with the meaning and truth of the work, being assigned to the blind creator as his
clear-sighted perfecter.
Thus there comes into being, one level below the genius, a new aesthetic elite of
criticism and interpretation. On closer inspection, this is not the public that
'receives' the work at all, but rather a sort of integrative agent in the production
of the 'work,' of whatever type it may be. It is governed by the dictum of Matteo
Mattesilano, "Semper mens est potentior quam sint verba" [The mind is always
more potent than the words]the guiding principle of an extensive interpretation
of law.i But the illusion that one could write the history of the reception of a
work [its Rezeptionsgeschichte] by questioning the author's critics, instead of
investigating his intentions, never actually gets at the real or supposed addressee
of the work, the audience, and even if it does perhaps get at the audience's
'judgments of taste,' it still doesn't reach as far as what was expected of the
audience as the effect of the work: its experience, or even its enjoyment.
In the end all that we have as an index of the work's 'historical influence'
['Wirkungsgeschichte'] is its sheer survival, the simple fact that it did not perish
along with the mass of what has been forgotten. It is not a devaluation of the
function of criticism when one suggests a comparison, for a particular book or
theater season, between the elevations and condemnations handed out by the
reviewers and the

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final statistical results in terms of performances and editions. Such a suggestion

is only a warning intended to put a damper on the extravagant evaluation of
histories of influence [Wirkungsgeschichten] as successful or possible means of
access to the experiential side.
Mythology offers the unique advantage that one only has to deal with the slender
stock of what has survived. We cannot get access to, and question, the people
who made it up any more than we can question the possible specialists, whom I
carefully do not call critics because they may also have been competing
rhapsodists, go-betweens, organizers of cult festivals, and other responsible
people. Jauss, building on the work of Vinaver and Rychner, has been able to
depart from the categories of classical and Romantic aesthetics in relation to the
old Romance epic precisely in view of the fact that oral delivery had still not
ceased to play a part in the formation of the works as they are accessible to us
and that one can speak of a "fluid transmission" of this kind of orally delivered
poetry with elements of improvisation. Jauss has shown for the Roman de Renart
that "the core of the cycle, the fable of the day the lion held court, was retold
differently no less than eight times." This strikes him as a "remarkable
phenomenon," one that a positivistic mode of investigation would not be able to
account for except by assuming a sequence of "corrupt variants" of an
inaccessible original. Jauss considers the medieval audience, for which these
variations could present themselves as a "sequence of continuations'' that "were
always able to develop a new element of excitement, in spite of continual
imitation." 24In contrast to what we have to assume in relation to the early
Greek epic before it entered the phase in which it was written down, in the
medieval epic the culture of writing has a strong influence on the process of
variation and selection, giving an accidental character to the fixing of the
variants that have no original and concealing the reversal of the relation between
theme and variations that is caused by the continual influence of people's
predilections for a da capo.
As a result of the writing down that 'accompanies' the process of reception, the
theoretician of the medieval epic is confronted by a different kind of
configuration of source materials. He does not have to merely conjecture what
was decided as a result of forgetting and survival, nor does he have to regard the
outcome, as the mythologist does, as the summing up of unknown alternatives
that creativity produced.

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Translator's Notes
a. The term archaic should be understood here in its original Greek sense as
signifying association with origins or beginnings.
b. T. W. Adorno.
c. Vulcanism and Neptunism were competing geological theories in the latter
part of the eighteenth century, Vulcanism asserting the volcanic, or igneous,
origin of rocks, and Neptunism asserting that they originated in the oceans.
Vulcanism, then, can suggest convulsive processes requiring relatively little time
in comparison to Neptunism's long-term processes of sedimentation.
d. Institution, here and on subsequent pages, is used in a sense that clearly
relates to the one introduced by Arnold Gehlen in his Urmensch und Spätkultur
(Bonn: Athenäum, 1956). For Gehlen, institutions are the shared patterns of
perception and behavior that man erects to take the place of instincts (with
which, in comparison to other animals, he is very poorly equipped) in guiding
his actions.
e. Dezisionismus, "decisionism," a term coined by Carl Schmitt, is now
commonly used to refer to an attitude that emphasizes the element of sheer
decision in human affairs that cannot (in practice, at least) be entirely eliminated
in favor of rational argument. Arnold Gehlen, who introduced the
'anthropological' concept of institution that is being used here (see note d), has
been described as a decisionist because his institutions are (in part, at least)
simply accepted, without ever being completely justified on rational grounds.
Blumenberg appears to be saying here that a "decisionistic" interpretation of
institutions underestimates the objective progress that they can represent.
f. The concept of "momentary gods" that are genetically prior to special,
functional, and finally personal gods was introduced by Hermann Usener in his
Götternamen (Bonn, 1896). Cassirer was very interested in Usener's theory.
g. "Mean" here is bedeuten, which besides being defined as "to mean" or "to
signify" can also mean ''to direct," "to enjoin," "to advise," in line with deuten,
"to point." Thus Bedeutungen, in one sense, were "indicators" of appropriate
behavior.
h. Critique of Pure Reason A 710, B 738, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1929), p. 575 (translation slightly revised).
i. Matteo Mattesilano was a jurist in Bologna circa 1435, a "postglossator," and
the author of De interpretatione legis extensiva (Venice, 1557). His maxim,
given here, is cited by (for example) Josef Esser, "Die Interpretation im Recht,"
Studium Generale 7 (1954): 377.

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2
Fundamental Myths and Art Myths
Es sind auch Teufel, doch verkappt.
Mephistopheles, explaining angels to devils [Goethe, Faust II, line 11696]
[They are devils too, but in disguise.]
Attempts have repeatedly been made to reduce the diverse myths of our culture
circle and of others to a fundamental myth [Grundmythos] and then to establish
the latter as the 'radical' that underlies unfoldings and enrichments. This
procedure is based on the assumption that the invariant kernels of myth would
also have to lead one to its original condition. The capacity for marginal
variation would then result from a surrounding field of later accumulated foreign
bodies and residues of amalgamation. But the radical myth does not have to be
the initial myth. That would be a supplementary assumption that can only have a
lively attraction for someone who does not subscribe to the assumption that what
interests us is not the original myth at all. On the contrary, the myth that is varied
and transformed by its receptions, in the forms in which it is related to (and has
the power of being related to) history, deserves to be made a subject of study if
only because such a study also takes in the historical situations and needs that
were affected by the myth and were disposed to 'work' on it.
If it is supposed to be possible to allow talk of a fundamental myth without
giving it out as the original myth, its condensation and consolidation must be a
diachronic process, a sort of testing of what could no longer be dispensed with in
a unit myth, both in identifying it and

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in laying claim to what it accomplishes as an image. The more successful the

process of solidification, the more hard-wearing its result.
The fundamental myth is not what was pre-given, but rather what remains
visible in the end, what was able to satisfy the receptions and expectations. We
are familiar with the purely literary phenomenon that it is precisely in the unit
myths that are most 'successful,' historically, that daring and violent amendments
and twistings find their special provocation. Could Kafka or Gide have managed,
in their determined modifications of mythical themes, to forgo the Prometheus
myth? Can we imagine it having vanished from our store of tradition at some
time or other? The easy and not unjustifiable answer will be: "Inconceivable."
The same is true for a fundamental myth like that of the prohibition against
turning around to see that what was promised with certainty has also certainly
occurred, like Orpheus and Lot's wife. We can understand immediately, in terms
of anthropology, what fills the prohibition against turning around with
inexhaustible significance: As humans our frontal optics make us creatures with
a lot of 'back,' who have to live under the condition that a large part of reality
lies behind us and is something that we have to leave behind us.
Prometheus and Orpheusthese names make clear, at the same time, that it has to
be a mistake to measure and explain the significance of a fundamental myth by
the fact that it was supposed to give answers to questions. Nevertheless, a
fundamental myth will have to be assessed in terms of the scope of its
accomplishment: being radical, it becomes capable of being total. But that only
means that it carries with it the suggestion that owing to it and in it nothing is
left unsaid. What is not said is a different category from what is not asked. What
totality means here is something that we know at all only since it was renounced,
and had to be renounced, so that we could have scientific knowledge.
Science depends on the abandonment of the claim to totality. There is so much
talk of a 'world concept' in philosophy precisely because philosophy cannot have
a world conceptit can never have more than an idea of something that must
continue to be withheld from it because it is not able to deny itself the norm of
theoretical knowledge. It is frivolous to suppose that it might have to throw off
this very norm in favor of a world concept of whatever kind, or that it may even
have done so in one case or another. That is playing with possibilities that do not
exista subtle kind of self-important dealing with options that are not open. The
renouncing of totality in favor of science is just as final as the renouncing of the
kind of truth that people once thought they could expect from totality, or as the
renouncing of specific

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"why" questions, or, finally, as the renouncing of the 'intuitive' character of

knowledge [Verzicht auf Anschaulichkeit]. However, we are operating here in
the area of things that cannot be renounced, things that make themselves
noticeable in the surrogates that they force into existence.
The characteristics of a fundamental myth can be seen from attempts to imitate
the qualities of myth with the means of art. Here, in the 'art myth' too, it never
seems to be pure imagination that is at work, but rather the elaboration of
elementary fundamental patterns. Ifto clarify this by the example of Plato's
mythsmen are in any case thought of as emerging from the earth, as the Greeks
largely did think of them, then the imaginative representation of their cultivation
up to their highest potential, in the simile of the cave, is supported by this basic
idea, as an extension built into the 'fundamental myth' that can be schematized as
'emergence from the earth into the light.' Here there is a convergence between
'fundamental myth' and absolute metaphor. 1
After Plato I daresay only Nietzsche tried to devise elementary myths that were
thought out carefully as theory, and employed them as an instrument of
philosophy. But Nietzsche works just as much with daring variants of sanctioned
myths. He knew what he expected and wanted to demand of a reader who had
been made familiar, from earliest childhood onward, with configurations like
that of the biblical Paradise, where the tempter had the form of the snake, the
prohibition had to do with a harmless fruit, and God, walking in the garden, was
friendliness itself, permitting almost everything and forbidding only one thinga
figure whose generosity seemed to be glorified by the contrast of its later
transformation into the angry zeal of a lawgiver who was to prohibit almost
everything and leave only a few things in the permitted category. When
Nietzsche, in his late retrospect on Beyond Good and Evil in Ecce Homo (1888),
makes the myth of Paradise into a scandal, at the same time he makes it more
obvious than many allegorical interpreters before him had done that it contains a
fundamental myth of a high order.
In doing this Nietzsche announces himself as one who is speaking theologically,
when he suggests that to refer to this myth is to "speak theologically," which is
something he "rarely" does. The criterion of leaving nothing unsaid says nothing
either for or against this specific description; it is the method of 'reoccupying' a
given configuration that qualifies it as mythical.
Nietzsche says that it was God himself "who at the end of his days' work lay
down as a serpent under the tree of knowledge: thus he recuperated from being
God. . . ." [Ellipsis in original.] As a snake he

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not only takes a rest after his work of creation, he makes himself into the
principle of evil. One would have no doubt that, following the Gnostic model, he
is merely presenting himself as the god of this world. But Nietzsche has an
entirely different, original intention in the three sentences, designated as
elliptical, of his myth: The God who is recuperating from being himself sees, in
the paradisaic state of his creation, temptation itself. It is the temptation of
stationary finality and completeness. The self-enjoyment of the seventh day
turns into satiety with the good that he has made, because he sees that is cannot
have any future, any history. Paradise is the negation of history, the epitome of a
god's boredom. Thus God becomes the devil, in order to propel his work toward,
not the pleasant outcome of paradisaic harmlessness, but the dramatic
catastrophe of world history: "He had made everything too beautiful. . . . The
devil is merely the leisure of God on that seventh day." 2That (for the benefit of
those who would rather not look it up) is the entire text of the myth inversion. It
is evident that the "theological" attitude is meant ironically.
One spoils something for oneself when one sets out to skim assertions from the
multiple meaning of this compact myth. But this cannot be avoided if one wants
to demonstrate how the myth satisfies the criterion of totality by leaving nothing
unsaid. The myth allows one to see that there is nothing more there to say and
there will never be more to saysomething that no theory can dare to assert. The
temptation in Paradise was the device adopted by a God who wanted to give his
work the quality of history, who did not want the question of man to come to a
halt immediately but instead wanted it to take its course through the great detour
to the superman. This God did not regret having created, but he did regret the
extent of a perfection that as 'Paradise' already had to be the end, the epitome of
every satisfaction. Sin was a trick, and the old antithesis of good and evil was
only a deception from the very beginning, in Paradisethe trap in which man was
to be caught because he believed that this was the secret that God was
withholding from him. But God's true secret is that the good bores him, even the
good that he himself is. His day of leisure is his simulation of his absence
(simulated, since he does after all lie under the tree of knowledge as the snake),
as a means of driving man, by means of prohibition and promise (both means
deriving from the same source), into his world history.
This art myth embodies Nietzsche's whole suspicion that Descartes's genius
malignus [malicious spirit] may be the ultimate authority. The threat to the
subject at the beginning of the modern age, a threat that is only superficially
dealt with, could not have been eliminated

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by any argument, and could only be overcome by means of a final break with the
ideal of truth. In the figure of the biblical God of Creation there remains, in the
end, no good will toward man; that is why this God, in the metamorphosis of the
snake, makes him think that it is through temptation administered by God's
adversary that he loses his place in Paradise. God does not admit to man that this
is God's own secret wish, resulting from his boredom with the mode of
domestication called Paradise. It is a total myth of cynicism. It speaks of the
metaphysical tyranny that can only be escaped by one who makes good and evil
and true and false matters of absolute indifference for himselfthe tyranny that
demands the superman, because only the superman can escape it. The myth has
said everything that there was to be saidfrom Nietzsche's point of viewabout the
world, man, and history. In its three sentences, it leaves nothing unsaid.
If one considers the full extent of the malice with which Nietzsche here pretends
to speak as a theologian [Theologe], although of course he knows very well what
a mythmaker [Mythologe] is, it is increased by the elimination of the slightest
hint of dualism from the biblical personnel: God himself, still very much the
Creator and the friendly master of the garden, takes on the role of the diabolos,
the mischiefmaker. He is the one in all. But then one can't help noticing that he
makes use not only of tricks but also, precisely in order to be able to be the one
in all, of the faculty of transformation. By taking on the form of the snake, he
shows himself to be a God of metamorphoses.
From our perspective, the mythical category of metamorphosis carries the odium
of a reduced level of seriousness. Christian dogmatics opposed the God of the
Incarnation, who is supposed to have identified himself definitively with the
nature and fate of man, to the episodic character of metamorphosis. The critical
experience from which European postantiquity learned what constitutes the
'seriousness' of realism was the dogma of the Incarnation. The posing of a
question like the Cartesian onewhether the world really is, in itself, what it
seems to us to be, and what guarantees there can be of thisis something that one
can understand, as a problem of certainty that penetrates the whole epoch, only if
one can presuppose what was gained as a conceptual capacity through the
(similarly epoch-long) experience of dogma. In any case it is part of the modern
age's consciousness of itself that it is always 'getting serious' anew with new
(theoretical, practical, aesthetic) realisms. Regarding the mythical gods, who he
says only smile in response to the words time, life, and death, the poet says
finally, "There is only one word they listen to with seriousness: /
Transformation." 3

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Hans Jonas applied the concept of a "fundamental myth," with a methodical

intention that diverges from that of mythology as a department of the history of
religion [Religionswissenschaft], to Gnosticism as a spiritual formation of late
antiquity. What mattered to him here was not to dissect out the common and
irreducible characteristics of a multiplicity of Gnostic myths, as a paradigmatic
myth, nor was it to demonstrate the original unity of what was later a
multiplicity. What he calls the "autogenous, unitary, fundamental myth" is the
mode of representationwhich cannot be gone beyond and does not take this
concrete form by mere chanceof the self-conception of this epoch, which he calls
the Gnostic epoch. The fundamental myth is a transcendental factor in history,
arrived at by inference: "The sought-for synthetic principle of the manifold of
mythical objectifications in the realm of Gnostic interpretation.'' 4
The fundamental myth, then, as Jonas conceives of it, is not a matter of fact that
is found in the history of literature. As a structural schema for such facts and
examples, that is, for the myths or quasi-mythical constructs that can actually be
shown to exist, it is a "dynamic principle of the establishment of meaning." Here
it is not of primary importance that because of the reliance of Hans Jonas's work
on Gnosticism on Heidegger's existential analytic, it interprets the mythical
ground plan as a typically "existential" self-interpretation of historical Dasein, so
that what presents itself as an external proceeding that is narratable, part of the
world, and filled with forms is only a projection of the way historically living
man understands himself in his "existence."
Now, Jonas's approach, which was brilliantly confirmed by the extensive
Gnostic finds after 1945, has occasionally been extended, as a philosophy of
history, into the assertion that it must be possible to construct a findamental
myth for every epoch, even if no distinctive mythical material is present there, as
it is in Gnosticism. This idea may be tempting, but it fails to recognize the
exceptional disposition toward myth that is built into Gnostic dualism. For
stories can be told here, in particular, specifically because two primeval powers,
two metaphysical camps, oppose one another with every kind of stratagem and
trick, and the history of man is only a sort of indicator of the changes in the
distribution of power, back and forth, of the partial successes, turning points, and
attacks. The dualistic model is pregnant with myth. It produces stories in the
same way that modern dualistic remythicizing efforts instead retrospectively
produce history as something interpreted by them: The current state of the world
at any given time is always the expected cross section of the total process of the

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battle of the powers that determine reality. Only in this way can history be
narrated as a story, in which good and evil have their representatives.
In the strict sense, a dualistic beginning of history as a whole would have to
make impossible any unambiguous end, because one would always have to
reckon with the possibility of repetition; and that would arouse more concern
about salvation than it allayed. In fact Gnostic dualism, like every other, is
absolute only in relation to the beginning and its consequences, but not in
relation to the end and its definitiveness. The negative principle is not, indeed,
annihilated, but it is certainly driven to resignation by having its prey wrested
from it. What determines the outcome is not a shift in the distribution of power
but rather the superiority of one side in cunning.
That is why every relapse into Gnosticism contains the license, prized by its
partisans, of allowing any means in pursuit of the final goal. One can then speak
of strategies, also of double strategies, and the unconcern with respect to the
means employed excludes any alternatives with respect to the ends, the
realization of which is indispensable in order to justify those who serve them.
Part of this is the circumstance that the goals become evident only to the extent
that the intermediate process reaches or can reach the worst, the unbearable state,
so that in some thoroughgoing groups the repertory of Gnosticism includes the
augmentation of what is commonly called sin, as a way of forcing the state of the
world rapidly to the point where it becomes metaphysically indefensible, the
extreme provocation of the opposite principle. Together with this, one could
hold that moral righteousness and faithfulness to the law could not yet be the
quality that justifies an individual before the good, 'foreign' god.
The advantage of Gnosticism was that it did not need to involve man, overall,
more than moderately in the great, decisive cosmic-metaphysical events: They
did occur on his behalf, but not through him. He had to try to gain a share in
them, but did not have to supply a subject to undergo them.
However random the figures, the steps, the entanglements, and the deceptions
may be, the Gnostic myth tends, contrary to its dualistic general premise, toward
a decisive event by which everything that may have been contrived in order to
bring it about is justified. In this decisive event the last assumptions of the
existence of opposing powers of equal rank disappear; otherwise the process
would have to be endless and every certainty arrived at would only be an
episode. This makes it evident that an absolute dualism, like the Manichaean
one, cannot have been in the interest of Gnosticism as a doctrine of 'sal-

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vation.' A more suitable myth is one that includes the 'genesis' of the dualistic
division.
The hypothesis of a fundamental myth is forced on us by the profusion of
mythical variants and names and of the hypotactic and paratactic constructions
of Gnostic systems, which have the effect of parodies of Hesiod's Theogony. If
one adopts the hypothesis that all of this is the imaginative representation of the
historical life-style associated with a conception of oneself and the world that is
detaching itself from the ancient world and is at variance with that world's value
premises, then one sees in its relationship to what went before it the necessity of
allusion to ancient myths and the inevitable challenge to say all of this again in a
way that is 'sounder' and more capable of defense. Then one can anticipate the
way the dogma of the Church will form itself over against its Gnostic opponent
but will be viable in the world only because it acknowledges the problems raised
by Gnosticism. As such, the Church's dogma is to a large extent the form in
which the Gnostic opposition to the ancient world survives, institutionalized
with means provided by the ancient world.
If one wishes, both methodically and substantively, to keep open the possibility
that other epochs could also have what for them is the "effective basic
constitution of historical existence itself" laid out in a fundamental myth, by
means of which they are able to provide themselves with their "intentional
(mythical or other) objectifications in image worlds," this does not, in itself,
exclude other systems of expression and assertion. In the case of Gnosticism,
however, an exclusiveness of this kind does have to be maintained. The
fundamental myth does not prescribe the secondary material that will be
propagated. It co-ordinates it with its functions in the circumstantiality of
salvation's path through the cosmos. Abstract elements appear as hypostases,
emanations, or eons, as quasi figures. Harnack resisted the classification of
Marcion as a Gnostic; he had not taken part in the speculation about eons and
emanations, but instead had restricted himself to the doctrine of two gods. But
that analysis misses the decisive characteristics. The speculative redundancies
only constitute the free space of the Gnostic imagination; functionally, though,
they also make up what is suggested by arbitrariness in the deformation of the
ancient cosmos, and thus by its lack of binding force.
At the same time, with the liberality of this elaboration of systems, the scandal is
brewing that makes the ascendancy of the dogmatic condemnation of it
inevitable, however little this could already be visible at the time of Marcion's
excommunication in Rome in 144. For here too, as with other processes of
A.D.

dogmatization, one finds

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in practice that concepts always press themselves into the foreground when the
multiplicity of schools and sects, and thus of image worlds, cults, and
personifications, presses toward a higher level of exclusive definition, toward the
competitiveness of the contents by which they are differentiated. Medieval
Scholasticism was to go so far on this path that it became a caricature of itself
and made its name a term of abuse.
From the relation between the imagination and conceptual thought that can be
gathered from the defeat of Gnosticism by the Church, it would be easy to infer
that the supposed vigor that generates images is always simply an expression of
incompetence in relation to concepts. It would then only be a preliminary stage
of the world-historical work of conceptualitya itself, and the latter would thus be
the fulfillment of the intention that holds sway in names and images and rituals.
That is not only a hermeneutic mistake but an interpretation that has already had
an effect in history.
The separation from Gnosticism gives those who are engaged in the process of
the formation of dogma one of the two chief means by which they can
comprehend what they are doing. They can present metaphor and simile as
preparing the way for the conceptual definiteness that was first able to find its
image-free language in the creeds and the decisions of the Church councils. This
should be compared to Marcion's statement that the parable form is the mode of
speech proper to the proclamation of the "foreign god." In declaring this he had,
admittedly, created the difficulty for his interpreter that he had invalidated, of all
things, the parable of the prodigal son from the Gospel according to Luke, the
parable of which Harnack finally established that in the texts of the synoptic
Gospels it alone was "new and unique," that is, not derivable from Hellenistic
precedent. But in his sole Gospelfalsely attributed, he said, to Luke, but actually
belonging to PaulMarcion could not tolerate this unique passage because it
spoke of homecoming from foreign parts, whereas the Gnostic had to find his
true home in a foreign land. One seesand that is why this had to be cited
herehow Marcion seeks to remain entirely within the simile, and how he scorns
evading the issue by means of allegorical interpretation, even as a way of saving
a piece of evidence of the uniqueness of what he regards as the primary
document.
The second instrument by which the process of the formation of dogma is
comprehended by those engaged in it is by understanding assertions exclusively
as answers to questions, the stock of which is regarded as, as it were, an ideal
cosmos. Then the propositions of ancient philosophy already had to contain
answers that, while (of

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course) inadequate, were nevertheless unambiguously related to this stock of

questions. The language of new answers inevitably had to be related to the
explicationalready accomplished in advanceof the questions. Not only does the
process of the formation of dogma replace the stories, it also implies their
rejection, because stories cannot be validated as answers to questionsand also
because their binding force had to be questionable, and unsuited to serve as the
terms, submission to which was implied in faith.
Thus the dogmatization of Christian theology, out of fear of contact with myth's
orientation by means of images, produced a language different from the biblical
one. Its consistencyconsistency being the primary value in a structure of
dogmawas achieved through the taking over, which was not completed until the
High Middle Ages, of ancient metaphysics. This 'reception' made it possible to
suggest with confidence that in the teachings of the Church answers had been
given to man's permanent fundamental questions and that the Gnostic
hypertrophy represented only a muddled and failed attempt at the same thingit
did not, one could say, understand the questions, so as to be able to give the
answers.
Thornton Wilder reported that the last words of his friend Gertrude Stein, on her
deathbed, were, first, "What is the answer?" and then, after a period of silence,
"What is the question?" This concentration into an individual case reflects the
historical phenomenon that we have to deal with again and again and that we
uncover with such difficulty. Just as the Enlightenment thinkers suggested that
myths were nothing but inadequate answers to the pressing questions of human
curiosity about nature, to the early Christian self-interpretation the questions
about the story of the soul and its salvation had also appeared as 'given' and
permanent. That made it possible to demand that they should be answered just as
precisely as they were supposed to have been posed.
This is precisely the reverse of what actually occurs in history. The questions
emerge only when the accomplished products of the imagination and assertions
come under the pressure of the demand that they be associated with something to
which response, corroboration, approval, or advice is being addressed. Dogma's
late discovery of Original Sin crystallized out, as the question that had been
absorbed in it, what it actually was that redemption had to redeem people from.
The whole development of personal eschatology also appears to be like this, as
though it were the answer to the question of the fate of the individual soul and of
the justice governing that fate.

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All of this is only the remainder left after the application of a great 'reducing'
treatment to the stock of myth. To later observers who have been disciplined by
philosophy it always seems as though, across the history of mankind's
consciousness, questions have been posed and then answers have been attempted
whose inadequacy exposed them to displacement by other answers to the same
questions. Dogma appears as a defense against this process of displacement, as
laying something down in a written form made definitive by an extraordinary
sanction. It can be accomplished only by institutionalization, and that makes it
clear how inimical to institutions myth is. The weakness of Marcion's plan was
that he was not able to evaluate the pregnancy with myth of his division of
divinity into the demiurge and the god of salvation, as a potential that ran
contrary to his intention of organizing an official church based on the reduced
canon composed of the writings of Paul and the pseudo-Luke.
The stories that it is our purpose to discuss here simply weren't told in order to
answer questions, but rather in order to dispel uneasiness and discontent, which
have to be present in the beginning for questions to be able to form themselves.
To prevent fear and uncertainty already means not to allow the questions about
what awakens them and excites them to arise or to reach concrete form. In
connection with this, the consciousness that one cannot, after all, answer such
questions may enter in as an imponderable factor, as long as they cannot be
averted, in an institutionalized milieu, or disparaged as hubris, oras in the milieu
of modern scienceassigned to progress that has not yet occurred. We have
become accustomed to the 'rule of the game' of professionalism in the realm of
theory that also promotes those who are only able to invent questions, and still
more those who only act as critics of the answers and who even equip them with
the quasiethical pretension according to which being criticized is part of the
immanent intention of all supposed answers. To expose oneself to criticism with
a bearing expressive of the enjoyment of suffering thus becomes a professional
faculty, just as being a good loser once was one of the duties of the so-called
good sportsman. Such burdens are unknown to myth, which is why it was
necessary to speak of them here.
The disjunction between the mythical and the dogmatic frame of mind is not
complete. We must also remember mysticism, as the most determined
application of the concept of reality as momentary evidence,b as described in the
metaphors of blinding illumination or blind collision. The extreme form of
experience that is described in this language and that represents, on the scale of
possible certainty, the

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opposite pole to skepticism, is indeed 'pointlike,' but is nevertheless related, in

Plotinus's speculation, to the mythical 'normal process' that runs its course, as
cosmic action, on the cosmic stage. Mysticism has never been able to present
itself by any means but that of negation, as the infringement of the systematic
framework. It needs this framework in order to be able to boast of the
extraordinariness of its gifts, without being able to describe them.
The common expression speculative mysticism contains a contradiction. Where
the mystic speaks of the reality that he has encountered, he wants nothing to do
with speculation; but to speak of the possibility of mystical experience was
obviously also a concern of those who had never experienced it in reality but
who considered it indispensable as a description of the extreme case,
authenticated in the Bible in the case of Paul, of the irresistible intensification of
mere faith to the point of certainty, which anticipates the final state of all
believers.
What mysticism has in common with myth is the rejection of the suggestion that
it seeks, or gives, answers to questions. But mythological Gnosticism, as Jonas
calls it, also had to accommodate itself to the format of the relation between
question and answer to the extent that its intellectual environment came to bear
the imprint of the success of the Christian apologetics and dogmatics that were
disciplined by philosophy, so that it was confronted by feedback resulting from
the challenge that it had constituted for the Church and the Church's creeds. Thus
its overflowing production of myth accommodates itself, at least in retrospect, to
the system of man's fundamental questions regarding his origin and future, his
nature and his potential, his welfare and his ill fare, his fate in this world and in
the next.
The rivalry with dogma induces what Jonas has called the secondary
rationalization of the fundamental myth. It is this that relates the complex of
myths, for the first time, to a canon of elementary questions. Around the
beginning of the third century , Clement of Alexandria transmitted the
A.D.

systematic core of Valentinus's variant of Gnosticism. Valentinus shares

Clement's own assumption that man's salvation is brought about not by particular
actions or rituals, but rather in the form of a 'knowledge' ['Erkenntnis,' i.e.,
gnosis]. The Gnostic promise is not that one will ascertain transcendent truths
and be supplied with pledges of the granting of grace, but rather that one's
memory of a story that had fallen into forgetfulness, and whose knowledge puts
the world in a different light, will be awakened. This enables us to understand
the rationalized central questions of Valentinian Gnosticism, in the version
transmitted by Clement: "What makes us free is the knowledge of who we were,
and what we became; where we were,

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and what we were thrown into; whereto we hasten, and whence we are
redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth." 5One sees immediately that this is
not the stock of questions in response to which the myths of the Valentinians, as
they are reported by Irenaeus of Lyons, could have been narrated. But it is the
frame of reference in relation to which the Gnostics could define themselves as
possessing knowledge.
If one wants to read the catalog of questions in the way that it was meant to be
read at the time, then one must pay attention to the ambiguity of "whence
(póthen) we are redeemed." It does not have to designate what we are deemed
from [das Wovon der Erlösung], but can also designate what we are redeemed
out of [deren Woraus]. Then it would refer to the demiurge's cosmos, Marcion's
cellula creatoris [puny cell of the creator]. Now the cosmos had indeed become
an aggregate of evils, because it had issued from the weakness or wickedness of
the cosmocrator [ruler of this world, of the cosmos], but for that very reason it
still had nothing to do with man's responsibility. It is only through an anti-
Gnostic theodicy that that responsibility becomes the origin of evil in the world,
and thus also the sole thing 'from which' we are redeemed. The terseness of the
expression even makes possible, or favors, the interpretation according to which
the question and the answer relate to where the redeemer comes from, which
means, indirectly, where he gets his authority. If, with Hans Jonas,6one prefers
to interpret the expression as the spatial "out of what," then one imports the
mythical schematism of the cosmic space and its directions, its inside and
outside, into the secondary rationalization. To do that, it seems to me, is to fail to
appreciate what this rationalization in particular had to show, namely, that the
Gnostic mythology contained answers to extremely general questions that were
independent of its imaginative framework, in that they could be formulated
entirely independently of the material used to answer themin other words, that
they could be made plausible to a contemporary as something that affected him
also.
If the system was supposed to be able to provide information on what a
redemption had to set one free from, the questionin the interests of its general
acceptance among the people to be won overcould not yet be related to the
mythical mode of expression according to which the redemption is total
precisely by virtue of the fact that it leads directly out of this world. The
question, being artificially brought into relief, had to be kept free of a knowledge
that could fall to the lot of the outsider (to whom this was supposed to be offered
as a question that was 'already his') only by means of the answerthat the cosmos
had to perish or, if not that, that it must be possible for

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man's noncosmic essential core, for that which is capable of salvation, to be set
free from it.
The secondary rationalization that is contained in Theodotus's formula not only
provides "a reliable guide through the whole multiplicity of Gnostic mythology
and speculation," that is, for the primary field in which Gnosticism was
expressed, but also provides the framework of positions for the possible and
necessary tertiary 'reoccupations.' So if this does not display the questions that
precede Gnostic mythology historically, it does display the problem-concerns
that the mythology had made acute and that it leaves behind it, as soon as it
perishes as a result of the abundance of its narrative contradictions and the
discipline of the Roman Church's dogma. The fundamental myth, which is
reduced here to a formula that approaches abstraction, does not simply vanish
along with the epoch to which it belongs; rather it challenges the succeeding
epoch to satisfy the needs it had effortlessly aroused. I have already mentioned
the theodicy problem, in which this inheritance from Gnosticism and the effort
of 'reoccupying' the framework of positions that carries its imprint are really
deposited. A look at Augustine's treatise on free will, the work with which he
overcomes the Gnostic phase of his life, shows what a burden falls on manas the
one who stands in for Gnosticism's world demiurgeas a result of this transition,
but also shows that, with this burden, the concept of moral freedom begins to
stand out for the first time.c
And that takes place despite the fact that Gnosticism had been the most
pronounced example of a nonmoral conception of the world. It has no need of
the concept of freedom because in place of an intrasubjective decision between
good and evil it provides the idea of a cosmic contest. If what is at stake in this
contest is parts of the good that have fallen under the sway and the deluding
influence of the powers of the world, then from the perspective of a dualism that
is only an episode. In relation to man's interest in salvation, the cosmic
procedure is only a transaction surrounding him, though its reliability does
determine whether the event of the turning takes place, whether the recall
arrives. This is because the myth has a nonmythical core, just as man, in the
world, contains an unworldly deposit that at bottom has no need at all of
instruction, but only of awakening, of the removal of deception, of self-
discovery. It is possible to 'demythologize' this myth only because it possesses a
preexisting residue of form. What gives the Gnostic process its tendency to
mythicizationthe fact that it is almost entirely event, and only minimally
doctrinal contentalso exposes it to the conjecture that it could be
demythologized. What Bultmann dissected out in his work on the New
Testament, by con-

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sidering it possible and undertaking to demythologize it down to the core of the

'kerygma,' is not something that it is always and everywhere possible to do to
myths, but rather what is appropriate to the late-antiquity and Gnostic view of
the world.
The finest and most concise expression of that ultimate quality as an event, the
content of which cannot be conceptualized, is the Johannine Gospel's "Ego
eimi."d To say "I am he" presupposes that one speaks thus in a world of the most
intense danger and expectation, in which it is entirely sufficient to indicate that
now the time has come. The lot of him who has forgotten where he comes from
is not instruction about what he has lost and what he stands to gain; instead what
overtakes him is only the formal summons, which sets everything else in motion
as though automatically. "Wachet auf, tuft uns die Stimme . . . " [Awake, the
voice cries to us . . . ],e but whatever else it cries is of no importance. The
fundamental myth gives us to understand that nothing more than this is
necessary or to be expected.
Thus the fundamental myth occupies, if one may put it this way, a special
position. It is located precisely on the axis of symmetry between where we come
from and where we are going, between what comes to be and what ought to be,
between fall and ascent. The fundamental myth makes the importance of this
position understandable, but it is not functionally indispensable to it. The
'knowledge' that had given gnosis its name and that, in contrast to mere faith
(pistis), was supposed to constitute the distinctive status of its adherents, was not
identical with cognizance of the mythical apparatus, which had to assist in the
subsequent mutual understanding of those who were already participants in
salvation. This participation was more an event than an insight. It was the
equivalent of what was later, without taking much account of the content, to be
called awakening: something like an act of intensified alertness to one's situation
in the world, to one's foreignness to it and one's need to get out of it and, until
that time, to make it a matter of indifference to one.
This attitude syndrome presupposes an intensive vital feeling of a need for
salvation, of the loss of cosmic orientation or of orientation as cosmos. The
empty and formal "I am he!" becomes the only adequate way of acting on this
situation, as in de Gaulle's standard proclamation, "Eh bien! Me voici!" [Very
well, here I am!]. The situation, which can also be called messianic, does not
allow it to seem important who it is who comesto the astonishment of the post-
Christian observer, who is accustomed to the definiteness of dogma, different
names were continually being used for the messianic figure. The question of the
messianic moment is solely: "Are you the one who is

 Page 189

supposed to come, or do we have to wait for someone else?'' The horizon of

messianism surrounding both questioners and those who are questioned
prescribes the answer: "I am he." This explains the cry of exultation with which
Marcion had begun his Antitheseis, the work in which he rigorously reduced the
biblical text by excision: "Oh wonder of wonders, ecstasy, power and
amazement, that one can say nothing at all about the gospel, nor can one think
anything about it, nor compare it with anything else." 7
If the Gnostic fundamental myth had turned the ancient world's radiant cosmos
into what was now only the blinding container of wretchedness, whose function
was to be impermeable for everything coming from outside it and to distract, by
its brilliance, from the misery of those who are confined in it, then the savior, as
the bringer of the summons to return, had to experience the whole difficulty of
this mission in merely appearing in the world at all. Even before the Gnostic
figure of the demiurge summed up the world's capacity for antidivinity and
inimicalness to salvation, the world had already been given the character of a
container and filled with powers opposed to God's will to salvation. It is no
accident that Marcion based entirely on Paul his almost dualistic theology of the
foreign god who is contrasted to the just god of the Creation and the Law. It was
only with the greatest difficulty that Paul had been able to hold to the identity of
the giver of the unfulfillable Law with the giver of absolution from unavoidable
guilt. The price of this identity was probably the assignment of responsibility for
the contradictions to disturbing factors: world-administering functionaries who
have become independent, powers and forces of unclear character, between the
spiritual and the demonic, which may have originated in the angels of the nations
in the prophecy of Daniel.
If they had originally been part of the unity of a successful Creation, as
administrators and executors, the Fall and the condemnation of man had to have
presented to them the possibility of becoming sole and unrestricted cosmocrators
[rulers of the cosmos]. Paul seems to suggest, on behalf of these powers, that
they had known nothing of God's plan of salvation for man and only learned of it
through Christ's saving deed. No less plausible than such ignorance would have
been active resistance to higher authority's intentions for man; otherwise Paul
would not have been able to say of the archons that they treated the "lord of the
doxa"f as their prey, and that only the death on the cross broke their power.
(This, to be sure, was only a provisional defeat, in relation to the final end,
because otherwise no history of indefinite length would have been left for further
dealings back and forth.)8

 Page 190

Marcion has logical consistency on his side when he puts an end to the identity
of the Pauline God. He restores to the 'god of this world' responsibility for what
Paul had halfheartedly blamed on the demonized archons. Marcion's 'foreign
god' originally has nothing in common with man, who is entirely a product of the
world creator and, in contrast to later Gnostic systems, does not even possess the
pneuma as a way of participating in that other world. The new god, then, has
mercy on man as a result of impenetrable grace, as a result of the same
compassion with which the Gospel distinguishes the foreigner, the Samaritan, in
the parable.
The foreign god offers the cosmocrator the death of Christ in exchange for all
those who do not want to submit to his law and who declare this through the act
of faith as an expression of separation from the law. The offer suggests that here
everything is supposed to be 'on the up and up' and the foreign god respects the
property right (by the world's standards) that the demiurge has in men, as his
creatures. In the disputes between the two gods in relation to this 'honest'
ransom, it did not fail to come about that in retrospect the resurrection of the
messenger of salvation, after his freeing of the pagans and the damned from the
underworld, had to make his suffering and death appear as mere cunning, if not
as a fraud inflicted on the partner in the ransom deal. Independently of the
evaluation of cunning according to good ancient standards, which Gnosticism
had learned from myth, the question arose, in response to moral objections,
whether it was not just for the pedantic god of the letter of the law to be duped
with the help of the letter of the contract.
What is more important is the fact that the contract between the gods does not
remain the final denouement of the world process. Marcion's conception
contains the core of a circumstantial history, perhaps one rich in cunning tricks,
that presses for further narration once the key event has in fact turned out not to
be the final decision. The division between those who are loyal to the law and
those who are prepared for faith is final only in the case of the underworld; apart
from that, as must have already been clear to Marcion, history goes on.
At the same time, the determined docetism of his Christology, disclosed by the
Resurrection, curtails the mythical potential of Jesus' life in the backward
direction [in time]: The herald of the new god 'appears' in the world
unexpectedly, and without any previous history, at his baptism in the Jordan by
John. The Annunciation, birth, and childhood are expunged from the sole Gospel
that Marcion recognizes (and ascribes to Paul), the Gospel according to Luke. It
should have

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been possible to foresee that such rigorism could not, in the long run, promote
the continuance of Marcion's church. The general Church's realistic
interpretation of the Incarnation was bound up in the most palpable and lasting
way with the Lukan story of Jesus' childhood. For a theory of the affinity to
myth it is certainly not being too clever to say that the surpassing logic of
Marcion's excisions could never make up for the loss of the biblical scene of
Jesus' childhood. Here the image works in favor of the dogma. A closer
examination reveals that even under the aegis of docetism, the story of Christ's
birth could have been retainedwhy shouldn't he have been able to be born in
appearance just as he was to die in appearance? Here, however, behind
Marcion's antagonism of the two gods there stands another, his true and ultimate
dualism: the dualism of spirit and flesh. It was this dualism that had driven him
to reject any contact between the foreign god and the mechanism of
reproduction, and by which Christianity would have been deprived of the figure
who dominates its image world, the figure of the Mother of God.
It has not been possible to demonstrate the existence of connections between the
early Gnostic and the latebetween Marcion and Mani. But that does not diminish
the rigor of the logic by which the devaluation of the cosmos and its creator
gives rise to a dualism that continually surpasses itself. The uncoupling of the
world from the will of the god of salvation removes the restraints preventing its
demonization; but the more impenetrable this demonization becomes, the more
pressing becomes the further question how, then, a bringer of salvation can still
appear in it at all and be successful. Marcion's god of the world had not yet been
the devil himself, but only a sort of paragon of zealous tyranny and petty
harassment. But Origen already understood the ransom myth as implying that the
price of the release of men had been payable to the devil. That would have had
to make the initial situation, prior to the redemption exchange, more grave.
Should there still be moral hesitation about whether to cut the devil out by means
of cunning and malice? One can see how the fundamental myth prescribes the
scope of its variants.
Cunning is a category belonging to myth. It is only infrequently apparent that as
a way out of an emergency [Notstand] it can be the privilege of the weaker party.
The Gnostic demonization of the world makes man's position in it into an
emergency. The insoluble Pauline problem of the person who wants to comply
with the Law and cannot is not yet sufficient to permit an explanation that points
to a world god and lawgiver who planned everything in such a way as to produce
this pharisaic deadlock. Still the question remains, whether the function

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of cunning in Gnosticism was not prepared in Paul and, starting from that point,
just left to work out its logic. When the archons and powers, derived from
apocalyptics, who quite naturally form the background of Paul's idea of escaping
from the power of the world, fail to recognize Christ in his human form and his
obedience to the Law and consequently conduct him to the fate of death by
which their own power was to be broken, then their ignorance of the salvation
plan that is unexpectedly being fulfilled is not yet a process of succumbing to a
cunning trick. 9Only if their ignorance is brought about 'docetically' [i.e., by a
delusive appearance] is it meaningful to speak of cunning. The Pauline Christ
does lower himself to take on human form, but he does not instrumentalize it as
a deceptive way of disguising his essence and where he comes from. He must be
able to suffer and die in order to share the fate of men, so that by way of this
equation they can obtain a share in his overcoming of death and in absolution
through change of identity. Possibly this technique of escaping the certain
judgment of guilt by means of mystical death would be a piece of cunningif Paul
had not deduced it from the legitimizing identity of the God of Judgment and the
God who intends salvation. That, however, makes the story, which is only hinted
at, into a mere text for the ritual of baptism as the act of mystical participation.
The ransom myth is, originally, quite superfluous. The death of Christ is
prototypical, like the sin of Adam; as with the latter, anyone can participate in
the former, too, and nothing else is necessary in order to obtain justification. The
injury to the cosmic administration does not consist primarily in the suspension
of the Law, but rather in the suspension of the executability of judgments of guilt
as a result of their not being executed against guilty people who, on account of
loss of identity, can no longer be produced.
If one considers Christianity's long-term self-representation and self-
justification, then God's Incarnation as man appears as its central and almost
taken-for-granted eventso much taken for granted that the Scholastic idea of the
eternal predestination of the Son of God to become man could be conceived and
thus the Incarnation could be made independent of the contingencies of human
history. But in the early centuries it was by no means so definitively decided
what the central content of the joyful proclamation was supposed to be. The
salvation bringer's human form is initially more a procedural matter. One did not
need to think about the distinctive treatment of human nature until that nature
again had to be brought into agreement with the continuing facts of the world.
The early eschatology, with its acute need for salvation, required only that the
transcendent intervention

 Page 193

be effective, and did not require an interpretation of its significance in relation to

man's self-comprehension.
The Cur deus homo [Why did God become man?]g question originally presents
itself more in relation to the overcoming of the powers that are opposed to God
than in relation to the granting of favor to man. Consequently, less depends on
the 'nature' of the salvation bringer than on his having full power. He comes into
the demonically protected cosmos in the mask of flesh and with a pretense of
belonging in the world that is based on his suffering. He is born, it is true, of a
virgin; but the virgin is betrothed, and leaves the status of the miracle unclear;
from both the devil who tempts him and the judges who examine him, he keeps
his derivation a secret. Neither Dionysius of Alexandria, Epiphanius of Salamis,
or Amphilochius hesitates to explain the episode of the fear of death, before he is
taken prisoner in the garden on the Mount of Olives, as feigned. As soon, then,
as the individual episodes of the synoptic tradition are connected with the
syndrome of disguise, it is no longer the case that the archons and the powers
deceive themselves, as a result of their inability to penetrate the phenomenon
and its purpose; instead, they are deceivedplainly on account of an assessment of
their power of opposition.
At the same time doubts arise about the finality of the already achieved or
immediately impending triumph. Then it becomes necessary that more indexes
of the true nature of the Son of Man should be distributed through his life story.
Indifference with regard to the realism of the Incarnation diminishes as soon as
people seek guarantees of the lasting effectiveness of this single life and death.
Any suspicion that metamorphosis was involved becomes intolerable. As a
source of security for people's faith in salvation, the approach to an equilibrium
of powers between the god of salvation (on one side) and the world powers and
the demiurge who is synthesized out of them (on the other) cannot stand up to
competition.
The remnants of the initial situation as documented in the New Testament's
picture of the saving event were never understood by the Bible criticism of the
Enlightenment. The question why Christ, when he rose from the dead, had not
shown himself to the whole world, was one that Origen (arguing against Celsus)
already was able to answer only with difficulty and without support from the
sacred texts: Only the few, he said, to whom Jesus had appeared, would have
been able to bear the heavenly radiance of the transfigured Christ. In the face of
the same question, Hermann Samuel Reimarus bursts out with the
uncomprehending question: "My! Did he rise from the grave in order to be
incognito in his state of exaltedness and

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splendour?" And he immediately generalizes this to cover the entire story of

Jesus: "Did he come here from heaven in order not to show himself as one who
had come from heaven?" 10The exclamation, with the ellipsis that is typical of
the deist's style, contains the Enlightenment's universal incomprehension of the
fundamental myth of the bringer of salvation, who must keep himself hidden
from the powers and forces of the cosmos and cannot prematurely play out his
triumphs, especially, before the whole world.
I cannot reconcile myself to the idea of a spontaneous generation of the Gnostic
fundamental myth. Paul, who, to be sure, is no mythmaker, nevertheless set up
all the points of departure for the mythical scheme. The Pharisee's fundamental
experience of being unable to comply with the Law in spite of painstaking effort
is the source of the whole conjecture that the lawgiver might not have meant to
make it possible for man to be justified. But then a whole dimension of
explanations of the possible significance of such ill will opens up. The Gnostic
fundamental myth is the imaginative opening up of this background, and it is
evidently not the last word in this logic to say, following Marcion, that only the
god could be "foreign." It is, if not natural, at least hardly unnatural to declare
man to be "foreign" with respect to the lawgiver and god of the world, or at least
something about man or in him that does not belong to the demiurge's world and
to the creature composed of body and soul. In the story of the pneuma this
relation of foreignness develops into an odyssey whose symmetry was still
beyond Marcion's imagining: The conditions of the return home are prescribed
by those of the expatriation.
If the thesis is correct that the genesis and proliferation of artificial 'art myths'
depends on the development of dualistic axioms about the origin of the world,
the origin of man, and man's history, then Marcion cannot have been a Gnostic
mythologist as yet. He only makes evident Christianity's susceptibility to
dualistic disintegration, by shattering the identity of the god of the Creation and
the Law with the god of love and salvation. There he only drew the conclusion
from what he had learned from Paul, to whom alone he ascribes the possession
of a revelation from the foreign god. What he made out of this dissociation was
like a piece of philological work: disposing of false scriptural witnesses,
eliminating the entire Old Testament, and purging even the slender stock that
was supposed to derive from Paul's glimpse of heaven.
If the typical form of a Gnostic system did not yet fully emerge here, it is
especially because the god of the Law, too, still remains a just god, despite the
petty and hardhearted manner in which he im-

 Page 195

plements his justice. But it is also because Marcion did not yet arrive at a
cosmological story of the origin of man or of his participation in the world
beyond this one. What made such a great impression on Harnackthe
development of the idea of a god of grace and lovewas the lack of a myth that
would have been able to tell what made the foreign god take an interest in man,
namely, man's original participation in the realm of that god. Just that was what
Marcion did not know about. His exotic god cares for man really without any
reason. André Gide could have found his finest instance of an acte gratuit
[gratuitous action] here. The stranger espoused the cause of the miserable
creatures of the world god, in which he had no original interest whatever, and on
their behalf entered into a very unattractive legal relationship to the legitimate
owner of the world. The juridical fiction that Paul had already devised to cover
the absolution of the guilty does not generate a story in Marcion's case either;
sheer grace does not set up anything to narrate, any more than pure justice does.
The fact that Marcion's idea of the grace that the 'foreign god' does not owe man
resisted development into a consistent story becomes tangible in connection with
another weak point of his dogma. In the course of the forcible cure imposed on
the early Christian system, the need to relate the fate of the subjects of the old
god to the new salvation had to be felt. This need had been met very early on by
the doctrine, included in the creeds, of the "descent into hell" (descensus ad
inferos). Beyond all Christ's deeds and sufferings to which testimony was
available, this doctrine had to insert between his death and his Resurrection an
invisible episode in the underworld, as an interpolated act of fairness. By the
triumphal visit to Hades, the fathers belonging to the Old Covenant as well as
the pagans who had been true to the natural moral law were included in the (for
them) delayed redemption. Otherwise the contingent date of the saving events
would have distorted the picture of history into intolerable unfairness.
Analogies to this problem occur in history when an existential quality that is
unlike anything that has gone before it is proffered or proclaimed as being given
at a particular point in time. Thus the Enlightenment in the modern age will not
be able to avoid the objection that what it asserted of reasonthat it had only
begun to spread its light over mankind at a recent period, and since a zero point
had been establishedshould not have been the case. Then by far the greatest part
of this totality of rational beings would be disparaged by the new self-
consciousness, reason itself would be convicted of inability to eliminate
darkness and folly, and it would become questionable whether the confidence
could really be placed in it that was bound up with the

 Page 196

program of the Enlightenment. Lessing's Education of the Human Race, as the

first stage of all the Idealist philosophies of history, was a 'total' myth intended to
reconcile the Enlightenment with the overall history of mankind as something
that was at any rate not predominantly irrational, but instead served to usher in
reason's maturity.
I mention this here only in order to make clear the analogy to the myth of the
descensus ad inferos. It harmonized the contingency of the date of salvation with
the unalterable equality of all men in their claim to benefit from the saving deed.
Marcion could not avoid this demand for the integration of the history of
mankind either, although his system of the nonidentity of the world god and the
god of salvation, and the latter's free grace, had neutralized the internal
systematic pressure for it. What he does with the myth now is highly instructive
in relation to the preparation of the Gnostic fundamental myth.
He distorts the preexisting model, since he cannot let the appearance arise that
his foreign god acts in accordance with the norm of justice, and because he
certainly does not want to weaken the exclusiveness of justification through faith
by introducing a subsidiary form of redemption. Therefore the inhabitants of the
underworld, rather than simply following their liberator through the opened
doors, had to be faced with the decision regarding faith. In this story, too,
Marcion shows himself undaunted in his consistency. When Christ enters the
underworld, he is recognized only by those who had not submitted to the law of
the world god and the justice of their creator. It is already entirely typical of
Gnosticism when the villains of biblical history are now singled out by being
permitted to recognize the herald of the foreign god: Cain, the fratricide; the
inhabitants of Sodom; the Egyptians and all the pagans who had lived without or
in opposition to the Law. Marcion reduced the preexisting story of the descent
into hell to his gospel and implanted in it the preference given to pagans and
sinners, the lost and the godlessthey had at least kept the place of the 'foreign
god' vacant and had not filled it with the wrong god.
The underworld is still part of the realm of authority of the cosmocrator.
Penetrating into it cannot be described, for Marcion's gentle god, as an act of
violence. No doubt he also makes that proceed entirely in accordance with the
rule of law, as he does the ransom transaction: as dealing with the world god in
accordance with his own standards of justice and recompense, in view of the
price paid by the death on the cross. Marcion resisted the entirely senseless idea
that the death of the Son of God was the most perfect atonement that could be

 Page 197

offered to the Father for the sin of men. The avoidance of an act of violence on
the part of the foreign god, who is thought of as over-whelming, vis-à-vis the
world god, is the most important indication that with Marcion the dualistic
fundamental myth of the world struggle between good and evil, on a footing of
equality, is not yet fully formed.
Myth does not need to answer questions; it makes something up, before the
question becomes acute and so that it does not become acute. We know from the
Armenian polemic of Eznik of Kolb Against the Heresies that even in the
polemics against Marcion a role was played by the argument that his doctrine
required the foreign god to cheat the world god by raising Christ from the dead.
Eznik reports what is no doubt a later development of the Marcionites' inverted
version of the descensus. According to it, Jesus descended from heaven a second
time so as to present himself to the furious demiurge, who perceived his divinity
this time and realized that there was another god besides himself. Jesus is
supposed to have said to him, "We have a dispute, and there is no one to judge
between us except your own laws. . . . Did you not write in your laws that he
who sheds the blood of a righteous person, his blood shall in turn be shed?" And
the demiurge answered, "Yes, I wrote it." Then he had to acknowledge the other
god as the more righteous and admit that he himself deserved to die and could
not demand revenge for the theft of so many of his creatures. 11It is evident how
further mythicization begins in connection with the feeling of an unclarified
residue in Marcion's construction. Harnack sees Catholicism not indeed as the
work of Marcion, but as a result of his work. Catholicism, he says, was put
together in opposition to the heretic, and thus ultimately in opposition to Paul. It
was only against an enemy of this quality that the canonization of the contents of
the Bible and the dogmatization of doctrine could have been so necessary and
could have been accomplished in the way they were. Marcion had tried to
prevent the alliance between theology and the ancient world's cosmology by
disparaging the author of the cosmos; by this very means, he brought this
alliance about.
Marcion's solitary rank as a theologian made him dangerous. This is also
documented by a traditional anecdote that was meant to attest what might be
called his negative apostolic succession. According to the reports of Irenaeus and
Eusebius, Marcion had been able to meet with the last living disciple of the
apostles, Polycarp of Smyrna, and had demanded, "Recognize us." That was his
claim to the authority

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of the apostles for his church. Polycarp's answer is supposed to have been, "Yes,
I recognize youas the firstborn son of Satan." It is remarkable how Harnack can
take this anecdote so historically that he inquires into its dating and ascribes to
Marcion the hope that he could "obtain the recognition of the most authoritative
bishop of Asia Minor." 12But is it not entirely absurd to ascribe to Marcion the
desire for a recognition that would have been traceable to apostles who were
deluded by the world god and who participated in the falsification of revelation?
On the contrary, this desire is necessary for the damnatory purpose of the
anecdote, in order to give the rejection the weight of the authority of Polycarp. It
is more than the Roman excommunication of 144it is the invention of
A.D.

illegitimacy as an institution.
When Harnack fails to recognize the defamatory character of the anecdote,
whereas he easily observes the incorrectness and malice of Justin's comparison
of Marcion to heretics who had advertised themselves as gods and sons of gods,
this is because the oldest testimony of all to his hero seems too valuable for him
to let himself be deprived of it. It was after all this heretic of whom Harnack
confesses, "In Church history, he was my first love, and this preference and
veneration has not been lessened, in the half century that I have lived with him,
even by Augustine."13
When the Augustine who was just compared to Marcion wrote, in 388, the
A.D.

first book of his treatise On Free Will, and in the subsequent year his
commentary on Genesis against the Manichaeans, the remnant of the Marcionite
antichurch had been eradicated by the power of the state, shortly beforein A.D.

381as a result of the edict of the emperor Theodosius I. Augustine no longer had
to deal with this early form of Gnosticism when he made the freedom of the
human will into the agency solely responsible for what is bad in the world.
Freedom was conceived, for the first time, in its immensity, inasmuch as it was
given the entire burden of theodicy to carry. A concept that was never a part of
Church dogma, nor could have become such on the strength of the Bible, proved
to be the simply effective antidote to Gnosticism's fundamental myth. At the
same time it brought eschatology to a conclusion: After four centuries of
unclarified expectations, man was handed the responsibility for his historyno
matter what else could still be said (and sometimes said with more emphasis)
about the governing of this history.

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It was resistance to the dualistic fundamental myth of the demiurge and to its
consequences in terms of the corrupt nature of the world that forced the
conception of an original sin of man, a sin whose monstrous odium stood in no
relation to the traditional myth on the subject. The dogma of original sin was the
'reoccupation' of the functional position of the demiurge, of the counterprinciple
to the foreign or good god. Everything that Augustine could become and was to
becomethe philosopher of the treatise on freedom, the theologian of original sin
and choice by divine grace, the founder of the Middle Ages' metaphysics of
historyhas its roots not so much in the fact that he had once been a Gnostic but,
much more precisely, in the fact that he had been able to become a Gnostic. And
not only he, but the Christian tradition itselfand this not accidentally, but by its
own logic.
In contrast to his extended argument with Manichaeism, the name of Marcion
appears in Augustine only occasionally and incidentally. His order of importance
was recognized by another great theologian and heretic, the Alexandrian,
Origen. Origen contrasted him precisely to the intoxication with myths, the
longa fabulositas, that is characteristic of the kind of Gnostic typified by
Valentinus and Basilides, and viewed him as the more dangerous opponent. But
he did not see to what an extent that fabulositas had found its precondition, if not
its source material as well, in the division of gods that Marcion carried out.
We are acquainted with mythifications of the fundamental Gnostic schema that
were still unknown when Hans Jonas undertook to uncover the ''fundamental
myth" of Gnosticism, but which have brilliantly confirmed his skill in
conjecture.h These include, from the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, the
Apocryphon of John, which was available since 1896 in an unnoticed papyrus in
the possession of the Berlin Museum but was first published in 1955 and edited,
in comparison with the three versions that were among the new discoveries, in
1962. 14This is one of the oldest texts of Gnosticism, in its Barbeliotic tendency,
that are attested in the patristic writings. Irenaeus of Lyon had it before him, at
least in part, when he composed his refutation of the Gnostic heresies, about A.D.

180. For the purpose of showing how mythopoeia works, with this text we have
the additional good fortune of having four different versions at our disposal.
This 'secret teaching' reads at first not like a mythical text but rather like a
mystical one, written in the language of negative theology.

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Whatever could be stated about a transcendent principle had, until that time,
been developed and practiced only within Platonism and with its means. The
metaphors employed in the Apocryphon, both those of light and those of the
wellspring [Quelle], also point in that direction. Neither in Neoplatonism nor in
the Gnostic speculations about the original principle and the 'beginnings'
deriving from it is there any such thing as reasons, motives, and purposes that
could have had or could have had to have everything that followed as their
consequence. But the metaphors of light and of the wellspring do allow one to
imagine an originating quality, a characteristic pouring out of itself and
overflowing, that belongs to the good and the perfect as a sort of property. It
was, after all, already implicit in the framing of the Platonic Ideasand this was
what made it possible to set the shared super-Idea of the good above themthat
they command that they should be passed on in the form of appearances, thus
making it an obligation to transpose them into images, in a process that had been
made quite plausible by the original Ideas of virtuous behavior. Consequently
the Platonic demiurge was a good and faithful functionary of the Ideas, even
though in imitating the Ideal cosmos he was only able to bring forth and bring
about an inferior world of appearances. How he and his work could be
evaluated, initially and later on, always depended on which type of legitimacy
was ascribed to his performance: that of being regulated by the Ideas with the
goal of their self-communication, even at the cost of the diminution of the
original in its image, or that of an unauthorized and incompetent violation of the
original constituentsreposing in themselves in contented perfectionof existence.
The Apocryphon of John is stylized as a visionary experience at a date after
Jesus' Ascension. The apostle falls into perplexity when a Pharisee by the name
of Arimanias touches him on the sore point of the absence of his Lord: "Where is
your master whom you followed?"John answers, "He has gone to the place from
which he came." To this, Arimanias replies, "This Nazarene deceived you with
deception and filled your ears with lies and closed your hearts and turned you
from the traditions of your fathers." Then the apostle falls into doubt, tums away,
and climbs the Mount of Olives, and in a solitary place he asks himself questions
that approach the 'secondary rationalization' of the Gnostic myth: ''How then was
the savior [soter *] chosen, and why was he sent into the world by his father, and
who is his father who sent him, and

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of what sort is that eon to which we shall go?" He has hardly had these thoughts
when the heavens open themselves to him, the whole creation shines forth in
light and the cosmos trembles. A figure appears before him, first a child, then an
old man, finally a woman. The figure calls to him, "John, John, why do you
doubt?" Thus the revelation of the "secret teachings'' begins.
The Apocryphon is recognizably competing with the model that Marcion set up
when he credited only Paul with the possession of the pure teaching, because
only Paul had been vouchsafed a direct revelation, in a vision. Here John is set
up against Paul, the doubter against the persecutor.
"I am the father, I am the mother, I am the son," the revealer introduces himselfa
revealer who is no longer a mediator, since after all the mediator has already
failed to overcome doubt. Everything that follows is a great litany of negations,
whose culminationas in all mysticismis the disavowal of existence itself: "He is
not one of the existing ones, but he is far superior." And: "He is unnameable
because there is no one prior to him to name him." So an art myth comes into
existence only through the contradiction that this nonexistent and nameless thing
nevertheless 'has consequences,' which are entirely contrary to its definition.
From the nameless one there explodes a cataract of names, and from silence, a
superabundance of loquacity.
This silence, in which the inconceivable reposes, prior to everything else, is the
hypostatization of its status as unspeakable and nameless. Insofar as at the same
time, however, the inconceivable is light in its original purity and the wellspring
that produces living water, metaphor, as a violation of the principle of
unspeakability, furnishes it with a means of passing over into a narratable story:
In the mirror of the pure light-water that surrounds it, the inconceivable beholds
itself. As a result, then, of the fact that it pours itself out, it becomes present to
itself in an image, and it is already present in a traditional myththe name of
Narcissus reaches back into the mystery of the origin of things. 15For what was
imagined about Narcissus has a concealed affinity to the ancient rule of divine
autarky: A god's only object is himself, as in Aristotle's 'thought that thinks
itself.' Except that this latter had no need to generate anything, because the
cosmos that it moved had always been there and only needed the moving power
that lay in the loving imitation of the absolute reflexiveness [Reflexion].

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If, now, one has to remove the pregiven eternity of the cosmos, which makes
every kind of myth impossible, then it follows logically that the exclusive act of
reflection [Reflexion]iwhich is presented mythically as the inconceivable's
formation of an image of itself, against its overflowturns itself into the first
independent product, into the overflow's original mode of configuration. The
mirror reflection, though it is not yet recognizable as the turning toward
ruination, is nevertheless the beginning of a story that leads to it. The more
definitely dualistic the conception of the myth is, the earlier in the story the
counterprinciple has to appear. In one of the versions of the Apocryphon this is
drawn into the language of the metaphor of light, in that darkness is also
assumed as a preexisting, original principle, whose derivation is allowed to
remain as obscure as the darkness is itself. Initially it is participating and
receptive, but it immediately becomes counteractive: "But when the light mixed
with the darkness, it made the darkness light. But when the darkness mixed with
the light, the light became dark and was not light, nor was it darkness; instead, it
was sick." 16
What emerges has the still undifferentiated ambiguity of the internal and the
external, the Ennoia ['Thought'] that refers to itself and the Pronoia
['Forethought'] that refers to the world. What emerges, here, out of the
Inconceivable and, at the same time, in front of it, is the primeval creature that
gives this type of Gnosticism its name: The Barbelo. It is a dual being: the
emanation and self-glorification of the Inconceivable, the first and perfect eon of
glory, but at the same time also First Man and the virgin Pneuma ['Spirit']. The
relation between this and the abundance of speculative primeval beings, beings
that both infringe on the solitude of the absolute and begin to prepare the
inconvenience of a world for it, is palpable. Each of the characteristics with
which the Inconceivable endows the creature of its self-experience immediately
stands there, as a figure in a group, as though in a chorus around the spot of the
original wellspring. These hypostatic 'subjects' do not explain anything, but they
thicken the field of names between the Inconceivable and the usual, as if the
filling of the empty space could satisfy the need that in other cases is satisfied by
'explanations.'
The derivatives of the nameless are not adequate to what they derive from: They
are not capable of contemplating their origin. At each stage of their behavior in
relation to it, a diminution of the original quality takes placea reduction of their
'dowry.' The Barbelo turns toward the pure light and looks at it. The result, for
the Barbelo, is

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only a spark, which, it is true, has the same nature as the blessed light, but is no
longer its equal in magnitude. The Father still rejoices over the fact that his pure
light becomes apparent, that the invisible becomes visible through the initial
power of the Barbelo, but when the unspeakable becomes speakable its power of
accomplishment is also lost in the diffusion (parastasis) of the Pneuma.
Characteristic of the linguistic form in which these speculations appear is the
mixture of abstract personifications and demonic names, some of which stand
there uninterpreted and without function and some of which define faces and
shapes, such as "Lion face," "Ass face," "Hyena face," or "Dragon face,'' so that
the path from the negations and negative abstractions finally leads to a verbal,
that is, an unexploited, perceptual aspect. Just as the Barbelo is the inner and
outer act of the Inconceivable itself, its acts also are externalized and alienated
from it, so that it fills the world with personified concepts and allegories, with
high-level imitations and with low-grade mimicries.
Thus it is finally Sophia ['Wisdom'] who brings forth the first archon, Ialdabaoth,
withoutas it is explicitly statedthe consent of the Pneuma. Ialdabaoth is the key
figure in the genesis of a special and inferior world realm, which he founds, not
without encountering, in the process, a figure of unknown derivationin other
words, of a dualistic charactercalled unreason: "He took a great strength from his
mother. He went away from her and turned away from the place where he was
born. He created for himself an eon. . . . And he joined himself with unreason,
which was with him, and called the powers into existence, twelve angels under
him . . . modeled on the imperishable eons." 17This archon is an unmistakable
parody of the God of the Old Testament. His surnames mock the latter's
attributes. One variant of the Apocryphon even assigns to him the act of creation
by means of the word, and the conferring of names. The seven powers under him
"arose through his thought and through the fact that he said it. And he gave a
name to every power."18
Everything that parodies the biblical Creation at the same time emphasizes the
different nature of the diffusion of the Pneuma. In Gnostic mythology, only the
archons and lower powers operate like commanders or demiurges; the good
propagates itself only by generating [or "begetting": Zeugung] and 'spiration.'j
That is a distinction of rank that is also maintained in the definitions employed in
the Church's doctrine of the Trinity, for the coming forth of the Son and

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the Holy Spirit as opposed to the Creation of the world. As will appear, both
processes are involved in the production of man.
Ialdabaoth is a jealous god. He does not want to allow to those whom he created
and whom he keeps in subjection to his power any of the light and the power that
he himself received as a result of his descent: "Therefore he called himself 'God'
and rebelled against the substance from which he came. . . . And he saw the
creation that was under him, and the multitude of angels under him, which had
come into existence through him, and he said to them, 'I am a jealous God, there
is no other God but me,' by which he already indicated to the angels that there
was another god. For if there were no other, of whom should he then be
jealous?" 19In this version, from the Berlin papyrus, Ialdabaoth gives himself
away as a result of a knowledge he has that he would like to withhold from his
subjects, whereas in Codex II from Nag Hammadi the blasphemous
appropriation of God's self-declaration from the Bible becomes the epitome of
the archon's ignorance: "I am God, and there is other God but me."20This
ignorance, though, is probably more consistent, as the presupposition of the fact
that Ialdabaoth can be duped with regard to manwhom he wants to prevent, by
means of the food prohibition in Paradise, from gaining insight, through
knowledge, into what lies behind his power.
A critical point in the downward direction of the Gnostic processnot yet the
peripeteia, but the thickening of the plot leading to itis the creation of man in the
world. In this, too, a piece of the biblical Genesis is parodied: Man, we are told,
was made after the image and likeness of Elohim. It occurs to Ialdabaoth and his
archons, again as a result of the mirroring process, to insert a man into their
work. If the first hypostasis, the eon of glory and the pneumatic man, was
already a reflection, then this is a reflection of a reflection, and what they see is a
copy (typos) of an image (eikon*). Regarding this reflection, they speak to one
another: "'Let us make a man after the image of God and after his appearance.'
And they produced from themselves and from all their powers; they shaped a
figure from themselves. And every one of the powers produced, by its power, a
soul." So this becomes psychical man,k and his soul has no relation to the higher
world of the pure origin and cannot expect to return to it. It is evident that the
archons deceive themselves when they think that they are creating something
after the image of God, whereas they actually only create it after a second-level
imageafter the copy of a copy, which

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Plato had already condemned as the artificiality of art. The archons "produced it
according to their own image, which they had seen, according to the copy of the
primeval being, the perfect man. And they said, 'Let us call him Adam.' . . . " 21
The involvement [of God] with man does not arise through or consist in the fact
that the prototype was obtained surreptitiously and, in addition, was copied
sloppily and contemptuously. Nevertheless, through the surreptitious use of the
image a relation comes into being between the highest principle and this botched
piece of work, a relation that goes over the head of the demiurge who was
responsible for the work. This relation binds the Inconceivable to this creature
and causes it to undertake a momentous deception of Ialdabaoth. Ialdabaoth is
induced to give some of his pneuma [spirit] to the man he has fashioned, in
addition to the demiurgic psyche [soul]. It is through the pneuma that the
demiurge participates in the higher world of the prototypical mother Barbelo, of
the mother Sophia. He transmits itbecause of ignorance of what, in so doing, he
does to himselfon the advice of the "Five Lights," who come to him in the form
of his own 'angels' and prompt him to give life to the human figure by breathing
on it: "They advised him so as to bring forth the power of the mother, and they
said to Ialdabaoth, 'Blow into his face something of your spirit, and his body will
arise.' And he blew into his face of his spirit, which is the power of his mother;
he did not know this, for he exists in ignorance." Unintentionally, he has
established Adam's problematic of salvation and given him a share in the
heritage of the higher world, together with a prospect of legitimately belonging
to it.
In the Barbeliotic myth, the recovery of the pneuma from the world is not the
first thing that is achieved by deceiving the powers of the world. The endowment
of the illegitimate psychic copy with pneuma is, to use Hans Jonas's formulation,
"a stratagem of Light" in its struggle with the archons: The creator of the world
is weakened by his completion of man. According to this version, everything
that follows seems to be the reward for the fact that it was possible to impose a
decisive handicap on the demiurge in the beginning. If at the same time this was
the act that established a guarantee of salvation, that bound the highest power to
care for the fraction of it in the innermost part of man, still that was only a side
effect of the larger cosmic argument. But it will make it necessary for that power
to make a symmetrical outlay of cunning on the other side of the curve of

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salvation, when it is necessary to retrieve the deposit that the demiurge was
tricked into transmitting.
When the powers of the world see, now, that Adam's body shines as a result of
the pneuma, they become jealous of him. A rivalry arises between the angels and
man, the rivalry that medieval authors were still to describe as the motive for
Lucifer's revolt and fall: The prince of the angels receives a vision of the future
Incarnation of the Son of God as man, and his jealousy is inflamed by the
preference shown to this physical creature, over all the angels. Thus here too, in
the Gnostic myth, the prelude to man's temptation and misfortune is the
revealing to his makers, by the luminosity of the pneuma, of the superiority that
he has gained over them in power and understanding. For them, everything now
depends on the success of their conspiracy to mislead man about his origin. The
travesty of the Paradise myth makes the entire ambiguity of the familiar scenario
apparent, an ambiguity depending on whether it is viewed in terms of the
archons' intentions or in terms of the good principle's plan of salvation.
The prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is
meant to block man's access to the deposit of the higher world of light in this
garden. For Marcion, this was the first act of a petty god who wanted to treat
man roughly with law and judgment. Ialdabaoth's prohibition is issued "so that
Adam would not look upward to his perfection and would not notice his
nakedness in relation to perfection." Then what, for the Bible, is the original sin
would be the truth for Gnosticism. According to one version of the Apocryphon,
everything depends on man's not recognizing his nakedness, because the latter is
a falsification of his prototypical body by the mortal one that was constructed by
the archons: "They remained by him so that he would not look up to his pleroma
[fulfillment] and recognize the nakedness of his deformity (aschemosyne)."
The biblical mistakes about Eve that were perpetrated by the hopelessly ignorant
writer Moses are cleared up. She does not lead Adam astray, she leads him to
self-knowledge, since he discovers in her his nakedness, the deformity of his
body, the pervertedness of his situation: "And he became sober from the
drunkenness of the darkness, and he recognized his image. . . . " 22Eve is, in
fact, the imagewhich has remained hidden from the archonsof the primeval
mother, Barbelo, who is doing penance for her mistake, and makes amends by
suc-

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cessfully asserting the principle of life against Adam's deathly body. That is why
she is also called Zôê, the mother of the living.
The figure of the first woman, in her relation to the Barbelo, is especially
instructive in relation to the changed point of view that the parody of the biblical
text requires. One version obscures this by having Ialdabaoth seduce Eve only
after the expulsion from Paradise, and beget with her the bearers of the two
biblical names for God: Yahiveh, the bear-faced, and Elohim, the cat-faced.
These are the same of whom men believed that they were called Abel and Cain.
23Only with the begetting of Seth by Adam does the descent of mankind begin.
In the other version Ialdabaoth sees the picture from the wrong direction, when
he takes Eve's nakedness as the expression of her seducibilityand then is himself
seduced, into propagating a principle that he himself does not know and whose
origin is foreign to him: "He found the woman as she was preparing herself for
her husband. He was lord over her though he did not know the mystery
[mysterion*] that had come to pass through the holy decree."24What seems more
consistent, in this version, is that Eve is seduced before the expulsion from
Paradise takes place. A special feature is that the first archon gives the human
beings a draught of Lethe, a water of the incapacity for knowledge, "so that they
should not know from whence they came." Prevention of gnosis is the essence of
the archons' concern.25It is permeated with jealousy of the unexpected and
unforeseen specialness of man: "When the first archon realized that they were
exalted above him in the height and that they think more than him, then he
wanted to dominate their thought, not knowing that they surpass him in thought
and that he will not be able to dominate them."
In this myth everything depends on whether Adam's descendants can see beyond
the horizon of their coming from the hands of the archons and discover how they
belong to the realm of the pneuma. Ialdabaoth's offspringYahiveh, the ruler over
the regions of the water and the earth, and Elohim, who rules over the regions of
fire and airnoisily present themselves to man as, for him, the ultimate agencies,
who determine his fate. But it is still part of Paradise that man for the first time
gains clarity about his essential home and recognizes his nakedness by means of
the forbidden fruit. That is why he is expelled from the place of his self-
knowledge. The 'tempter' had been the same revelation-bearing spirit of light
who disclosed the

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Apocryphon to the doubting apostle: the Barbelo or the Sophia or even,

following the Berlin codex, Christ himself, who presents the Paradise scene to
John in the first person: "I, I revealed myself in the likeness of an eagle on the
tree of knowledge . . . so that I might teach them and awaken them out of the
depth of sleep. For they were both in a corrupt state, and they realized their
nakedness." 26Waking from the sleep of narcosis and the discovery of
nakedness are the two absolute metaphors of the act of gnosis, both of them
having a negating relation to man's falsified condition in both his body and his
world.
The Paradise scene of the Gnostic art myth is the inversion of the biblical one, its
destruction [Destruktion], not its allegorical interpretation. For it is at the
bidding of the highest ranking forms taken by emanations from the
Inconceivable that Adam and Eve disregard their creator's prohibition against
eating the fruit of the tree, and they bring mankind very close to its final
salvation. What happens when they notice their nakedness is not a sobering
realization of how they were seduced and disobedient; it is 'enlightenment'
regarding the perversion that has been inflicted on them, as possessors of the
pneuma, by the archons. The salvation story is entirely preformed in Paradise.
That, too, is a mythical structure as imitated by the art myth: The second
'enlightenment,' whose failure is supposed to be prevented by the Apocryphon,
only repeats the first onewith the same central actor, in fact, in the
metamorphosis (in the first case) of the eagle and (in this case) of the person of
light.
The expulsion from Paradise banishes human beings to the cavity underneath the
world's matter. This is the ultimate consequence of the intention of depriving
them of a view of their origin. So the author of the biblical text fell into the first
archon's trap when he defamed, as the devil's malice, the tempting statement that
the fruit of Paradise would make humans be like gods. But just this, to be like
gods, had been their destiny since they had received a share of the pneuma. The
Gnostic myth reads the interlinear version of the biblical Genesis. It would be
nonsense to speak of an "influence" of the Bible on Barbelo-Gnosticism. Rather,
the Apocryphon is the extreme form of aggression against a stock of images
assumed to be familiar.
At the end of his revelation, the spirit of light goes on to reveal how he became
active as a savior. He followed the human beings into their captivity in the world
and the body, so as to awaken them from their anaisthesia [insensibility]: "And I
entered into the middle of their

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prison, which is the prison of the body. And I said, 'He who hears, let him rise up
from the deep sleep.'" 27Part of the ritual is that, after the awakening, the one
who awakens is sealed with five seals, in the light of death; from then on death
cannot regain power over one who has been marked in this way. The savior
commands John to write down these secrets and to deposit them safely. They are
protected by a curse against frivolous exposure.
And that already contains a hint of the weakness of the Gnostic art myth: It
belongs to an arcane literature that remains withdrawn from the discipline
exercised by an audience. That allows it to take on the character of unbridled
prolixity, of fanciful proliferation, which is not subject to any process of
selection. The myth that is given out as "secret teachings" does have variants, but
they were clearly not exposed to any process of comparison. The litany and the
piling up of repetitions that can be imposed on a small sworn group do not
encounter any threshold of boredom and indifference because even being
tortured by them strengthens one's consciousness of being among the chosen.
That is well known from totalitarian systems, where the speeches of leading
functionaries can be just as long as they are boring, as though there had never
been such a thing as rhetoricrhetoric being a skill needed by those who are still
seeking power. It is also generally true, in connection with ritual and texts
associated with worship, that one wants to be able to show what one endures 'for
the cause.' So the Gnostic art myth degenerates under the hothouse treatment that
is accorded to it as a result of the sanction that lies on it and that keeps it distant
from any 'judgment of taste.'
After the verbal opulence and profusion of names in the Gnostic versionor
better, inversionof the Paradise myth, we can comprehend for the first time what
is involved in Nietzsche's accomplishment of turning it around in three sentences
and fitting it into his assignment to history of a direction aimed at the superman.
Half a century earlier Ludwig Feuerbach made of this, in one single, albeit long,
sentence, something that appears more harmless: "It is indisputable that the only
correct interpreter of Genesis is one who recognizes that it is from the same tree
from which Adam picks the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, with the
enjoyment of which he loses the paradise of life, that the leaves also come with
which he covers his nakedness."28Profundity is a quality that is currently
disdained. We cannot allow answers to questions to be profound. But

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the little connection that Feuerbach establishes between the fruit and the leaves
of the tree of knowledgebetween its relation to morality and the necessitousness
awakened by that relationis hardly an answer to any conceivable serious
question, and yet it has the ambiguity that can be called profundity because each
interpretation of it leaves the extent of what is not yet exhausted undiminished.
I am going to make a jump here and offer the shortest one-sentence variation of
the Paradise myth, which was found in Georg Simmel's diary after his death:
"The apple from the tree of knowledge was unripe." What eminent skill at
minimal modification together with maximal transformation is here displayed.
The framework of the story, which is only alluded to, remains, and yet the mood
of the whole thing changes ironically. The prop, which at first was only
supposed to be a forbidden enticement and a means to becoming a god, itself
moves into the focus of consideration. So little thought has been given, in the
entire tradition, to the fruit itself, that we have believed, from the pictures, that
the text must have referred to an apple, although it contains no such thing and
Feuerbach's version, because of the service subsequently performed by the
leaves, makes one think more of a fig tree. Simmel diverts us from the fact that
the price paid for the fruit of Paradise was Paradise itself; he would like to know
what the fruit was worth apart from the prohibition and the temptation. It was
not rotten, it was worse than that: It was unripe.
This is worse because it means that the right moment for the crime was missed.
It is not that the gain resulting from being led astray could not have contained
what it promised; instead, even the simple pleasure that could have been had by
waiting a little bit was missed. A quality that cannot be enforced either by gods
or by men, because it is only granted as the gift of timethe ripeness of the
fruithad been left out of consideration. Here everything depends on how the
accent is applied: It is not the Fall from Paradise, the forfeiting of freedom from
death, or the quarrel with the benevolent master of the garden that distresses the
late thinker, but rather the vexation caused by the fact, which is paradigmatic for
all ages of mankind to come, that the fruit had been taken from the tree of
knowledge a little bit too soon, too hastily, and thus the only compensation for
the loss of Paradise had been forfeited.
One perceives that while this is a total myth, it could not be a myth for mankind
as a whole because it is tied to an individuality that feels

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sorrow in view of the unripeness of what might have been the only fruit that
could have been worth mankind's sufferings. Without the individual behind it,
who utters this sentence, the reader would be left with the scandal that he and
others, and perhaps everyone, are not allowed to be more deeply dismayed over
the lost Paradise and the burden of labor in the sweat of their brows than over the
unripeness of the fruit of knowledge. Simmel himself never published this
sentence. It stands in his diary, and it is the unseemly curiosity of the epigones
that confronts us with an angle of vision that may only be permissible privatim
[privately].
That raises the question whether such a thought, inscribed in a diary, is an
accidental aperçu or an approach to the disclosure of a personal fundamental
myth. The procedure of carrying over the model of an epoch's imagination,
which in any case can only be arrived at by inference, into the sphere of
biography is certainly not beyond question, even in a case where an author has
himself thought of looking for a prior mythical formulation as a means by which
to make clear the unity and totality of his judgments and opinions as a
conception. I intend to illustrate this fact by the example of the later Scheler and
the characteristic affinity of his metaphysics for myth.
The archaeologist Ludwig Curtius recollects a last encounter with Max Scheler
in the summer of 1927, when the latter stood before his door in Heidelberg,
toward the end of the dinner hour, so marked by age and illness that Curtius had
to identify himself to the man he had known since their youth. 29Curtius
describes impressively the exposed and insecure temper, reciprocally penetrating
both personality and teaching, of the thinker, who had been, as it were, a silent
participant in everything "impure in the age," and whose "need for deliverance,"
as well as his "search, on one new path after another, for God," had arisen from
his entanglement in the guilt of his age. On that occasion Scheler had recited to
him, "as the final form of his philosophy," the myth of the Indian god who
became man (Krishna), who as one of his trials on earth had, while swimming
across a stream, to contend with the serpent of evil, and overcame it by flexibly
adapting himself to all of its enveloping loops until it let him go in exhaustion.
Curtius concludes his account by connecting the myth to Scheler: ''This doctrine,
too, was a self-confession."
Now Scheler was still able to give his own 'edition' of the myth after this, in the
lecture entitled "Der Mensch im Zeitalter des Aus-

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gleichs" [Man in the era of adjustment], which he delivered in November 1927

in Berlin and which appeared in the posthumously published volume
Philosophische Weltanschauung, in 1929. He takes as his point of departure the
quotation from Bacon according to which we can conquer nature only by
obeying her. Here it is the world serpent, the "symbol of the causal nexus of the
world," from which Krishna, at the call of the heavenly father, who warns him to
be mindful of his divine nature, withdraws as easily "as a lady draws her hand
out of a glove." 30Perfect flexibility as the principle of liberation is contrasted to
the idea of the domination of nature, in which Scheler sees the Judeo-Christian
image of man brought to its logical consequence "in keeping with the idea of a
creator God, a God of work." Interpreted in this way, removed from its direct
moral relation to the thinker, the myth represents everything that Scheler had
written since the treatises on the phenomenology of sympathy and on
ressentimentl in the construction of ethical systems, in his most productive
phase, between 1912 and 1914: cosmic Eros, Franciscan sympathy with nature,
and confidence in Being [Seinsvertrauen] as an antitype to the idea of exact
science, to technicization, to ressentiment, and to the mistrust embodied in
theory. Except that at that time this repertory had innervated his movement
toward Catholicism, whereas now it stimulated the metaphysics of the 'God in
the process of becoming' [des werdenden Gottes], who, drawing on the liberation
of the life impulse in the 'stormy weather' of the world process, provides himself
with the energywhich was missing from the purity of the sphere of essencesthat
he needs in order to realize himself. The world comes into being not through the
biblical fiat [Let it be] but rather through the non non fiat [Let it not not be] of
this self-empowerment. Man is the decisive executor of the movement that
comes from the world ground; he alone is able to unite the intuition of essences
[Wesensschau] and experience, spirit and stress [Geist and Drang]. He does this
with the elasticity of the Indian god-man, if he follows the thinker and his myth.
The history of Scheler's influence on the last years of the Weimar Republic is
confusing, because almost every factor that gave this phase its character
becomes involved. But the misunderstanding of Scheler's 'fundamental myth' by
the sympathetic and fascinated but cautious archaeologist nevertheless provides
food for thought: An extreme cosmological extrapolation is 'reintimized,' almost
read from its author's

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physiognomy. What was meant as the task of mankind becomes the personal
problematic of Scheler as he neared his death.
From here I suggest we look back at another fundamental myth and its
proneness, at the time, to being misunderstood. Schelling's call to [a professorial
chair in] Berlin appears to the liberal Varnhagen von Ense, the widower of
Rachel, as the epitome of all the darkening trends of the age of Frederick
William IV. He cannot come to terms with this "philosopher with a calling to
instruct the age," and characterizes his lectures, which soon lead to public strife,
as "old Scholasticism" and "paltry fairy tales." 31In Varnhagen's diary there
stands, under February 24, 1842, the brief formulation of Schelling's
fundamental myth: "First God produces himself, but then he is still blindonly
when he has produced the world and man does he become able to see." The only
response to this that Varnhagen can manage is the single exclamation,
unforgettable for the admirer of that great production, his diary: "What a
scandal! So he is blind for a while, like a newborn puppy?''
Both Scheler's and Schelling's total myths represent a modern type of art myth
that is brought about by violating dogmatic rules of theology: God is not the
absolute being, his attributes are not optimized all around with universal
quantifiers. He can create a world, but he is unable to see it; he is the epitome of
pure essentiality, but he lacks the power to bring an essence to reality. The story
becomes narratable because a deficiency, and thus a goal, is ascribed to God, a
goal to arrive at which the world and man are precisely the correct, though also
risky, means. This remythicization of the concept of God that was 'purified' by
philosophy demonstrates how myth and divine impotence, or at least diminution
of power, correspond to one another. But what is primary is not that one ascribes
a goal to God but rather that one shows that the world and man are his necessary,
irrevocable, and thus no longer contingent 'means.' The more intimately the goal
is incised into God's being, the higher the value that is found when one weighs
up the means of achieving it. The adjustment accomplished in remythicization
allows man to win to the extent that God losesloses so as to win, for the first
time, through man and with man. The world and man are the absolute
circumstantiality of God's dealings with himself.

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Translator's Notes
a. Literally, "work of the concept" (Arbeit des Begriffs). The author is using
Hegel's language here.
b. This concept of reality is one of several that the author distinguishes in his
"Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans," in Nachahmung und
Illusion, ed. H.R. Jauss, Poetik und Hermeneutik 1 (Munich: Fink, 1969). See
especially pp. 10 11.
c. This "reoccupation" process and Augustine's role in it are discussed in detail
in part 2, chapter 1, of the author's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).
d. John 18:5.
e. The first line of a well-known Lutheran hymn, which was reworked by J. S.
Bach as the initial anthem of his cantata BWV 140 (information supplied by the
author).
f. Doxa refers to divine radiance, glory, majesty, or mode of being. See author's
note 22 to the next chapter, and the article cited there.
g. Title of a treatise by Saint Anselm. See next chapter, note 33 and related text.
h. Kunst der Vermutung "art or skill of conjecture" alludes to Nicholas of Cusa's
concept of the same name, introduced in his De coniecturis (1440).
i. The German Reflexion signifies, without distinction, the logical 'reflexiveness'
or self-reference of the "thought that thinks itself" and the visual reflection of an
image in a mirror.
j. Hauchung "breathing spirit" (pneuma, literally, "breath") into something; also
the process by which the Holy Spirit is brought forth by the Father and the Son.
k. Psychical as possessing mere soul (psyche), as opposed to the "Spirit"
(pneuma) that distinguishes the "First Man" and the ("pneumatic") possessor of
gnosis.
l. Ressentiment, literally, "resentment," is a term often used, since Nietzsche's
Genealogy of Morals, to describe the rankling envy that seeks cunning ways of
depreciating and depleting whatever is strong. The two works of Scheler that are
referred to in this sentence are Phänomenologie und Theorie des
Sympathiegefühles (1913) (later editions entitled Wesen und Formen der
Sympathie), in Gesammelte Werke (Bern: Francke, 1954- ), vol. 7, translated as
The Nature of Sympathy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1973); and "Das
Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen," in Vom Umsturz der Werte (1915), in
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3.

3
Myths and Dogmas
Scimus deum de deo nasci,
quemadmodum de non deo non deum.
Tertullian, Ad nationes
[We know that God is born of God, just as what is not God is born of what is not God.]
"Deum de Deo
Lumen de Lumine
Deum vero de Deo vero."
Credo of the Roman Mass
[God from God,
Light from Light,
True God from true God.]
The discovery of the narcissism involved in small differences showed us how they open
deep chasms between people. Large differences become established as matters of course
and elude perception precisely on account of their superevident presence. One of the
fundamental circumstances of the history of our consciousness has long avoided
observation and statement; it concerns the equality of power that we like to solemnly
assert as holding between the classical [Greco-Roman] and the biblical roots of this
history. I do not dispute this equality of power; what I have in mind is the similarity
between them in one respect that affects the volume [of their effects] and thus the
possibility of observing them empirically. Myth, as it was transmitted by the ancient
world's texts, excited, propelled, impregnated, and stimulated

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the imagination and the formal discipline of the European literatures in a unique
way; whereas the biblical world, in spite of the incomparably greater depth to
which it penetrated the consciousness of the two millenniums after Christ, is
nearly absent on the level of manifestation in literature.
In the line of the great figures of German classical philology in the nineteenth
century, none stood so equally close to both worlds, the biblical and the
mythical, as Jacob Bernays, son of a Hamburg rabbi and the author of the most
convincing solution to the puzzle that Aristotle left behind him in his theory of
the operation of tragedy. In correspondence with Paul Heyse, who was always
eager for out-of-the-ordinary subjects,a Bernays drew attention to the "tempting
illusion" that the biblical materials were similar to epic ones and would have to
be suited to "great tragedies." The difference, however, between the mythical
and the biblical materials, the difference that prevented the modern dramatist
from making use of great new models, of which it was painful to be deprived,
was "such an essential one that the lack of success of biblical dramas up to the
present can be blamed on their authors only inasmuch as a poor writer betrays
himself by his choice of poor material." What prevents the poet from making use
of the figures in the Bible, he writes, is the way they are fixed in a written book,
and the incomparable presence of this book in people's memories. A writer who
expanded or deformed this material, even by a little, would have to fail by
verging on parody. It is only with figures who stand entirely in the background,
like John the Baptist, that it might be possible to do something. "But with lava
like Saul, which broke out from the innermost part of the volcano and is now
rigid and brought to an eternal standstill in the Book, I doubt that anyone will
ever be able to do anything new.'' It is not an accident that Shakespeare, who
"after all, rummaged everywhere for subjects, never burned his fingers on a
biblical one." 1
Images that are fixed in written formone can go onimply a sort of verbal
'prohibition of images,'b which does not affect the fine arts in the same way
because their means are not canonically stamped and promulgated in advance.
The description of this state of affairs is the first, formless encounter one can
have, within our cultural horizon, with the antithesis of myth and dogma.
The fact that its reception is not superadded to myth, that it does not enrich it,
but that instead myth is handed down and known to us

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in no other condition than that of always being already in the process of

reception, is the resultin spite of their iconic permanenceof its elements' capacity
for being deformed, of the fact that (to use Bernays's words once again) it is not
composed of "figures of granite," any recourse [Zugriff] to which must turn into
a violation [Sich-Vergreifen]. Bernays does not make a point of the difference in
ethical or sacral quality between the biblical and the mythical figures, in order to
explain each type's disposition to or lack of availability for reception. He cites
only the single circumstance that what is handed down in sacred books is 'fixed
in written form' ['festgeschrieben']. That is an entirely formal aspect; but it has as
a consequence that in relation to what is fixed in writing, a kind of work begins
that is very different from work that relates to a fundamental stock of images:
This is work directed at producing bare compatibility between historically
heterogeneous communications that were never originally laid out with an eye to
later painstaking scrutiny.
Myth has called forth impudent and satirical exaggerations of its contradictions.
A book religion produces the opposite: a transition to abstract conceptual
formulation as a way of avoiding the difficulties that arise on the historical and
perceptual level. Which of the eschatologically wrought-up members of the
original Christian community could even have dreamed that the Lord, whose
return on the clouds of heaven everyone thought he could expect within his
lifetime, had been characterized by or expressed anything like the hypostatic
union of natures or the Trinitarian unity of the persons in one divine nature, as
they were to be defined by dogma? Dogmatists existed only because heretics
existed; and heretics existed because more than one route could be taken in
evading the difficulties contained in the original contents of the Holy Scriptures.
But these were by no means equally legitimate routes, so that finally one of them
was recognized as right, and was able to determine who had been wrong.
I do not start from the premise that this process disguises a naked decisionism;c
the history of dogma, too, contains a principle of selection. Perhaps even
Marcion could have won the prize of survival if he had not given the impression
of dealing with the letter of Scripture in a way that was all too liberal, and thus
authorized less sagacious disciples to pursue such dealing without consistency. It
is not the philologists (and Marcion is one of their ancestors) but the philologists'
students who have always spoiled everything.

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One can go beyond the formal consideration of the difference between myth and
dogma, variable freedom from writing versus fixation in written form. If one
proceeds to matters having to do with content, one will have to undertake
differentiations that are not so much eidetic as matters of tendency. For who
would want to deny that the biblical God has mythical features, even if his
uniqueness limits the possibility of stories [Geschichten] about him to those
having to do with his appearance in history [in der Geschichte]? His jealousy of
other gods is, from the beginning, not a question of his relating directly to
realities that he recognizes as such. It is much more a rivalryoperating indirectly
through the behavior of men and decided on the battlefields of the history of a
nationwith the gods of the peoples round about. In Sinai, Egypt is stripped off, in
a bloody manner, and dies out as well, during the desert generation, so as to
produceif one may put it this waythe striking force of dogma for a new field of
testing and temptation among Canaanites, Moabites, and others. This is what
will make possible even the restoration after the Babylonian exile, the re-
creation' of the sacred books 'from nothing.'
Among those who returned in 538 a half century after the destruction of
B.C.

Jerusalemthere cannot have been many left who had been led away into exile in
586. The time in which to drive out Egypt in the desert had been shorter than the
time, on the banks of the Euphrates, in which to forget everything and let
memory die out. But in the meantime this had become a religion of priests with a
centralized cult, a divine system with strict regulation of every feature of
everyday behavior, and above all with written original documents. Only those
could take part in the rebuilding of the Temple whose monotheism had remained
unquestionable. That meant not only renunciation of the cultural liberality of the
'pantheon' but also the loss of all those who, in the foreign land, had been or had
become willing to make concessions. It was a repetition of the destruction of the
cult of the golden calf, carried out with the different means granted by history
since that time. What the reformers Ezra and Nehemiah made a reality was the
first selection of those who were disposed toward the strict observance of a
dogmatic mode of existence founded on the Scriptures of the covenant.
Prohibitions of the making of images are easy to transgress, granting the
remarkable exception (which turns aside into such exuberant ornamentation) of
Islam. The Decalogue's prohibition of images has been

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pushed to one side by the Christian tradition to an extent matched in few other
cases, not illogically in view of the fact that God was supposed to have made
himself visible in the meantime. But his definition as one who is invisible
continued to be preponderant. His saints have stimulated the representational
imagination more than the face of the Son of Man, which remained unknown, is
nowhere described, and our deprivation of which is forced on our consciousness
by the notorious shroud. Myth easily crosses the boundary of the realm of
visibility. It may make difficult demands on the capacity for visual perception,
like the direction to imagine the three Graeae as equipped with one shared tooth
and one shared eye. It makes up for that by forgoing the demands of what is
essentially invisible. Epiphanies do not require justification of the intentions and
cunning lying behind them.
In the limiting case the Enlightenment critic can ridicule the pedantic
hermeneuticist. Thus Abraham Gotthelf Kästner ridicules Montfaucon, who had
written regarding Pluto's acquisition from the Cyclopes of a helmet that makes
its wearer invisible, that he had never yet seen this helmet in a portrayal of Pluto,
and that such portrayals in general were less common than portrayals of the
other gods. Kästner's comment on this, in a single sentence: "Did Montfaucon
expect to see Pluto portrayed with the helmet on his headin other words,
represented in circumstances in which he was invisible?" 2The compelling force
of the rule of invisibility in the case of the spirit has the result not only that the
third Person described in Christian theology has been particularly unpopular in
or even absent from iconography but also that even in the New Testament texts
the problem of how this Person is to make an appearance becomes evident when
it takes on forms that it should after all by no means have been allowed to take
onthe God who is said to scorn every kind of docetism takes the form of a dove
at the baptism in the Jordan, of flames at the Pentecostal outpouring. At Luke
3:22 the pneuma hagion [Holy Spirit] appears, at the sounding of the voice from
heaven, "in a bodily shape like a dove"and there stands the treacherous pagan
word eidos [shape, form].
In the fine arts, too, the sacred has mainly been treated in terms of the response
to it. Burckhardt, looking at the dome of San Giovanni in Parma, observes that it
is only in the corona composed of John's former fellow apostles that Correggio
has achieved a magnificent so-

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lution of the problem of representing John's vision on Patmos: "These prodigious

men on the clouds are archetypes of all kinds of power and plastic richness"; but
in their midst and as their point of reference Correggio has made a Christ float in
the air about whom one has to say that "I wouldn't give much" for him.
3Nevertheless, as Burckhardt remarks the next day, the painter was deeply
stirred by his vision of the superearthly realm. But then something astonishing
dawns on the viewer: the retranslatability of the sacred world, once it has been
put in visible form, into the mythical. "One can in fact even think of it as
translated into pagan form: Prometheus, lying on the Caucasus, sees his earlier
comrades, the other Titans, floating down to him." It is not Christ, but the
visionary, John, who is compared with Prometheus, while the apostles are
compared with the Titansthe floating Christ does not remind the viewer of
anyone.
Our subject here is not the greatness of the invisible God but rather his capacity
to become, even independently of his cult and places of worship, purely by
means of the word, 'real' and thus (if the expression will be excused) capable of
unlimited transportation. The capacity to endure through exile and the capacity
to be propagated in missionary fashion over exotic distances are only two
aspects of the same characteristic.
In a midrash on the book of Exodus there is the sentence: "Two things Israel
asked of God: to see his form and to hear the words from his mouth."4Even
disregarding the sequence, it is amazing that this is said about the same book of
the Pentateuch that contains God's statement that "Thou canst not see my face:
for there shall no man see me, and live." Consider that if this were translated into
myth, it could only have been said of the head of Medusa. Between the
prohibition of images in Exodus 20:4 and the threat of death in Exodus 33:20
there is an inner coherence of denial, which expands into a renunciation of
stories. But the threat of death is precisely not founded on any sort of 'spiritual'
status. Invisibility here is the unbearableness of somethinglooking God in the
facethat might in principle be possible for a more steadfast or a more worthy
viewer. The status of something as spiritual is different. In the biblical
prohibition of images the God who thinks is still unknown, not to speak of the
God who thinks himself, so as to preserve his autarky. This latter God
determines the conception of a principle of the world that is not allowed to bear
any of the world's characteristics.

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Nothing of what mystical visionaries have ever said about their glimpses through
the chink of transcendence is found or is even merely hinted at in the Old
Testament: At God's feet there is splendor, and the prophet's vision reaches at
most to the border of his raiment. If the conjecture is correct that the Old
Testament's ark of the covenant was a throne brought along on the journey
through the desert, then it was an empty throne. 5More than God's hand is not to
be seen on any of the pictorial evidence discovered by archaeology; and this is
already an amazing liberty in pictorial representation, when the pictures on the
wall of the synagogue of Dura show God's intervention [Eingreifen: intervening
'grasp'] in the sacrifice of Isaac, and his hand grasping the prophet Ezekiel by the
forelock.
But the prohibition of images is of course much more general than a mere
prohibition of images of God; it is above all a prohibition of images of man.
Here it appears as a retrospective systematization if one suggests that, on
account of the biblical formula of man as being made in God's image, making
images of man would have amounted, indirectly, to making images of God, so
that it was logical to include man in the initial prohibition of images. That is
fine, but it is clearly the kind of thing thought up by theologians. A more
obvious objective would be to eliminate the misuse of pictures of people in
magic, a practice, just as infamous as it is widespread, whose offshoots extend
all the way into the epoch of photography.
The invisible presses toward processing in the form of dogma. Utopia also
belongs in this category. As a limit concept, it commands one to think what no
man's eye has ever yet seen, even if its more harmless instances produce motley
fancies of increased indolence. In its intensified instances utopia is the result of a
sum of negations, when it is focused solely on avoiding contamination by what
currently exists and when it culminates in a prohibition against saying anything
positively imagined and graphically descriptive about the new land as it will be
after the bursting open of all delusion systems.d That is logical in the
circumstances, but at the same time it serves to protect from doubt, by means of
mandatory invisibility. It has to be reprehensible to depict the future if one is
supposed to be able to be confident that it is produced by necessity as the
dissolution of all oppression. The utopian prohibition of images demands
submission, by refusing to provide stories. He who doesn't tolerate this is one of
those who already, on other occasions, remained in wretched unbelief because
they did not

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see. It is remarkable what a variety of formations of this elementary type have

been created in a short period: Barth's dialectical foreign God, Bultmann's
kerygma, Heidegger's Being, Adorno's restoration by "negative dialectics" of the
pure and empty horizon of possibility.
Utopias are poor in images because every image spoils the ideal: There is an
invisible God in every form of provision of happiness for mankind.
Consequently no narrative or iconic core constituents of utopias that are,
nevertheless, described have developed. The title "utopia" has held fast the fact
that it emerged from the travel romance, from the idea of things being different
elsewhere, not from extrapolation into the future. The latter was first made
possible by the addition of the idea of progress, and thus already implicitly
makes a heresy of any position that could hinder, through mere subjectivity,
what will 'turn out' as an immanent result of the logic of history. So the images
of an undefined past become all the stronger; the memory of servitude in Egypt
is stronger than the expectation of the Promised Land. Yahweh always remained
more distinctly the God who had led the people out of Egypt than the God who
had promised them the land.
The result of this asymmetry is that wherever the historically definite, datable
past seems to contain guarantees about what is possible and to come, it tends
toward myth. In his theory of social myths, Georges Sorel described
constructions of an indeterminate future as effective and having few [practical]
inconveniences when "the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a
class" are enclosed in them. Such inclinations "recur to the mind with all the
insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life." The myths that give
expression to these inclinations would have to "give an aspect of complete
reality to the hopes of immediately impending action on which the reform of the
will is founded." Then social myths would not come into conflict with the
experience acquired, in the course of their lives, by the people they represent.
Sorel's examples, by which he does more than just illustrate this thesis, are
instructive. The early Christians' expectation of the apocalypse, in spite of its
failure, had brought Christianity "such a great profit" that there were scholars
like the Abbé Loisy who wanted to relate Jesus' whole preaching to the
apocalyptic myth. Luther and Calvin had, it is true, awakened hopes that were by
no means realized, and seemed to their present-day adherents to belong more to
the

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Middle Ages than to modern times; their central problems were practically
forgotten; and yet from their dreams of a Christian renewal an "immense result"
had followed. In the case of the French Revolution one can say that it could not
have been victorious without its images and that its myth had utopian features,
because it "had been formed by a society passionately fond of imaginative
literature, full of confidence in petite science ['popular science'] and very little
acquainted with the economic history of the past." Nevertheless, although the
utopias came to nothing, this revolution may have been much more profound
than the people who constructed social utopias in the eighteenth century could
have dreamed. 6
It seems to me that in his theory of social myths Sorel underestimates the
dimension of the indeterminate past and consequently arrives at a function for
myth that seems quite formal. What was at work in the social myths of the
Enlightenment was not the definition of anticipation but rather the fiction of
recollections. In spite of Rousseau's explicit stipulation that the state of nature
was unrepeatable, the prehistory of man as a natural being who lacked nothing,
which Rousseau invented, was a proclamation of the contingency of every
contemporary cultural and political condition. In that respect it was, above all,
the antithesis of the other theorem of the status naturalis [state of nature] that
was decisive for the modern age, the one that defined the state of nature as the
epitome of the reasons compelling the establishment of state power.
Regarding early Christian eschatologism, too, one can say that it could find
resonance only in a retrospective view of a history (barely framable,
chronologically) in which God had disposed over the world, mankind, and his
people with sovereign decrees of weal and woe, so that he certainly could be
believed capable of the annihilation and definitive replacement of the world, as
the winding up, putting the seal of finality on everything, of his power over it.
Neither Olympian Zeus nor the Aristotelian philosopher's god could have been
found capable of such supremely mighty dispositions over the history of the
world and men. It is always the dimension that lies behind that produces the
scope of definable expectations. This scope, however, is exclusively a factor
affecting the present, its self-comprehension, the energy of its processesnot their
goal-directedness. Even if there had been, for only one historical moment, an
original Christian community in which the Sermon on the Mount had becomeor
even merely had a like-

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lihood of becomingthe rule of life, then the whole apocalyptic disillusionment,

the tremor relating to the eschatological goal, in the early centuries would be
insignificant. Sorel sums up his description of the mythe social, as a factor that
refuses to define the future, in the concept of a means that operates on the
present. To apply it, in terms of contents, to the course of history would be
meaningless.
In the concept of the social myth, which Sorel invented in 1906, the minimum of
what could still bear the title of myth is arrived at. No story is told any longer;
only a background of desires, of rejection, of power-will is touched on. The way
Sorel speaks of the "general strike," it is a title for an overwhelming occurrence
of a concentrated manifestation of the will to a jenesaisquoi [an 'I don't know
what']. The strong point of this final myth lies in its power of exclusion: It is a
canon by which one can always know and will what is not allowed to exist. But
with that it reaches its amazing convergence with dogma, which in its origin is
the canon by which to exclude heresies.
The social myth is the residue left by a 'demythologizing' process, exactly like
Bultmann's kerygmawhich allows one to say, at every step, what was mythand
Heidegger's Being, which is found by a continual process of eliminating the
characteristic features of 'entities.' This mode of thought simulates the provision
of answers to questions, such as would inevitably arise in theoretical contexts, by
means of a refusal of importunity. The prototype of all models of refusal is that
contained in the name-giving as the refusal of a name in the Old Testament,
where God, by naming himself, simultaneously makes himself known and
withholds himself: "I will be who I will be" [Ich werde sein, der ich sein werde].
So at any rate Luther translates (since the verb haya has no present tense) "ehyeh
ascher ehyeh," for which (assimilating it to metaphysics) the Septuagint puts
"Ego * eimi ho on*" and the Vulgate ''Ego sum qui sum."7,e It is only to the late
ear, spoiled by too much philosophy, that the refusal of a name in this
perpetually mysterious formula can have seemed like a whispered prompting by
Being.
The refusal of images, the refusal of stories, the evasion even of the naming of a
name, the isolation from all involvement with wives and childrenall of this only
prepares the way for the suspicion that in the covenant of history as well this
God is a partner who poses conditions that cannot be satisfied. This suggestion,
which fully emerges from the context of Phariseeism in Paul, produces an
interiorization

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and an increased pressure of the need for deliverance, a need that since Egypt
and the Exile, and even under Roman rule, had had characteristics of externality.
The fact that this God was supposed to have made man after his own image and
likeness never took on the character of an initially unilateral obligation, free, as
yet, of any reciprocal duty. Otherwise it would not have been evident, either,
why it should have had to come to a new theology that replaced the relation of
man being the image of God with strict identity on both sides of the covenant.
The theological hyperbole only becomes understandable if one has in view the
failure of a formulation that fixed God's commitment to unconditional aid to man
at a high level in terms of its initial conditions.
It was Heine who settled accounts with the consequences of dogmatic
monotheism most bitterly when he asked himself, with regard to Shakespeare's
Shylock, why this dramatic character could only become a tragic figure,
although he was introduced as a comic one. Heine's answerwhich is not in
harmony with the origin of tragedy and with the breaking off of its possibility in
historyis that this was the result of monotheism, that "fixed idea" whose "bearers
are too weak to master it and are overwhelmed by it and become incurable."
8The God of this fixed idea is one who can only make demands, because he has
no adversaries in the form of competing gods, as on Olympus, and man cannot
play this role. The mode of behavior that is appropriate to absolute demands is,
Heine says, precisely "martyrdom." If the antithesis was originally between
monotheism and polytheism, it is not repeated in this form. It passes over into
the final form of the mutual exclusion of monotheism and pantheism.
Now, that pantheism was the logical consequence, taken up again, of the
proposition that everything was full of gods was not Heine's most characteristic
idea. Heine sees the victory of pantheism after monotheism, not at all as a
liberation from the latter, as relief from the brutality of transcendence, but rather
as an intensification of that "martyrdom" into a "storm of persecution" that has
no equivalent in the past. If everything is God, then no one can want, any longer,
to have a god, his own god, as in the case of Paul in Athens, for whomin spite of
the superabundance of godsthere had been the point of entrance and contact
represented by the "unknown god." But all the indications run counter to Heine's
construction of a dogmatic pantheism. Pantheism has never existed except under
conditions of

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tolerance. When everything is God, the separation of powers attains its perfect
form: The original concentrated embodiment of all sheer abandonment to an
antithetical position that is outside the world or indifferent to the world is played
down in a leveling off of powers. If everything is God, the proposition that a
God exists loses its meaning: Pantheism and atheism are equivalent with regard
to the absolute quality of the world.
Something else must be considered: Pantheism has no absolute relation to the
future. If the universe itself is God, nothing can arrive that would not have
already been present. To quiet the unrest regarding the future that sets in after
the end of antiquity and as a result of Christian eschatologism is one of the
nostalgic motives promoting a new renaissance, this time the renaissance of the
Hellenic cosmos or of the muses or of the Olympian and Dionysian gods or of
that entirely unknown something/someone that "Being" may have been before
the pre-Socratics.
Or does everything depend on the possibility of being able to believe that the
Messiah has not yet come? The future Messiah is an idea; it can be burdened
with all sorts of self-denial and need in the form of anticipation. No dogma is
needed to determine who it will be and what nature he will have. The Jews'
Messiah is supposed to come as one who is totally unknownas, in the literal
sense, a figure of what has never been present before. Consequently every word
about him can be a prohibition of imagery, rejection of myth, suspension of
history. Rabbi Israel of Rischin taught that the messianic world would be a world
without likenesses,f because in it the comparison and what is compared could no
longer be related to one another. But that would apparently mean, Gershom
Scholem comments, "that a new mode of being will emerge which cannot be
pictorially represented." 9
Pure anticipation, defined only by negations, may seem unserious in the context
of historical hopes that have always already been disappointed. On the
assumption that the end of likenesses will not emerge from the necessity of
history, but rather as the opposite of history, it sustains the sum total of wishes
precisely in that, responding to none of them in particular, it respects and
intensifies the subjectivity of the idea of happiness. The Christian anticipation of
a future visio beatifica [beatific vision], in contrast, is entirely bound to the ideal
of the presence of truth through theorya projection, as it were, of the ancient
wise man into the final state of Christianity's blessed. A hap-

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piness of theoreticians, for theoreticians, who keep ready for supposedly lower
desires the title "kennel happiness" ["Glückseligkeitsstall"].
The Messiah who already came a long time ago is, first of all, memory; second,
a defense against allegedly mistaken definitions produced by a dogma that is
guided in each case by what the greater number is able to agree to; and finally a
figure subject to historical criticism. As such he threatens, in the hands of his late
theologians, to dissolve, to lose his familiar historical contours by becoming a
product of syncretism. If it has to be said that the Messiah has already been here,
then the difficulties that follow hard on the question of what he brought with him
are inescapable.
Something has to be exhibited, and in the circumstances the only thing that this
can be, apart from the display of doubtful relics, is something invisible. In
Christian theology it is the store of Christ's infinite merits, administered by an
institution that emerged from the eschatological disillusionment of the discovery
that the time and the need to establish oneself again under worldly conditions
still remained. The economy of the invisible store of grace requires draconian
safeguards in the form of a mode of distribution, from sacraments to
indulgences, and above all in the form of dogma. Controversies about grace
become symptoms of the paradoxical situation of having to administer the
Messiah's legacy.
If he has not come yet, he excites the imagination without over-straining reason.
No burdens of proof are involved. The longer people have already waited, the
longer they can still waitthat is almost a law of temporal proportions in history.
It is suspended as soon as there is even a hint of a procedure by which to bring
about the final event. That is done for example by celebration of the most
extreme sinfulness as something that the divine onlooker at history is expected to
find intolerable, or by assaulting his favor with law-abidingness, with the zeal of
conversions, which is thought to be able to satisfy a precondition for the
dawning of the apocalyptic day of redemption.
The result of a comparison [between the two positions] in terms of energy seems
to be entirely in favor of absolute expectations. Even so, it will never be possible
to decide definitely whether the prohibition of wishes and of images that goes
with a messianism that is open toward the future can achieve free openness to
any fulfillment [freie Besetzbarkeit], beyond all myth, mysticism, and dogma,
and what that would cost, historically. In this regard Scholem has said,
impressively

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enough, that the Jewish people has had to pay the price of messianism "out of its
own substance." The magnitude of the messianic idea, he says, corresponds to
the "endless powerlessness in Jewish history." What it produces is not only
consolation and hope. "Every attempt to realize it tears open the abysses which
lead each of its manifestations ad absurdum [to absurdity]. There is something
grand about living in hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly
unreal about it." In this relation to history, he says, persons lose their singular
worth, because they can never fulfill themselves. The constitutive lack of
fulfillment in everything that that energy potential attracts to itself depreciates
the personwho is referred to the presentness of his lifein the center of what one
could perhaps call his realism. Scholem's most precise formula for this state of
affairs is that the messianic idea in Judaism ''compelled a life lived in deferment,
in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably
accomplished." In this respect, he says, it was "the real anti-existentialist idea."
One no longer reads that without an effort to bring to mind what the final remark
refers to. It was contained in a lecture, "Towards an understanding of the
Messianic Idea in Judaism," which was first published in 1959, so that it derives
from the decade of existentialism, in which almost anyone would have had to
understand what was meant by opposing messianism to this dominant
philosophical formation. Existentialism, too, had aimed at an existence without
likenesses, but without any postponement of this moment. For to be "authentic"
and to exist in "authenticity" is itself the only metaphortaken from the traditional
distinction between modes of speechgthat it permitted itself. Looking back, we
can differentiate the two positions more precisely. The messianic idea, as the
anticipation of a condition that cannot be grasped by the imagination, is truly
antiexistentialist in its retroactive effect on the situation of the person in the
presentforcibly depriving it of all claims to unmediated fulfillment. But in regard
to the 'essencelessness' ['Wesenlosigkeit'] of the future condition, it itself
formally complies with the standard of freedom from likenesses, of not being
'carried over' [übertragen]h and of being incapable of being carried over, to
which existentialism gives the tide of "authenticity." In a less newfangled
language, it is the replacement of transitive truth (veritas) by intransitive
truthfulness (veracitas). It is composed not of instances of knowledge but of
decisions, or better, of the disposition to make decisions, of resoluteness toward
what does

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not yet exist and is not determined by what exists. A world of resoluteness is
also a world without similes.
The turn of expression that speaks of a world without likenesses [or parables] is,
of course, also directed against the New Testament's way of saying that the
kingdom of heaven is like this or like that. The only difference is that the speaker
of the parables himself, in the process of dogmatization, withdraws from the
status of similitude, so as to gain the complete seriousness of the realism by
virtue of which man is no longer an episode, no longer the provisional world
functionary, but instead has become the divinity's permanent destiny. To prevent
that from appearing as an intolerably contingent fact depending on the arbitrary
presence or absence of human sinfulness, Scholasticism in its Franciscan lineage
contrives a dogmatic device that, though it never became the official teaching of
the Church, withdraws the Incarnation from its merely historical status. Duns
Scotus's doctrine of the eternal predestination of the Son of God to be incarnated
as man makes man's history a matter of indifference in comparison to God's
intentions for him. His reality had become equivalent to his ideal quality. Placing
the accent on the timelessness of the decision in favor of man's redemption made
it possible to deal with the difficulty that the realization of that decision had
become a contingently dated event in the past. The eternal predestination of the
only-begotten Son to become the Son of Man was the most extreme antithesis of
the characterization that Irenaeus of Lyon had given for the Gnostic
Christological myths; according to their teaching, Jesus had passed through
Mary in the way that water flows through a tube: "dicunt Jesum, quem per
Mariam dicunt pertransisse, quasi aquam per tubum. . . . "
Has a theism ever been able to afford to contradict human needs, to renounce
everything in favor of the absolute purity of the concept?to deny itself
concessions to identification with a nation, to the aesthetic optics and acoustics
of the cult, to images, to desires that souls should be taken care of? Wouldn't that
conjure the 'golden calves' out of the ground?
When in the 1930s the talk was of the new German myth of the twentieth
century,i the question what stabile spiritual form could have prevented
susceptibility to this myth seemed urgent. Apropos of a remark by Einstein about
Hindenburg, Thomas Mann notes in his diary that the Jews' greater sense of the
truth could be attributed to the fact that they had no myth and that their brains
were not "be-

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fogged" with it. 10To the extent that that was not meant only as a piece of
ethnopsychology or psychology of religion, and did not just provide an occasion
for the antithetical remark that the internal German "movement" of those days
was "a prime example of the German spirit's wallowing in the manure of
myth"to the extent, then, that it was meant as more than this, it had to favor the
discipline of a purely conceptual monotheism as a reserve of resistance against
myths. But almost at the same time that he was writing about this movement's
"fraudulent, time-worn pretension to be a 'return,''' the author of the Joseph
tetralogy was in the process of writing the monumental epic of the recurrence of
the same and carrying out, without conceptualizing it yet, a program that he
defined in 1941 under the rubric of "myth plus psychology": "It is essential that
myth be taken away from intellectual Fascism and transmuted for humane ends.
I have for a long time done nothing else."11
When, then, after renewing the biblical myth, he was renewing the German myth
of Faust, doubts about this notion occurred to him. In September 1943 he begins
the ninth chapter of Doctor Faustus and notes, to his confusion, how the emotion
aroused among the German emigrants by reading samples of the book began to
be combined with a "patriotism that seemed curiously premature." It puts him in
a critical mood, and he takes it "as a warning against the danger of my novel's
doing its part in creating a new German myth."12The whole range of questions
about possession of or freedom from myth is touched upon in these notes. Does
it facilitate the sense of truth if one expects to possess only a little truth? Is
conceptual thought [der Begriff] equal to the task of rooting out the stocks of
images, or is it only the monopoly of the management of images that must be
attacked, and the indestructible need-'position' reoccupied by something else, by
humanized myth? Or is every offer of myth finally drawn into the vortex of the
vague needs of a self-definition that was conceived at some time, and
unhesitatingly placed in the service of the corresponding renunciations?
If one examines the historical experience of the modern age, one finds the
incomparable lesson, which is seldom taken to heart, that could have been drawn
from the possession of the sciences and from their historical form: to see the
nonpossession of truth as whatin contrast to the promise that the truth would
make people freestill comes closest to such a liberation. It may be that the
history of science

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is still too short to make this upshot of intimacy with it manifest to the
consciousness of the epoch. But there is reason to fear that the satiety with that
same science relates to and is based on precisely its procedure of continual
retraction, on obsolescence and transition as the modality of its possession of
truth. In that case, even before the greatest gain could be drawn from the age of
sciencethe gain that consists in its very form of knowledgethe realization of this
profit would have been frustrated by reluctance to pay the cost that it involves.
If it is correct that the supposed possession of too many truths damages the
truthdamages the sense of truth and especially the sense of other people's
truththen the Enlightenment was right to see tolerance as the most important
criterion for distinguishing between myth and dogma. "Theogony" did not lead
to any disturbance of the peace, Voltaire says, and describes this as an admirable
characteristic of antiquity. It could, he says, at the same justify one in setting
hopes on philosophy, although philosophy has not yet submitted its homogeneity
with myth and its heterogeneity to dogma to proof. It is "very bad manners to
hate one another on account of syllogisms." 13Precisely because the idea of
justice is a truth of the first order, which is always sure of universal consent, "the
greatest crimes that afflict society are committed under the false pretense of
justice."14Philosophy too seems inclined, following the supposed dictates of
higher ideals, to disregard the ideal of tolerance that it developed. Already in
antiquity, for the Skeptics, and now for the Enlightener, the multiplicity of
philosophical schools provokes the supposition that they are all equally
dogmatic. Only if the central topic of philosophy becomes ethics does it have
nothing more to do, essentially, with those positions and disagreements: ''As all
the philosophers had different dogmas, it is clear that dogma and virtue are
entirely heterogeneous in nature."15
No matter how startling this appears at firstmyth becomes, for this Enlightener,
the pure precedent demonstrating the independence of moral obligation from
dogmatic positions, from given contents of theory: "Whether they believed or
not that Thetis was the goddess of the sea, whether or not they were convinced
of the war of the giants, and the golden age; of Pandora's box, and the death of
the serpent Python, etc., these doctrines were in no way connected with morality.
C'est une chose admirable dans l'antiquité que la théogonie n'ait jamais troublé la
paix des nations [it is an admirable fact that, in the ancient world, theogony
never disturbed the peace of the na-

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tions]." Voltaire always has the Indians or the Chinese handy in order to
demonstrate that nothing is so fabulous or absurd that it cannot be believed, but
with the assurance that no significant consequences and disagreements relating
to moral feeling and its reliability result from such certainties.
Here philosophy is evidently inferior to myth in that it, in particular, claims to
establish this connection between its theoretical and its practical constructions.
There isVoltaire assumesno moral dogma. But philosophy, in striving to give a
rational basis to something that does not need a rational basis, dogmatizes
moralityjust as theology had doneand thus for the first time makes it sensitive to
doubts and critique aimed at its foundation. On the other hand, precisely because
myth, on its 'theoretical' side, is fantastic and hypertrophic, its variants and
contradictions had no effect on ethics.
Put paradoxicallyeven though among Voltaire's examples there are no frivolous
ones (as there usually are among his examples), so as not to spoil the impression
in this casethe immorality of myth, in its contents, is a kind of protection for
morality in its independence from these contents. It is in the same wayso the
inference must, after all, runthat one should also regard the arguments and
contradictions among philosophers, although they would not admit this
themselves: "Of what importance is it to the state whether we share the opinions
of the realists or the nominalists? . . . Is it not evident that all of this should be as
indifferent to the true interests of a nation as a good or bad translation of a
passage of Lycophron or Hesiod?" 16Does Voltaire forget that he had always
believed or at least always acted in accordance with the principle that in the
service of a 'good cause' there must also (if not above all else) be good writing?
This, incidentally, has nothing to do with the advice, coming from a different
source, to the effect that where there is good writing, it must be in a 'good cause.'
But Voltaire turns noticeably away from the Cartesian assumptions of the early
Enlightenment, which assumed that the connection between physics and ethics,
between science and the conduct of life, between theory and practice, was a
relation of conditionality: that the completion of the knowledge of nature will
provide everything that must secure the acceptance and permanence of a morale
définitive ["definitive ethics": Descartes] that is adequate to reality. This had
after all still been the source of the pathos of Fontenelle, who had pictured the
identity of science and enlightenment for a century.

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Voltaire's experience conflicts with Fontenelle's expectation: The observation of

the history of science in his timethe indecision, which to him was
incomprehensible, between Cartesianism and Newtonianismhad exposed the
realm of theory as a region of dogmatic intolerance. The melancholy of
Voltaire's retrospective consideration of myth implies the neutrality of its stories,
in their contradictions and even in their immorality, for the private and public
standard of the norms of life. The great surprise is that the theological dogmatics
is only a special case of the need to have precise knowledge about what is
invisiblewhether it be vortexes or gravitation, the Trinity or graceand not to
allow anyone to make different assertions about it. And this on account of the
assumption that absolutely everything depends on the truth, or even on one
truthfrom the finitude of a proposition, an infinity of consequences results.
Voltaire was confronted with this type of situation, in the present, in the form of
Pascal's argument of the wager, which he bitterly attacked.
Pascal's argument had been one of absolute seriousness, the pure exhibition,
never surpassed, of the dogmatic calculation according to which nothing could
be too much and could be taken too much to heart or too strictly if everything is
at stake. The heart of Voltaire's repeated outbursts of indignation against Pascal's
calculation on the infinite is that man does not have an interest in God's
existence that outweighs his interest in his nonexistence. 17But Voltaire did not
inspect the other side of the relation at all: the statement that a finite life is a
negligible stake in return for a possible infinite gain. In this undiscussed premise
the finite life is viewed from outside, always as the life of someone else, whom
the thinker, as though he were an onlooker at the acceptance or rejection of the
wager, has before him. Seen from within, as the only life that a person has, it
isprecisely on account of its finitudethe simply unsurpassable, and in this sense
'infinite,' value, which cannot be a 'stake' in a 'winning strategy,' and is not
equaled by any summation of other values. Pascal's wagerlike every other
modern offer, equipped with dogmatic coefficients, of compulsory happinessis a
calculation that is always drawn up for other people.
Perhaps the next step in this reflection would have been to suspect or to assert
that convictions are, in general, not important in relation to behavior. Socrates
was not condemned because he did not believe in the gods or becaused he would
not have shared certain convictions of the people around him. He had to die
because he did not worship

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the polis's gods or because he was suspected of diverting others from such
worship. The public interestand Voltaire identifies with this interestis only in
people's behavior, not in the motives that lead them to this behavior. That may
be a superficial analysis, since the stability and dependability of behavior, and
consequently its reliability in the future, very definitely hinge on the clarity of
the reasons people have for it. It is in the public interest to be able to count on
trustworthy behavior on the part of the citizens of the polis in any kind of
situation, including those in which the constraints of conformism are weakened.
That is the point at which the hidden aspectmotives, even the possibility of
giving rational arguments for behaviorbecomes a matter of public interest: in
other words, the point at which morality, while it is not always a context on
which legality depends, can nevertheless become that. Here myth has no
function, no effectiveness, no trustworthiness whatsoever. It draws its vitality
from the frivolous assumption that the world's capacity for explanation and the
need to give rational grounds for behavior in it are not what matters.
Behind many of Voltaire's texts there stands the idea that it is easier to behave
virtuously when one does not possess too many firm opinions, dogmatic
convictions, or, collectively, 'truths.' Seen from the perspective of this
assumption, myth fills the empty space in which truths are otherwise inclined to
establish themselves. For Jacob Burckhardt this is indicated in the symptomatic
fact that despite all its authority, the most influential oracle of the Hellenes, the
oracle at Delphi, had "never uttered a religious truth having general
significance." Evidently no one inquiring there, before the end of the purely
Greek period, had assumed "that the god would enter into such matters," either.
18
Myth contains an implied concept of reality.19What it intimates, in its stories
and its figures, as valid reality is the unmistakability of gods, to the extent that
they intend to appear: the incontestability of their presence for the person to
whom they mean to appearsomething that what goes before and what comes
after can neither contribute anything to nor render doubtful. But that is not a
validity that myth demands or (still less) requires that one concede to it, not a
validity for which it even strives or makes itself accommodating, or the
acknowledgment of which it would reward with premiums. The fact that the
people of whom it tells are supposed to have had experiences with gods that had
this momentary unavoidability does not imply anything with regard to the people
to whom it is told.

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The way in which a god appears differentiates the mythical from the dogmatic
mode of consciousness. The fact that a god can appear, and thus remove any
doubt that he is a god, need have no effect on the status of the story as beyond
question if the manner of the demonstration, the display of presence, the
instrumentation of evidence, is essentially different. There is probably only one
myth that contains this differentiation as a differentiation in the divine
appearance itself: the story of Semele as one of the many mythical mothers of
Dionysus.
Semele was the only mistress of Zeus who was not content with the form in
which he appeared to and slept with her. That was her downfall, and was so
intended by Hera, who in the form of her nurse had whispered to her that she
should make sure of her lover's true form, since otherwise she might be dealing
with a monster. So Semele told Zeus that if she was to continue to accommodate
his desires, he would have to swear by Styx to grant one request for her; when he
obliged her, she demanded that he sleep with her in the same form in which he
went to Hera. Of what happens next, there are, understandably, two versions.
According to one version, anyone who sees a god in his true form must die; as a
result of the stupendous experience of the epiphany, Semele, giving birth to
Dionysus, dies. According to the other version, Jupiter appears to her as a bolt of
lightning, which strikes her dead, so that Dionysus, not yet having been carried
to full term, has to be taken from his dead mother and inserted in Zeus's thigh.
The second version is the result of adjustments made necessary by failure to
understand the first one.
This is evident from the fact that Zeus keeps his promise in a counterfeit manner,
since the lightning bolt is not his true form but only his attribute, the instrument
of his wrath and his punishment. What is 'translated' in his appearance as the
lightning bolt is the presupposition, stemming from Phrygia, where Semele
originated, that one who sees a god must die. That would not have worked in
Greek myth: Zeus had appeared to Semele as Zeus; she knew whom she was
dealing with. Thus, Ovid, too, only says that he carried out the oath by fetching
the inescapable lightning flash, the inevitabile fulmen, down from heaven,
reducing his wrath's power and his flaming rage to the minimum and with it
entering Semele's father's house, which was destroyed by the resulting
conflagration. Hesiod alluded to the story, which was unintelligible to him, only
because he had to mention Zeus's splendid son, Dionysus, who gladdens many
and is

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exempt from death, in listing the sons of Zeusbut of his mother all that he had to
say was that she, who had once fallen into the power of death, was now a
goddess, just as her son was a god. 20
Ovid was not able to overcome entirely the inconsistency in the story, between
its two heterogeneous premises. Hera's ruinous advice diverges noticeably from
what Zeus's mistress then actually demands on the strength of her lover's oath. In
the context of the Greek notions of gods, Hera knows that there is no difference
between the form in which her husband comes to her and the one that he exhibits
for Semele. Therefore, she inspires, on the one hand, the suspicion that someone
else may have pushed his way into the maiden's chamber under the name of the
god and, on the other hand, toying with the idea that it is not enough that it
actually is Zeus: "nec tamen esse Iovem satis est . . . "; he must also embrace her
exactly as he does his wife: "tantus talisque." She suggests to her rival that this
would involve demanding of the god that he also equip himself for her with the
attributes by which he is recognized: "suaque ante insignia sumat!" From the
point of view of the jealous goddess, this is the decisivethe ruinouspart of the
wish, because it refers to the lightning bolt. In fact the poet forgets the important
point. He makes Semele wish only for the one thing, that the god should be for
her the same as he is for his wife: "da mihi te talem!'' What the temptress had
separated out, Semele forgets to wish for; but Zeus does not forget to grant it. He
takes the lightning bolt and appears with it, not as it.21
In that case, what initially brought death to Semele (who later became a goddess)
would not have been the sight of the god but rather his anger, with which, while
he does adhere to his oath, he exceeds the literal content of the wish and thus
makes it disastrous. The inconsistencies make it evident that the background
contains a state of affairs that was unintelligible for the Greeks: one in which
man can experience certainty of a god's presence only through its
unbearableness.
So, the concept of reality as momentary evidence includes disparate modes of
certainty. The exclamation of the Cumaean sibyl in Virgil: "deus ecce deus""The
god! See, the god!"when Aeneas and his companions enter the grotto of the
oracle points precisely to the fact that one becomes aware of such a presence
without terror and death, that one can have it pointed out to one. In comparison
to this, think of the way Paul was struck down on the occasion of his vision at
Damascus.

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Aeneas had not doubted, either, when Jupiter sent Hermes to him with the
command that he abandon Dido and continue his journey; although an incredible
thing is being demanded of him, he does not hesitate, any more than Abraham
does when he receives the absurd order to sacrifice his only son, the son of his
old age. The biblical God has a perceptually irresistible impetus in his
appearance, the indescribable and untranslatable 'splendor,' the doxa of the
Septuagint, which, as the latinized gloria, is speculatively identified with the
Roman 'honor,' the essence of all the divinity's aims for the choruses of angels,
for the world, and for man. For, according to the principle of autarky, God
cannot be allowed to have other objects and aims outside himself. This change of
meaning undergone by Yahweh's chabod, which would not have been possible
in the context of Greek myth, is one of the premises of Christian dogma,
whereby an epoch-making, systematically fundamental concept of the world
goal is developed out of a title for the subjective experience undergone by one
who is singled out to have God appear to him. 22
There is no such thing as an 'adherent' of myth. Since it commits people strictly
to a stock of propositions, what comes through in nomenclature [like that just
discussed] is the dogmatic form not only of thought but also of institutions. To
that extent, too, dogma is a mode of thought associated with self-assertion. The
modality that belongs to propositions in relation to which the 'sheep' can be and
are meant to be separated from the 'goats,' and the formulas of
exclusionanathemasthat go with those propositions, presuppose an attitude
according to which it is possible to define a core stock of modes of behavior and
assertions that deserve to be defended. In contrast to that, the mythical mode of
thought is characterized by an almost unlimited capacity for combining
heterogeneous elements under the heading of the "pantheon." Even the earliest
instances of it that are accessible to us are, to carry over a historiographical
catchword for the condition of late antiquity, "syncretisms." In the Fastihis poem
on the pagan 'ecclesiastical year,' the Roman calendar of festivalsOvid reduced
the principle of the pantheon, as a logical result of myth, to a very concise verse:
"Dignus Roma locus, quo dens omnis est" [Rome is a worthy place, where every
god is found].
What myth lacks is any tendency toward continual self-purification, toward a
ritual of penance for deviations, toward the casting off of what is impertinent as
the triumph of purity, toward the judgment

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of souls. Myth has no outsiders, something that the dogmatic attitude needs in
order to keep itself under the pressure of definition. What afflicts the dogmatic
attitude is something that it, itself, continually generates: heretics. These had
each believed, for a long time and mostly ingenuously, that they were engaged in
the one, shared task, only to risk, one day, one item of definition too much,
which turned out to be a point that they could not carry. Here there is no such
thing as an invitation to agreement. One who asserts something, risks everything.
Origen is the most important example. The founder of Christianity's first
systematic theology almost inevitably became a heretic and, like few others, met
this fate after his death, in his literary remains and his great influence. Marcion
had been a shrewd, reductive spirit; Origen is a constructive intellect who is
almost to be measured by the standard of the Scholastic summa. The distinction
between theology and philosophy remained foreign to him; both knowledge and
revelation were elements of a homogeneous truth. He named these elements, for
the first time in a positive sense, dogmata [dogmas].
The term was burdened by the Stoic assumption that philosophical schools were
distinguished by their dogmas, and that their dogmatic character was their
mutual exclusiveness, their refusal to be arranged in a systematic totality.
Consequently a new and unique distinction is called for, the distinction between
ecclesia [church] and secta [sects]between something that is meant and allowed
to exist only in the singular, and something that was or was supposed to be
engaged in continual splitting off and scattering. The center was defined by what
occurred on the margins and borders. Who would be the Church was determined
by who gained the defining powerin alliance, as well, with the power of the
stateto declare others to be schools [i.e., 'sects']. Marcion had been the first to
recognize this and had laid claim to the designation of ecclesia for his followers.
When the emperors Gratian and Theodosius took the matter in hand, in 381, both
the Marcionites and the other heretics were forbidden to designate themselves as
"churches," as well as to use the Church's terms for ecclesiastical offices. 23In
the twelfth anathema of the Fifth Council, the worst accusation against the
reprehensible Theodore of Mopsuestia is that he not only compared Christ to
Plato and the Manichaean, as well as Epicurus and Marcion, but also compared
the "dogmatic" character of the relation between teacher and school in the
former and the latter

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cases, according to which each of these teachers invented his own dogma
(oikeion dogma), and his students assigned themselves the name of their teacher
on account of their relation to that dogma: "simili modo et cum Christus dogma
invenisset, ex ipso Christianos vocari." 24In this conciliar text the word dogma
stands precisely in the almost historiographical sense that had been established
in Stoicism. In this connection there was always a resonance from the fact that
the Greek word was translated by the Latin decretum [decree, doctrine], in which
one could hear an emphasis on the derivation from the language of law, the
quality of being established, historically, by 'edict.' Augustine uses the Greek
word with the Platonic contempt for its roots in dokein [to think, to appear] and
doxa [opinion]: "dogmata sunt placita sectarum" [dogmas are the maxims of
sects].25
That which has become the subject of the discipline of the history of dogma is
unthinkable without adding a dose of historicism to the concept of dogma, which
is why it was only in the nineteenth century that the subject manifested itself
under this title. But the late, historiographical use of the concept does not
prevent it from being the case that the propositions and systems of propositions
that were focused on in this way were already present, as a mode of thought,
behind these facts and as their basis: It is only people's identifying themselves as
belonging to a community by accepting certain propositions and excluding
others that makes these propositions into dogmas. The readiness to express
oneself in them does not constitute the dogmatic mode of thought any more than
the 'symbols' (symbola fidei)jby which people recognize one another and allow
themselves to be recognized, without their containing the entire substance of
devout behaviorfirst established the symbolic mode of thought. They contain
what everyone must continually acknowledge faith in, but not everything against
which one is not permitted to offend by other assertions; that is the difference
between 'symbol' and dogma.
The statement that myth had no adherents was meant to make visible its
characteristic form of freedom, which it owes to a forgoing of truth. Nietzsche
formulated it this way: "The old Greeks without a normative theology: Everyone
has the right to contribute, poetically [das Recht, daran zu dichten], and he can
believe whatever he likes."26Burckhardt gives as the almost exclusive reason for
this privilege the fact that the earliest, "sometimes grotesquely frightful notions
of the gods' personality and myth" had not been retained, because the in-

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stitution that could have retained them, the influence of cult functionaries, was
absent. "Greek religion would read differently from beginning to end if a
priesthood had had influence over it . . . the epic poetry, as a whole, would have
become impossible." 27But Burckhardt too takes up the attractive old mistake
according to which myth, in the version in which it entered the tradition, came
from the original period of the Greeks. That is the only reason why he is able to
coin the phrase, in the very first section (on "The Greeks and Their Myth") of his
Cultural History of Greece, that "with their myth they had defended their
youth."28This statement is contradicted by his later insight that the most original
form of myth had contained grotesque and frightful elements and that these
elements would not have been overcome if an institution had watched over the
cult. The overcoming, which celebrates its triumph in poetry, came later; what is
defended in it is not youth. The young Epicurus, preparing to evict the gods from
the kosmoi into the metakosmia [from the cosmoses into the spaces between
them], and thus both to terminate myth and to complete it, still learns from the
Democritean Nausiphanes the one maxim of his life: "Don't let yourself be
frightened!''
Myth was able to leave behind the old terrors, as monsters that had been
vanquished, because it did not need these fears as means to protect a truth or a
law. The single institution that sustained it was not aimed at alarming and
frightening its public, but rather, on the contrary, at bringing forward the terror,
tamed, as a liberating insurance of more beautiful things. The role of the
rhapsodists was neither to treat the terrible objects as real nor to let them be
entirely forgotten. Their audience's satisfaction depended on the reliability of the
distance contained in the statement that even Odysseus had made it home. He
had traversed the entire landscape of possible dangers and terrors, had tested the
durability of the system of the separation of powers under stress. That is what
everyone had wanted to hear again and again in the epics and, before that, in the
forms from which they developed.
This proposition is not contradicted when Burckhardt says that the difficulty, for
us, of understanding Greek myth is the result of the fact that the Greek people
themselves "evidently wanted to forget the original meanings of the figures and
proceedings."29But it was precisely only the 'original meanings' that they
wanted to forget, certainly not what they had been domesticated into in myththe
gods, that is,

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with whom "one could live," because they "were subject to fate just as much as
men were, did not want to be more moral than men, and did not provoke them to
disobedience by the holiness that belongs to the God of the monotheistic
religions." The statement that Zeus and the other gods, according to another of
Burckhardt's formulations, had "never recovered from Homer" can be taken
literally only if one assumes that the "dominion of poetry over every conception
of the gods" is a constitutive weakness of the Greeks' relation to the powers
above them, because that relation is deficient in the binding force and the
submission that are characteristic of authentic religion.
From the point of view of historical influence, the reverse formulation would be
at least as justified, according to which it was Homer and Hesiod who first gave
their gods historical durability, resistance to the process of erosion. In spite of
his freedom from theological bias, Burckhardt finds something lacking in myth
that only became familiar and almost normative for him as a result of a history
that was deeply affected by dogma: a form of definition of the religious material,
its modality as something decided, and a sanction against poetic frivolity and
informal dealings with it. He finds this missing with the amazement of a
historian who declines to be a philosopher but has absorbed philosophy as the
epitome of prohibitions of frivolity.
The way the terms truth and lie are used has important consequences for every
way of understanding myth. Burckhardt's Cultural History is distinguished by
the fact that it gives up the connection, deriving from the Enlightenment,
between myth and the trickery of priests, but does not seek any new connection
between myth and a concept of truth having a dignity higher than that of theory.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, wants to force a revaluation of the term lie, so as to
strike at the moralism of the duty of truthfulness by henceforth allowing talk of
the "beauty and gracefulness of the lie." What used to be called the trickery of
priests has become a sort of artistic activity: "Thus the priest invents myths of his
gods: It vindicates their nobility." It is difficultbut the philosopher seeks to
require nothing from himself and others that is not difficult,"to revive for oneself
myth's feeling for the free lie." The legitimation of this is, admittedly, that of the
classical philosophy of history according to which the origin of philosophy itself
was made possible by the freedom of myth. The greatness of the Greek thinkers
results from the fact that they still live "entirely in this condition in which they
are entitled to lie." Nietzsche did not

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see the original situation of early philosophy, with and after myth, as an initial
and portentous relation to truth, but rather as a sheer lack of truthand as the right
that results from this: "Where one cannot know anything true, one is permitted to
lie." 30
Though the formulation may be aggressive in its immoralism, still it merely
describes as "permitted" what occurs in any case when people are embarrassed
for lack of truth or of truthseven in cases of proclaimed resignation: Vacancies
are always filled. Everything that dogma requires, myth exempts people from. It
requires no decisions and no conversions, knows no apostates and no repentance.
It permits identity even when it is deformed to the point of unrecognizability,
indeed even in the effort to bring it to an end.
The conversio [conversion] is the antithesis of a mythical event. It must be
strictly dated, historically, and datability is in fact a characteristic of the classical
instances in which it is attested. It is remarkable in how many biographies of
philosophers and other theoreticians the point in time can be specified at which
the new truth gained its adept, whoaccording to Wilhelm Ostwald's description
of his discovery of the "energy imperative""suddenly had to stand still, and had
the almost physical sensation that is caused by an umbrella turning inside out in
a gale." I have intentionally picked an author who is capable of banality and
shuns lofty ideas, Long after it ceases to be possible to appeal to illumination
and inspiration, the anecdotally understated 'shock' that signals one's being
struck by evidence remains obligatory. Adherents to a 'truth' demand that its
founder or discoverer, since there are no other stories left for him to tell, be able
to tell at least the one story of how it struck him and divided the continuum of a
life into two parts, creating the zero-point situation from which a horizon of new
possibilities opened up.
The Sigmund Freud Society in Vienna was able, in January 1976, to appeal for
contributions for the construction of a monument to be erected on the spot where
Freud, according to his own account, had gotten onto the track of the secret of
dreams, on July 24, 1895. He writes this five years later, on June 12, 1900, to
Wilhelm Fliess. Amazingly, he says nothing on this subject in the letter that he
had written to the same addressee on the day the secret was discovered.
Nietzsche was "overcome" by the idea of eternal recurrence in August 1881 by
the lake of Silvaplana. It was the idea of the renewal of myth as, at the same
time, the final and sole truth, the truth that made man

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absolute. It happened like an epiphany, in an act of momentary evidence. Dated

events include: Descartes's turning to the idea of method, on November 10,
1619, as well as Pascal's memorandum of his abandonment of the idea of
method, on November 23, 1654; Rousseau's momentous idea on the way to
Vincennes, as well as Husserl's discovery of the a priori correlation; Kant's great
light in 1769; Goethe's discovery of the Urpflanze [original or archetypal plant];
William James's turning point resulting from the reading of the essays of
Renouvier on April 30, 1870; Gibbon's decision to write the history of the
downfall of Rome; and Valéry's renunciation of aesthetic production. In brief,
the conceptual history of conversio unfortunately ends where the name of the
concept is no longer used, where even the pleasure taken in rhetorical
secularization is pastbecause one hesitates to lay claim to any other legitimation
than that of authentic confrontation with the X whose turn it now is to legitimate.
For Nietzsche, the early idea of the beauty of the lie is refuted almost
automatically by the experience, hardly a decade later, at Silvaplana, of the most
beautiful of the beautiful lies confronting him like one of the despised old truths.
It presents itself like these in that it presses toward the 'seriousness' of the
capacity for proof, the 'accomplishment' of making man absolutely
responsibleman who is supposed to take responsibility for all the worlds rather
than just for one, and who learns from this what it means to philosophize with a
hammer.k To the extent that it is burdened with the capacity to provide a
transition to the superman, the no longer beautiful lie of eternal recurrence loses
more beauty. Nietzsche would have liked best to prove it by means of a study of
physics. In that case the recurrence of at least this one element, the truth, would
have been complete, even if since Zarathustra it was called soothsaying
[Wahrsagung, literally "truth saying"] and had acquired all the marks of the
pressure of selection.
Not to satirize such a recurrence of the truth is difficult. To that end one must
also pay closer attention to the service that the myth of eternal recurrence had to
perform within the compound of Nietzsche's philosophy. It is unmistakably
meant as the final opposing idea to Christianity, to Christianity's central massif:
The recurrence of the same makes each passage through the cycle a matter of
indifference once its pattern has been decided; the realism of Christology,
however, had distinguished the one world as the only one. This was

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the only possible point of God's monstrous effort in both sacrificing and
accepting the sacrifice of his own Son.
In the New Testament, eschatology had changed from being an idea of the
cyclical incineration and renewal of the world to being the entirely different
signal, understandable from the story of the Passion, whose import was: No
longer this world, and never again a world! To conceive another world that
would demand the utmost of God in order for him to keep it to his purpose
appears as the epitome of all blasphemy. In the world cycles of eternal
recurrence no absolute event like this is conceivableor, to put it differently, every
event would be like it. The seriousness of the idea consists in the fact that what
is repeated is what has been decided, once, by man. In that way action becomes
creation; the one history for which man is responsible decides for all the
histories, the one willed reality decides about the inclusion or exclusion of all
possibilities.
No matter how paradoxical this may sound as applied to Nietzsche, the idea of
recurrence formally combines the realism of Christian dogma with one of the
categories of myth, that of circumstantiality. It is purethe purest
possiblecircumstantiality to make the world repeat its history eternally so as to
get man in the worldif only in the dimension of the supermanto some extent
under discipline, to force him or even only to persuade him to function as the
custodian of existence. For rhetoric is the essence of Nietzsche's philosophy.
There had been a formula for the medieval God that was supposed to set his
majesty against the claim of reason, to defend theological abundance against
anthropological poverty: God can bring about by means of many things what
could also have been brought about by means of few. 31Note well that this
principle does not assert that he must proceed in a circumstantial manner,
because, perhaps, he is ignorant or incapable of simplicity; it only asserts that the
idea of simplicity is not the triumph of the spirit, but only the finite intellect's
defense against the demands of the infinite intellect. Theoretical reason cannot
rely on God's sharing the preference for simplicity that is forced upon it, or even
on his taking it into account. Conversely, the concept of the potentia absoluta
[absolute power] is the corrective against tying God's will to the procedural order
of the actual cosmos. It involves the principlewhich finished off the Middle
Agesof immediacy, which is in fact the developed consequence of the dogmatic
style, in contrast to the mythical style of circumstantiality. Man cannot afford

 Page 245

the former God any more than he can afford the latter.l He could neither desire
nor invent him; therefore, he exists, because he contradicts man's desires.
The idea of recurrence applies the principle of abundance to the world once
again, as its means of coercing man: We are not supposed to be able to afford to
reckon only on transience when everything perpetually recurs. Mythical
circumstantiality as a means of diminishing the absolutism of the powers has
become the circumstantiality of the world. Directed against man as a world-
simplifying creature, it generates an extreme pressure in the direction of the
superman, who alone would be a match for this condition of existence. God had
treated himself to abundance because infinity contains no economy of
constraints. A similar situation is now supposed to hold for man, if no
consideration needs to be given to moralityand as a sign that no consideration
has been given to it, as the stigma of the grand scale of amorality. The repetition
of the same must be justified by the quality of the unique world that becomes its
eidos [form, pattern]. This is accomplished only by one who has passed the
"great test" of which Nietzsche speaks: "Who can endure the idea of eternal
recurrence?"
In view. of its fundamental 'givens,' the dogmatic mode of thought finds It
necessary to develop secondary rationalizations of circumstantiality: After the
story has been told once, it is necessary to find the formula that spells out what
reasons and what purposes the component actions are to be associated with. To
prevent readers from immediately thinking of Christology here, let me refer first
of all to the concise formula that the Jewish philosopher of religion, Franz
Rosenzweig, found for the difference between myth and the Bible: The former
deals with the "side leaps" [or "escapades": Seitensprünge] of divinity, the latter
with its "paths." 32Paths [Wege], as a counter-metaphor to side leaps, do not
exclude detours [Umwege]; nevertheless, dogmatic rationality tends toward the
possibility of giving reasons. The idea of recurrence is dogmatic to the extent
that it sees in man the sole and sufficient reason for the quality of the worldit is a
more pointed version of the model of responsibility for the world that was
invented by Augustine, but without the purpose of serving as a theodicy.
Nietzsche's thought was very consistent in giving maximal extension to the
world's reality as a way of expressing its godlessness. The theological attribute
of omnipotence had been opposed to the circumstantiality of the course of the
world, to extension, because omnipotence

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permits anything to be done in a point; thought through all the way, it makes
superfluous even the mere existence of the world, which it was invented to be
the power underlying. For it would be possible to supply each subject with its
final destiny, as between bliss and the opposite, by immediate decree at the
moment of its origin. So the world is circumstantiality in nuce [in a nutshell].
Through circumstantiality, it becomes the history of man, including that of his
meeting with salvation as a result of sin and redemption. That God, in order to
save man and to reconcile him with himself, should need not only a 'fixed
procedure' but a painful one and one involving death is incomprehensible on the
assumption of his absolute power. It can only be associated with the principle of
circumstantiality as a stimulus to the fides quia absurdum [faith because it is
absurd].m The idea of eternal recurrence brings the mythical pattern of
circumstantiality back into rationality, by inventing a function for it in the
assignment of meaning to history.
All demands for the giving of reasons culminate in the question of the reason for
existence [Seinsgrundfrage]. All the claims that can be set up following the
principle of sufficient reason converge on it. If the fact that there is a world is
supposed to be understood as contingent, as the result of a decision that could
also have gone the other way, so that then nothingness would have been
preserved, as opposed to existence, and if this decision is supposed to be
represented as a rational, perhaps even an ethical one, then it must be possible to
defend with reasons the fact that anything at all does exist, rather than nothing.
Leibniz's best of all possible worlds is not by any means a sufficient reason for
this, for even the best of what is possible could be cut out if it were established
that it was still not good enough to overcome the superiority of nothingness.
Nietzsche's idea of recurrence defends existence by the simple da capo [Again,
from the beginning!], the assertion of a model's deserving to be repeated, that
would have resulted from the superman's responsibility for it. The superman is in
fact definable by the fact that he accepts responsibility, in absolute seriousness,
for the history of the world as something repeatable.
So an objection had to be admitted that the theological salvation story could not
possibly have withstood. The rationalization of that story has to stop short of the
final petulance of the question whether it would not have been more reasonable
not to create, in the first place, a world and a man who would put their author in
such difficulties

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for both his justice and his kindness. Since the metaphysicians of Christianity
unanimously assure us that its God could never be forced, or be motivated by a
lack, to emerge from his eternal solitude and originate something that was not
simply himself again, it must be assumed that the Creation could not change
anything for the Creator.
In contrast to Nietzsche's author of the model to be repeated in the eternal
recurrence of the same, the biblical creator God was the same God who at any
time could put a final end to the history that threatened to miscarry in a way so
disagreeable to him. But the logic of the Christian dogmatics is just this, that
instead of doing that, God involves himself more and more deeply, and in the
end definitively, in this historythat he mixes himself up with it just as
realistically and inextricably as man the doer does in the idea of eternal
recurrence. The contradiction between the Incarnation and eschatology had been
that the latter was supposed to have promised, in spite of the former, to make an
immediate end to history.
The culminating question of the metaphysical tradition, Leibniz's "Cur aliquid
potius quam nihil?" [Why something rather than nothing?], could never be
answered. Nietzsche's idea of recurrence 'reoccupies' the position of this question
with a myth. Nietzsche did not need to go into the question whether any world at
all had a right to exist; instead, he replaced the question with the postulate that
all the subsequent worlds in the endless sequence of eternal recurrence would
still have their right to exist founded in this one. For Nietzsche, man has to exist
because the quality of the world, for all of its cycles, depends exclusively on
him. But had man also had to exist in a world whose Creator was supposed to
have produced it for his own glory?
If one assumes that the world would have been suited, even without man, to
increase the glory of its author in the eyes of a heavenly audience, then the
question arises why man had to existindeed, whether he should have been
allowed to exist. If in spite of the quality of the world, in spite of the preparation
of Paradise to meet his needs, in spite of the final dispatching of the Son of Man
for his redemption, the terrible preponderance of the massa damnata
[condemned mass] still remainedwas there still a justification for this creature?
The question is not posed outside all history and all consistency with the pre-
given norm of questions. For it had to be answered, more or less explicitly, in the
Christian system, together with the central question

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why God became man, why he had, in (for the first time) complete realism, to be
"true God and true man."
Cur deus homo [Why God became man] is the title of the workparadigmatic for
the fundamental attitude of the whole of medieval Scholasticismof Anselm of
Canterbury. One would surmise that this question would have been frequently
posed and answered in the millennium since the saving events of Christian
history. Astonishingly, this is not the case. A new type of systematic unfolding
of problems comes on the scene with this work. Anselm, the inventor of the
famous proof of God's existencephilosophically, simply the limiting case of such
proofsmakes it evident that he can answer his core theological question only if
the question of the reason for the creation of man can also be answered. That
would be the only way to deduce God's interest in this creature. That interest
consists, to put it briefly, in the fact that after the fall of Lucifer and his
followers, the number of angels foreseen, in God's divine plan, to constitute his
eternal choir of jubilation had to be brought up again to the status quo ante [to
their prior state], and that this was supposed to occur through the promotion of
men who had been tested in blamelessness. 33
Such statements, in their exotic medieval humility, have often been marveled at.
The enormity that the expense and the annoyance of the whole history of men
should be nothing but the unavailing attempt to bring eternity's royal household
back to its old splendor is almost forgotten in the face of this fountain of
inexhaustible imagination. Respect for the beauty of the narrative invention
silences the question for what purpose God, to whom the fullness of all
fulfillments in himself and, in addition, the Trinitarian generation [of the Son]
and 'spiration' [of the Holy Spirit], as internal processes, were ascribed, had to
maintain such choirs of jubilation in the first place. And why the God who had
been able to create the angels to fill up his band once, without human additions,
could not simply create new angels to replace the fallen ones. Facing the
importunity of such questions, one becomes immediately aware that one stands
at the watershed between myth and dogma, between the world of images and
Scholasticism, and that the Christological treatise itself contains the
contradiction that it deals with the stories by means of the secondary
rationalization that they are answers to questions, but without permitting further
questioning.

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The myth just did not need to allow itself to be asked why it was that eternity's
planning had risked the adventure of using men for replacements instead of new
angels. It only needed to direct attention to the intolerable gap in the ranks of the
jubilating choirs to make the story follow that here something had to happen,
with complete circumstantiality, to remedy that. Again, it is mythical for a story,
as the last one, to keep the view toward further matterstoward abysses, the edge
of the world, what cannot be interrogatedengaged, and to keep its listeners
breathlessly occupied with all that ensues.
Once the price that consists in accepting the final story has been paid, the
dimension of the much admired logical consistency of medieval deductions
opens up. Their insuperable and untouchable premise is God as a being who, for
himself, is the only object of contemplation and the absolute goal of the will.
Once one has accepted this postulate, it becomes almost a primal idea of
aesthetics that music should be the mode of self-reference in which the first (and,
in the original intention, the only) creatures produced by the divinity are directed
to that divinity in their exclusive office. When the absolute power is not able to
achieve its ends, the shadow of revocation falls on its undertaking; to save, from
the catastrophe of its breaking off, at least those who remained or became suited
to the original aim is then only a coming to terms with the failure. In the end
something must be done with men that had not been done with the angels after
Lucifer's fall: What has proved unsuccessful must nevertheless be saved and
recovered for the original purposethough only to the extent required by this
purpose.
Fortunately I do not have to reach any conclusion here about whether this story
deserves the admiration that it has met with. But what was to regulate the
medieval system fundamentally is already manifest here at the beginning of the
Scholastic formation: unrestrained compliance with the need to ask more and to
credit oneself with more answers than could even merely have been suspected in
the documents of the foundation of Christianity. In addition, as a burden taken
over from ancient metaphyics, there is the prohibition against making man the
purpose served by the world, because only God, and thus the part of the world
that is related to him directly, could be that.
It is almost incomprehensible that a man like Anselm obeys this prohibition. He
has the highest expression of the fact that man is this purpose of the world
continually before him, because his whole attention, in his speculation, is
directed at the fact that God had taken

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on this nature and no other. But he takes over still another ancient assumption,
the assumption that the number makes no difference to the essence. The
individual is only the multiplication of the essence in a manner conditioned by
matter. The result of this is that mankind's natural increase in number stands in
no relation to its background function of entering the heavenly choirs as a
replacement. At this point the suspicion arises that there might be an accidental
surplus, which would inevitably lead to the massa damnata and would make the
divinity's will to salvation fail to be credible for mankind as a whole, because it
would be without a function.
If the number of men who had to be promoted to the ranks of the angel choirs
had remained indefinite, then, arguing backward, the original constitution of this
sounding body would have lacked the perfection of a number that followed
necessarily from its task. Anselm experiences a bit of the Gnostic's dilemma in
that he has to reduce the perfection of the Creation so as not to diminish the
magnitude of the Redemption. Cautiously, he decides that the creation (prior to
the world) of the angels was not a perfectus numerus [final or perfect number].
Although he cannot avoid its being the case that man came into the picture only
as a solution to the problem of replacing the devil, he can still waive the tightest
possible nexus and gain the space within which a human history is in fact
allowed to take place. The lack of personnel in heaven, the instantaneous
necessity of man for God's gloria, was lessened if the original number was not
sheer necessity.
In the instance of Anselm's treatise, a limiting value of dogmatic discipline picks
itself out that implicitly runs counter to the question of the reason for existence.
God could only have kept his identity, as the normal realization of his attributes,
if he had entirely forgone the Creation. To put it differently: What supervenes on
his autarky eo ipso [by that very fact] becomes myth.
The archbishop of Canterbury and primate of England who wrote this treatise
during a temporary exile indirectly demonstrates the dissatisfaction of his age
with the Christological dogmatics that had been practically concluded for more
than half a millennium. In this eleventh century, after all, the debate is no longer
about the 'hypostatic union' of two natures in one person, but about their
cooperation in the 'spiration' of the Holy Spirit. Anselm does not work on the
refinement of the concepts and the consolidation of the system with the means of
ancient metaphysics. Instead of unflinchingly making God think

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himself, as Scholastic Aristotelianism, drawing on the Metaphysics, will do,

Anselm tells something like the 'prehistory' of man. In the process he makes man
into an unforeseen constitutive part of the story of God's dealing with himself.
Anyone looking for a fundamental myth for medieval Scholasticism and its
concerns about divine majesty and autarky has its completed schematics before
him in Anselm's speculation. This is not a case of an inadequate intelligence
avoiding stricter methodical demands; Anselm demonstrated what he was
capable of in this respect with his 'ontological argument,' which occupied
posterity as nothing else has done. This argument was to charm even the
despisers of Scholasticism into its deserved admiration, because the profundity
of the idea, the representation of ultimate philosophical longing and of the self-
perfection of reason in the overestimation of concepts, hardly suffered from its
successful refutation. Anselm did not know that in its pretension and its form, he
had invented something like the 'ultimate thought' of philosophical reason. 34
The relation between dogma and myth, reason and imagination, can be
exhibited, by the example of Anselm, as a quantitative one. Faith is supposed to
give more information, by virtue of the biblical documents, the creeds, and the
council decisions, than reason is able to provide; but myth goes beyond even
what can be gathered from both sources taken together. This surplus is the story
of God's dealing with himself, the story of his gloria, as a precondition of the
substantial realism of the Incarnation. Anselm definitively replaces the Gnostic
fundamental myth of the purchase of men's freedom from the custody of the
world ruler with the new fundamental myth of the infinite atonement made to the
Father by the Son. Only in the fourteenth century did this turn into dogmatic
definitions, as the final stage of the process of 'secondary rationalization.' It is no
longer a matter of canceling Satan's legal relation to man by paying a debt, and
reestablishing the prior situation, but rather of expiating the insult done to God
by the privileged creature that he intended as a replacement for the angels.
As long as, through a transaction with Satan, his legal power of disposition over
man was to be put out of effect, the mythical category of cunningeven without
the extreme of docetismcontinued to dominate the bargain leading to man's
salvation. Once the necessity of man for God and his gloria could be established
in a new way, and

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God had become the sole addressee in the process leading to the pardoning of
man, the postulate of strict realism applied: the equivalence, in substance, of the
infinity of the insult, on the one hand, and the infinity of atonement on the
otherdown to the last detail in the interpretation of this story. It had now become
possible to explain why God's design (not only for man, but for himself) could
not be reestablished by any offering that was less than or different from precisely
this passion and this death of his own Son. In transactions with the devil there
could not be any logic of equivalence, but in transactions with God equivalence
had to govern everything. Anselm made this equation obligatory for the
subsequent history of theology.
However amazing it may sound, the new fundamental myth permits Anselm's
language to enter the modality of necessity. The purpose of his treatise is not
only, through the dogma of the Incarnation, to show God's goodness to man but
also to show the simple inevitability, for the will to salvation, of this one
solution. 35Consequently he can promise the reader more than the ''credo ut
intelligam" [I believe so that I may understand].n He also promises him joy from
contemplationo of the content of faith, a contemplation that the treatise will
make possible for him. Fides, intellectus, and contemplatio [faith, understanding,
contemplation] are the key words, at the very beginning, for this offer. Here
Anselm opposes the tendency toward the opposite of contemplation and
'intuition,'p which characterized the first great 'demythologizing' effort carried
out by the 'dialectical' wing of the theology of his time.
Later on it became evident that there would be no successful, no sufferable
demythologization of Christianity. The tendency of dogma is directed toward
preserving something that is subject to attack or temptation, which presupposes a
world that is full, as we still (and again) hear in Luther's song, of attack and
temptation, if not of devils. Anselm's fundamental myth, in contrast to this, seeks
to establish a definitive position on this side of gnosis. It is not for nothing and
not by accident that we hear of the delightful beautyq of the sought-after
explanation. What is sufficient, he says, has already been said by the Fathers, but
what fulfills has yet to be saidand this a full millennium after the advent of
salvation.
Finally, we need to flash back across this millennium again to the scene of 'Paul
on the Areopagus,' because this fiction already contains all the problems of
Christianity's (hardly voluntary) involvement with

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myth. While we see Anselm develop his fundamental myth out of needs
contained in the consolidated, but (for him) insufficiently 'intuitive' dogma, Paul
runs up against the almost unbroken front of myth as it was absorbed in the state
religion. Nothing is left for him but to seek a gap for his god to break in
throughto bow to the idea of the pantheon, to make of the profusion of gods a
totality, and to provide for one who may still have remained unknown. His trick
is to make the last, not yet known and recognized god into the firstand then
immediately into the only one; and what is more, into the only one who does not
need to be worshiped with temples and altars, and who excludes the veneration
of images.
Through the supposed gap in myth, dogma forces its way. It defines this God not
only as the creator and lord of the world, but also as its judge, who will execute
his judgment through a man whom he caused to rise from the dead. Paul does
not quarrel with the philosophers' God of the Attic schools, but enhances his role
into that of the fulfiller of an expectation that is inherent in every human heart.
What matters is no longer to avoid incurring the displeasure of any of the
established authorities in a system characterized by a separation of powers, but
rather to satisfy the conditions posed by the one and hitherto unknown power
that decides the fate of the world in accordance with justice. All the legitimation
of the one proclaimed by the apostle derives from the overcoming of death. Not
even his name is mentioned. Paul, in this horizon rich in names, passes this name
over in silence. Nothing makes the fictional character of the scene clearer than
this apostle who passes over the name and does not appeal to what he had 'seen,'
although elsewhere the Christophany [epiphany of Christi is his absolute
legitimation.
He would have been able to derive the right to name that name here from the
construction with the aid of which he opposes the division of mankind into
Hellenes and barbarians: Everyone, he says, descends from the same origin, so
that it does not matter that the Resurrection did not take place in Greece. This
demand that his listeners recognize a single history of a single inheritance from
Adam may have contributed to Paul's failure in Athens.
This attempt at breaking into myth has the character of dogma because it
consists solely of restrictions. The multiplicity of the gods is reduced to the
single, previously unknown God, the multiplicity of peoples, in their
circumscribed regions of habitation, are reduced to

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a single extraction, and the diversity of the fates of individuals and peoples is
reduced to the single expectation of judgment. To the extent that these
reductions are carried out, who or what actually fills the positionsthe naming of
names, reference to localities, testimony to the proclamation of the
Gospelbecomes unimportant. Paul presents himself as one who, emancipated
from his contingent circumstances, transmits a universal message. The author of
the apocryphal speech does not make him say anything about justification
through faith, but about the world and mankind instead. 36
The element that is not invented, in fact probably could not have been invented,
in this seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, is the way Paul takes the
dedicatory inscription, "To an unknown god," as his rhetorical point of
departure. What is an invention, and at the same time gives more point to what is
in any case a pointed encounter between myth and dogma, is the use of the
singular. For the tradition is overwhelmingly to the effect that there were, in
Greece, altars dedicated to "unknown gods." Even Tertullian, the skillful
debater, twice mentions tha Athenian inscription in the plural: Ignotis
deis.37Tertullian had to be more cautious vis-à-vis his readers, in dealing with
this single fact of the text, than the author of the Acts, who made his hero
'demythologize' the Athenians' altar just as he did the proclamation of an
unknown god who after all was not merely what had been missing, but the
radical reversal of the relation between what was included in the stock and what
was missing.
The speech on the Areopagus says nothing about the Gospel; it is a presentation
of legitimations and relations of authority. The apocalyptic principle, with which
it confronts the cosmos-metaphysics that originated and is predominant in this
locality, derives its justification from the Creation of the world and accredits the
one to whom it assigns the role of judging the world by his having risen from the
dead. But the speech does not relate anything about the two poles of the biblical
world.
The idea was not unfamiliar to the Greeks, from their myths, that a man who was
proven in life could be promoted to judge of the dead. The inventor of the speech
on the Areopagus was able to make Paul allude to this when he had him
conclude with the indication, laconic in comparison to every form of
apocalyptics: "Because God had fixed a day on which he will judge the world in
righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this man he has given
assurance

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to all men by raising him from the dead." After all, this is spoken in the place
where Socrates has operated, for whom Plato, in his art myth, had to develop the
assurance of a moral justice going beyond life because the Athenians had denied
him this justice. Apart from the accreditation by resurrection, Paul remains
within the framework of what that Socrates, in the Gorgias dialogue, is supposed
to have described by saying that the myth of the judgment of the dead counts for
him absolutely as logos. And, in the Phaedo, that in this matter it is quite
worthwhile to take the risk of believing that the matter really stands this way,
even if it may be a little different from the way it is represented there.
So the first paradigm of the relation between myth and logos in Christianity that
we have before us precedes Christianity's reception of metaphysical
terminologies. The dogmatic mode of thought is not bound to the means of
definition employed by the patristic and Scholastic authors and the Church
councils, and did not come into existence through them. Friedrich Theodor
Vischer wrote in his "The Course of My Life," in 1874, that his former study of
theology had allowed him to look behind the scenes and into the secrets of the
Church and of dogma. This, he says, is an advantage that cannot be entirely
replaced by any other type of scientific or worldly liberation of thought. But the
conclusion that he drew from this insight into the great arcana needs to be tested:
"Every dogma is a convolution of an idea, which is a philosophical problem, and
a bit of myth; the first component gradually dissolves the second and sifts itself
out." 38For Paul's speech in Athens at any rate, this formula does not generate an
adequate result.
If one tests it on another complicated state of affairs, that of the dogma of
Original Sin, then while one does encounter the reinforcing element of the
theodicy that is produced in order to combat Gnosticism (reinforcing because it
is combined with a new concept of freedom and with the world-ruining guilt
ascribed to it by Augustine and by the Council of Carthage in 418), one cannot
arrive at an understanding of the earliest stratum [of this state of affairs], that of
Paul's experience, as a Pharisee, of the impossibility of complying with the Law.
Why was it not possible to comply with the Law? The answer to this question
could have something to do with the core of all the answers that have been
given, in philosophy, to the question why compliance with moral standards
becomes difficult for man: The finiteness of life, tending

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toward death, prevents any patience in achieving our purposes while having
consideration for the purposes of others, for their possible universality.
The first sin may have brought death into the world, but death had to perpetuate
sin in it. In that case the dogma of Original Sin is originally part of the story of
death's coming into the world. If one cannot know that death is immanent in
organic nature, then one can tell the story of how the world's resistance to it was
breached. Paul would only have had to say, and perhaps actually intended to say,
that death came into the world through sin and consequently all had sinned from
that time onward. 39The first part of the sentence would have been mythical, the
second rational, because it contains the intelligible explanation of the way in
which the infinite will does not put up with a finite life. The dominion of death
would be something in the condition of the worldthe power that, once admitted,
could not be broken againwhile the permanence of sin would only be a
secondary condition.
This path, that of expressing the inexplicable mythically and the explicable as its
intelligible consequence, was not taken by theological dogmatics. The latter
made the sin of one man immediately into the inheritance of all, and took upon
itself the difficulties of this requirement, difficulties that reason could not
tolerate, so as to substantiate the unity of salvation more fully, or at least more
obviously, with the help of the unity of guilt. This example shows that the
glimpse that Friedrich Theodor Vischer thought he had had behind the scenes
and into the secrets of theology only reached the foreground. Dogma is not the
consuming of myth by the bit of philosophy that it also contains, but is itself
already a piece of remythicization of what, assuming a minimal mythin the sense
of the Platonic relation of myth to logoscould also have been brought about as
insight into a conditioning relation. The philosophical origin of or the prior
imprint of philosophy on a type of concept employed in dogma does not
determine whether a philosophical problem was also brought in, only in a
different manner, rather than the consequence of a prior commitment that could
only be narrated as a story.
It is not true, as one can observe in the cases of Plato, Paul, Origen, or Anselm,
that the disciplining of a system by philosophy or dogma ends with the mythical
'residues' in it being consumed, as Vischer claims to have discovered. On the
contrary, the diffusion and acceptance

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of means of expression that are capable of definition increases the demands

made on the prior narrative 'givens' [Vorgabe], on the mythical framework of
beginning and end, basis and abyss [Grund und Abgrund]. The Christological
dogma, with its gesture of warding off what could not be demanded of its God,
seems poor in content a millennium later in comparison with Anselm's new
fundamental myth. After all, to make up for putting a stop to further inquiry he
has provided, initially, a comprehensive story of God's dealings with men, a
story that is not subject to the strict requirement of faith, but that has pushed
itself, like an iconostasis, in front of the ultimate unfathomables, and restrains
the mind from pressing forward with inquiry.
Philosophy, in opposition to myth, brought into the world above all restless
inquiry, and proclaimed its 'rationality' in the fact that it did not shrink from any
further question or from any logical consequence of possible answers. Dogma
restricted itself to ordering a halt to the pleasure taken in questioning by those
who transgress boundaries, and marking out the minimum of what cannot be
relinquished; that is why, for example, the Roman Catholic church's late
dogmatics regarding Mary is quite atypical, even if it is not inconsistent. Myth
lets inquiry run up against the rampart of its images and stories: One can ask for
the next storythat is, for what happens next, if anything happens next. Otherwise
it starts over again from the beginning.
Flaubert noted in his Egyptian diary on June 12, 1850, that during the day his
group had climbed a mountain on the summit of which there was a great number
of large round stones that almost resembled cannonballs. He was told that these
had originally been melons, which God had turned into stones. The story is over,
the narrator is evidently satisfied; but not the traveler, who has to ask for the
reason why. Because it pleased God, is the answer, and the story simply goes no
further. It is satisfied to pursue the uniformity of the stones, which is contrary to
the nature of accident, one step back, to a point where it has to appear entirely
'natural.' Melons just grow that way, and there is no needin their casefor an
explanation of why they look so similar and so uniform in size. Thus the
introduction of the melons helps one to accept a characteristic of the surprising
stones that stones do not in general and by their nature tend to have. It is a case
of falling back on the life-world, on something that is familiar in it, and there is
no thought that God would surely have to have some purpose in dealing with the
melons. This fragment of a myth takes only the

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single step from the life-world to the unusual, and then the story is over. He who
asks "Why?" is himself at fault if he is annoyed by the answer. He has violated
the rules of the game of the mythical world. Nothing has been asked of him; on
the contrary, he has been offered something, something that in the face of the
surprising facts can only be a 'free gift.' Dogma refuses such offers, because it
commands one to believe its God to be capable of anything.
When, in Luke, the angel promises Mary the throne of David and eternal
kingship for her son Jesus, she asks the angel, as she has every right to do, "How
shall this be, seeing that I know not a man?" The answer that she receives is the
refusal of an answer, ending as it does in the statement that with God, nothing is
impossible. No alternative is left but submission, since the rest of what the angel
offersbeing overcome by the Holy Spirit and overshadowed by the dynamis
[power] of the Highestis a filling up of the narrative emptiness with names, with
almost dogmatic abstractions that are slightly tinged, metaphorically, with
copulation.
A statement like the one that in the beginning God created heaven and earth does
not do anything toward bringing this closer to our comprehension; instead, it
serves very well as a prelude to the nonadmission of further questions, with the
risk of the anathematizing of daring answers. Augustine, who gave the final
formulation of the doctrine of the creation from nothing, as opposed to the
dualistic conception that presupposes matter, nevertheless goes one step further.
He inquires after the reason for this creation: "Cur creavit caelum et terrain"
[Why did God create heaven and earth?]. But the question is not posed in order
to give an answer, but rather in order simply to discredit inquiry, or to displace it
into the expectation of the same pattern over and over again: "Quia voluit"
[Because he wanted to]. The model represented by this formula of rejectionthe
substitution of the will for reason, in the divinityis the most momentous and, in
its further development, the most disastrous one for dogmatic rationality. The
God who can do what he wants will want to do what he can. At the end stands
the infinite universe, which is God himself over again, or simply God himself.
Such statements as that of the angel of the Annunciation to Mary, in Luke, or
Augustine's statement about the reason for the Creation, are pure exclusions of
any narrative license. They are already the

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consummation of dogmawhatever may remain to be defined later onand are at

the same time germs of its destruction.
During the history of its use, the sentence according to which in the beginning
God created heaven and earth has taken on the venerable quality of
unfathomable profundity. In actual fact, from the beginning to the end we don't
understand a single word of it. There is nothing in this sentence that could have
made the world more intelligible, or even explicable, for us. I do not intend to
investigate, here, what then is the basis of its indisputable and unique
effectiveness, which might be summed up as the production of confidence in the
world. Just now, the point is to see the sentence as the elimination and blockage
of every story; one should not get the idea that insight into an unfamiliar and
mysterious process is being offered.
But if that is supposed to be the case, if the function of the sentence is to impose
requirements and categorical demands, then one will wonder whether it is
already the furthest that the will to concealment, aimed at producing prostration,
will go. I submit a variant form that supplies clarity in relation to this
consideration. It is the corresponding sentence from the Gnostic system of
Basilides, as reported by Hippolytus: "Thus the nonexistent God created a
nonexistent world from nonentities, casting and depositing one seed that
contained a conglomeration of the seeds of the world." 40This one sentence,
with its heaping up of negations, oversteps the boundary set by dogma's
suggestion of comprehensibility; it demonstrates the inaccessibility of the origin
that it asserts, and gambles away even the presupposition of the creatio ex nihilo
[creation from nothing]. If one were to classify the first part, one would assign it
to mysticism. At the same time, though, it provides evidence of the intolerability
of the language of negative theology and its function of creating submission, by
unexpectedly turning to a metaphor that seems to betray the beginning of a story,
or the presence of a story in the background. The dependent clause that follows
as a second part retracts the paradox, the exploding of intention by means of
negations; softens the strict prohibition of images; and provides what, while it is
indeed a primitive, is nevertheless a familiar orienting pattern, one that is
distributed worldwide in myths: The world itself comes into being like what
comes into being within it, from an egg or from a seed.
What this myth involves can be effortlessly unfolded. One could tell, further,
what ground the grain of seed fell on, what waters fed

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it, and what sun shone upon it. In contrast, the first part of the doctrine of the
Creation is simply incapable of being continued. What more could be said? God
does not exist, the world does not exist, and what the world was produced from
is similarly, or even more, nonexistent. If this is thought to be derived from the
negations that are characteristic of late Platonism, one only needs to compare it
to the intuitive accessibility of the Platonic art myth of the demiurge, which is
meant to make the world transparent in its construction.
The sentence from the account of Basilides is a sort of formal metaphor for the
procedure by which a Gnostic system is produced: A ceremonious conceptual
iconoclasm is carried out, immediately after which the overthrow and
prohibition are extensively disregarded. In addition, the pluralism of powers
must be restored, which sets in motion the telling of a story. In dogma, the One
is offered as the Ultimate; but stories cannot be told about it, unless it were a
story of how it ceased to be the One. The dilemma of the history of Christian
dogma lies in its having to define a Trinitarian God from the plurality of which
no license for myth is allowed to follow.
The generation of the Son and the 'spiration' of the Spirit may be linkagespaled
into metaphorto biblical predicates, in the Trinitarian dogma, which wards off
relationships of subordination [between the three Persons], but ultimately the
Trinitarian God becomes more and more similar to the Aristotelian unmoved
mover, who intensifies his autarky to the purest reality by executing even
thought only as the thought of himself. The Trinitarian hypostases remain
processes of pure inwardness, and on account of the identical nature of the three
Personsthat is, their equal eternityno story can be told, either, of what led to this
generation and spiration. Dogma, having awakened a need for myth,
immediately summons it back to raison [reason].
How far from accidental such an unsettledness of the boundary between dogma
and myth is, is shown by the rabbinical conception of intradivine dealings, a
conception that permits no hypostases: God prays to himself that his mercy may
triumph over his severity. 41However fine the idea may be, instead of figures it
makes, as it were, the divinity's attributes negotiate with one anothercompassion
negotiating with justice. What else should it mean to say that God prays to
himself? The story is not expanded, because in its function it is an averting story,
preventing myth by means of a tiny concession to it.

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Translator's Notes
a. Paul Heyse (1830 1914) was a prolific German novelist and a comparatively
unsuccessful dramatist.
b. The kind of prohibition typified by the Second Commandment: "Thou shalt
not make unto thee any graven image. . . . "
c. That is, a nonrational process of making an arbitrary decision between
alternatives; see translator's note e to part 2, chapter 1.
d. Verblendungszusammenhänge "delusion systems," an expression used by T.
W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer in their Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam:
Querido, 1947; Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969), p. 48 ("gesellschaftlicher
Verblendungszusammenhang").
e. And the King James Version has "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14).
f. Gleichnisse "images," "comparisons," "similes," or "parables." English has no
word with quite the same breadth of meaning.
g. Eigentlich, which in the context of existentialism is translated as "authentic,"
has the more general meaning of "proper," "true," "real," and thus of "properly''
or "strictly" speaking, of the "literal sense" of what is said, as opposed to
metaphorical (uneigentlich) modes of speech and meanings.
h. A 'metaphor' is literally a "carried-over" use of a term.
i. Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) was written by Alfred Rosenberg, the
Nazi 'philosopher.'
j. The symbola fidei "symbols of faith" are the "creeds" stating Christian
religious beliefs in summary form.
k. How One Philosophizes with a Hammer is the subtitle of Nietzsche's Twilight
of the Idols, written in 1888.
1. The reference is to the God who can be 'circumstantial' and the God (of the
potentia absoluta) who can act immediately, without employing any intervening
agency.
m. Compare Tertullian's famous "Credo quia absurdum" "I believe because it is
absurd."
n. This is an apothegm coined by Anselm.
o. Anschauung. Like contemplatio, which the author translates with it here,
Anschauung means initially simple "regarding" or "viewing," which is then
elevated into a quasi-visual "contemplation" or "intuition" of a truth. I have
usually translated it, following the common practice in philosophy, as
"intuition," although this suggests a similar spread of meaning only to a reader
who understands its derivation (intueri, which has strong visual connotations, is
very close to contemplari), and in these contexts the meaning does not have
much to do with the usual nontechnical sense of "intuition" as unusual, rationally
inexplicable insight. The reader must bear in mind the original visual
connotation of the idea in order to appreciate its association, in the author's
discussion, with mythical 'imagery.'

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p. Anselm opposes die Tendenz zur Unanschaulichkeit. See the previous note on
Anschauung "intuition."
q. "rationis pulchritudinem amabilis": Cur deus homo, Book 1, chapter 1, ed. F.
S. Schmitt (Munich: Kösel, 1956), p. 10.

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4
To Bring Myth to an End
One more story and after that I shall bristle with x's and y's.
Stendhal, Henry Brulard

In his discussion of myth Fontenelle expressed the Enlightenment's amazement

at the fact that the myths of the Greeks had still not disappeared from the world.
Religion and reason had, it is true, weaned people from them, but poetry and
painting had given them the means by which to survive. They had known how to
make themselves indispensable to these arts. 1This statement is meant as a
contribution to the history of human errors. Part of the program of the Cartesian
school was to remove this category too, together with the totality of prejudices,
from people's minds. The vigor of the myths must have seemed all the harder to
understand, since the explanation of the tenacity of prejudices that described
them as keeping themselves alive by flattering man about his nature and his
place in the universe, against all his better knowledge, did not fit their case. Not
only did Fontenelle see a relationship of exclusion between the new science of
nature and the ancient myths; he also leaned toward the assumption that given an
appropriate presentation, science could fill the vacancy that had arisen, in the
system of needs, as a result of criticism of the myths. No doubt he considered
something along the lines of his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes
[Conversations on the plurality of worlds] as compensation for all the lost
beauties of the tradition, in the destruction of which he had participated so
successfully, in the year in which the

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conversations on the plurality of worlds appeared, with the Histoire des oracles
[Story of the oracles (1686)]. This basic idea of 'reoccupation' had motivated
Fontenelle's invention of the literary genre of the didactic conversation for the
Enlightenmentwhich did not consistently keep in view the ulterior purpose that
he had meant the genre to serve. 2
In the legend that the ancient oracles fell silent at the hour of Christ's birth,
Fontenelle sees only one of the tricks from the repertory of deceptions practiced
by priests. Since he has an opponent to whom the historical truth is not a matter
of indifference, the question of the truth of the invention is too important to him,
as well, to allow him to enjoy its simple beauty and, at the same time, to see how
the elemental need to find significance in history is satisfied by the manifestation
of the mere form of simultaneity. Still, Fontenelle hesitates to pursue the logic of
his critiquewhich is definitely designed as an indirect critique of Christianityall
the way. When the addressee of his pamphlet, the Jesuit Balthus, replies, he does
not read the diatribe to the end, so as to avoid the temptation of a rejoinder. He
writes to Leclerc that rather than continue the polemic he would prefer that the
prophet in the oracles had after all been the devil, so that they were forced to fall
silent when God made his appearance in the world, if that was what the Jesuit
wanted.3
Fontenelle accepts a presupposition of his opponents without which the
legendary event would not be worth disputing about; he raises the pagan myths
and oracles to the level of comparable and conflicting truths, historiographical
assertions, equivalent contents of a 'belief,' in order then to attack that pretension
and in it, indirectly, to hit the other partner in the comparison. This is why he
also fails to comprehend the protected status of the myths in the poetry and fine
arts of his time; he regards it almost as a cunning practiced by their contents, in
their endeavor to assert themselves, because their making themselves so
indispensable seems to him an inexplicable mystery. What remains outside his
comprehension is the fact that distance from the myths is not first established
when one believes that one can assure oneself of their 'falsehood.' Distance
presents itself in the myths themselves as the acceptance of 'significance.'
Through it, they make themselves available to the aesthetic reception, in such a
way that they finally appear as a particular category of that reception. Goethe
will say: "The Greek mythology, otherwise a confused jumble, can only be

 Page 265

regarded as the unfolding of the potential artistic themes that lay in an object." 4
That the relationship between the 'prejudice' called myth and the new science
should be one of competition necessarily presupposes the interpretation of
individual myths as etiological. This is why Fontenelle, as the secretary of the
Academy of Sciences in Paris, could see a triumph of the Enlightenment in the
explanation of the nature of 'thunderbolts.' He had before him the overall state of
'convictions' regarding the origin of these phenomena, convictions that he saw as
forming a single front alongside other constituent parts of consciousness, so that
when this one was hit, all the others seemed to be hit as well. An explanation of
the nature of the rainbow could be seen as a refutation of the function of the
biblical myth, if and as long as the latter was viewed exclusively in its
relationship to reason's need for explanation, and the institutional character of its
'apotropaic' [ill-averting] function over against ancient fears of storms and floods
remained unnoticed.
The biblical text makes it evident that the God of the terrible flood wanted to set
up a sign of definitive distance, of the possibility of trust in the world, when he
spoke to his heart: "I will not again curse the ground anymore for man's sake; for
the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite
any more every thing living, as I have done." He gives those who have just
escaped the Flood a first specimen of the sequence of agreements and
convenants that were to characterize his dealings with his people: "This is the
token of the convenant which I make between me and you and every living
creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud,
and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth." One will not
want to say that this is an 'explanation' of the rainbow, which would have had to
be replaced as quickly as possible, with arrival at a higher level of knowledge,
by a physical theory. All that the theory accomplishes, after all, is that the
phenomenon, once it is seen through in this way, has lost its 'significance' for
man.
The point is not to lament this loss, but rather to oppose the historical myth of
the darkness out of which reason lighted its own way only when it was
constituted as science. We enjoy the way the Romantic landscape painter has
again reclaimed the rainbow, for a different kind of experience, from the
insignificance assigned to it by the

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Enlightenment. Keeping the phenomenon on the plane of narratability or

pictorializing has not been made superfluous by any degree of theoretical
lucidity, as can be seen more clearly in the case of historiography than anywhere
else: To keep the totality comprehensible in the form of a 'pregnant' event, and
not to let it be atomized in the cloud of facts and circumstances, will always
reassert itself as the historian's task when the opposite has been asserted and
presented long enough.
Although history may appear as something that can be made and that in its great
events, with the nailing up of theses and with coronations, is made, the reception
embraces myth precisely as something that cannot be made, as something that,
because it could not be invented, is without a beginning. However certain it is
that myths were made up, though we know no one who did it and no moment at
which it was done, this lack of knowledge nevertheless becomes the index of the
fact that they must belong to the stock of what is primeval and that everything
that we are acquainted with is myth that has already entered into the process of
reception. One must already have the work of myth behind one in order to be
able to apply oneself to work on myth and to perceive it as the stimulus to
exertion directed at a material whose hardness and power of resistance must
have unfathomable origins. The limit concept of the work of myth could be what
I have called the absolutism of reality; the limit concept of work on myth would
be to bring myth to an end, to venture the most extreme deformation, which only
just allows or almost no longer allows the original figure to be recognized. For
the theory of reception this would be the fiction of a final myth, that is, of a myth
that fully exploits, and exhausts, the form.
So as not to leave that standing as a mere riddle, I will add that such a final myth
could have been the fundamental myth of German Idealism. Perhaps this will
spring to the eye better if I introduce that fundamental myth here with the words
with which Schiller presented it to Goethe. What he there communicates in a
single sentence, from Jena to Weimar, is an ironical abbreviated version of
Fichte's first proclamations after assuming his chair in Jenaand, it may be added,
only three years after his meeting with Kant: "To him the world is only a ball
that the ego has thrown and that it catches again in 'reflection'!!" 5How is it
possible that in the midst of the success of the modern age, of its program of the
scientific destruction of all

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myths whatever, a final fundamental mythat least, one that was meant to be
finalarose?
The ultimate [or "final": letzter] myth was a consequence of the ultimate doubt.
Descartes had introduced the thought experiment of the genius malignus
[malicious spirit], not wantonly and not in the absence of historical pressure, but
still in the confidence that he would be able to dispose of it with the aid of the
concept of the ens perfectissimum [most perfect being] as a guaranteeing
authority whose existence could be demonstrated. Leibniz already objected that
a doubt that was this radical could not be removed by any argument, and Kant's
proof of the impossibility of every type of proof of God's existence allowed the
naked edge of the doubt to continue its subversive existence. There was only one
means by which to remove this last monster from the world, namely, for the
cognitive subject to make itself into the authority that is responsible for the
object it knows. Thus Idealism'sa 'final myth' is a way of establishing distance
from a terror that is now only mental, and now strikes deep only into the
theoretical subject. Because to be completely and thoroughly deceived is
something that need not disturb the subject of the life-world, as long as that
subject can be sure that it will never awaken, from the impermeable reality with
which it has had to deal so far, into an unknown one.
Seen from the perspective of Idealism's fundamental myth, the malevolent
demon of Cartesian doubt is the monster of a prior world of terrors that are now
definitively overcome. In the associated philosophy of history, which establishes
past states as definitively past, the mythical prior world has its necessity for a
future of which it may be and is meant to be assumed that it has just become
present. The epistemological demon whom Descartes introduced was supposed
to be capable of doing something that, under the heading of "delusion," had been
ascribed to the Greek gods as their part in tragedy. But there, this veil had
always been partialalso capable, in the interweaving of the 'separation of
powers,' of being pierced by means of the favor of another god. In myth, the total
and the definitive do not occur; they are products of dogmatic abstraction. This
is why the fundamental myth of Idealism includes a philosophy of history. That
philosophy epitomizes the fact that God himself cannot do everything at once,
not even for himself. The philosophy of history makes history once again into a
story,b one that deals with the original playful or adventurous or shaping and
organizing subject. It can no longer be

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the most perfect being, in whom Descartes had sought the guarantee for the
accessibility of the world for theory. For there could not be a story about such a
being; according to the classical definition of its eternity, it was everything at
once. But if the absolute finds its way to itself only by way of the detour of time,
its history does not 'befall' it, it cannot alarm and appear strange to it; instead, it
comes into the horizon of its experience as something it has made. This
experience is, strictly speaking, an essentially aesthetic one.
In the winter of 1811 to 1812 in Berlin, Schopenhauer took notes on Fichte's
lectures and made a marginal notation in his notebook: "I am trying to explain
how this whole fairy tale arose in Fichte's brain." 6His explanation is to the
effect that Fichte must have misunderstood Kant's doctrine, no doubt on account
of its incompleteness. Against Fichte's original 'given,' the Being that
contemplates itself, Schopenhauer notes the objection that while the ego can
certainly be contemplative, it can never itself be what is contemplated. The
fundamental pattern of Fichte's doctrine of science was that the only way in
which one can come to know 'Being' [das "Seyn"] was by its communicating and
making itself understood. Schopenhauer comments: "Isn't it pretty impudent [to
assert] that the story of something that no one knows anything about is supposed
to be attested by the fact that it comes from that same thing? In the same way
rogues have sold pieces of land that were supposed to be in America, after
producing maps of the land that were supposed to have been made on the spot."7
Now the description of absolute reflexiveness as contemplation is only a
provocation to the movement without which something simply could not appear
in a philosophy that must, however, appear in it without fail: the subject's
dissatisfaction with itself, as the precondition of its willingness to have a world.
Just three years later, Schopenhauer discovers the invaluable advantage that
Idealism's subject derives from the fact that it need not allow itself to be
frightened by the experience of the world as lostness in infinite space and
infinite time: In reflection on myself as the subject of knowledge I become
aware that "the worlds are my representation, that is, that I, the eternal subject,
am the bearer of this universe, whose whole being is nothing but a relationship
to me." In this recognition there is summed up the whole feeling of exaltation in
which the horror and awe are dissolved that arise, for our experience of the
world, in view of the millenniums and "the countless worlds in the sublime
heavens. . . . What has become of the

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horror, of the dread? I am, nothing else exists; sustained by me, the world
reposes, in the repose that emanates from me: How should it terrify me, how
should its greatness amaze me, which is never anything but the measure of my
own greatness, a greatness that always surpasses it!" 8So that is it: A story is
told, about the world and about the subject of its objects, that radically excludes
the absolutism of reality. It is an unprovable story, a story without witnesses, but
a story with the highest quality that philosophers have ever been able to offer:
with irrefutability. If we could agree on anything as counting against it, there
would be weight in the testimony of its beneficiary, to whom the assurance of
the world's favor, as his creation, loses credibility because of his overall
experience, with his 'creatures,' that his being their author does not
unequivocally guarantee their subservience to him.
If, in Idealism's fundamental myth, only the form of a myth is now meant to be
put into effect, with abstract names and in conscious unsurpassability, then this
myth has its point in the representation of autogenesis, of the subject's self-
production. By this means even the primary condition of every possibility of
reality is kept under the subject's disposition, as though the subject did not want
to let itself be surprised by the quality of reality, not even by the fact that there is
anything at all, rather than nothing. One could describe this point as the absolute
dominion of the wish, of the pleasure principle, at the opposite end of a history
that must have begun with the absolute dominion of reality, of the reality
principle. Hence the observation, which at first was disconcerting but could then
be converted into an affirmative one, that the creative and the neurotic
imagination are closely related to one another. Both would have withdrawn
themselves from the dominion of the reality principle.
The deepest conflict that the subject that reflects on its absolute root can have
with itself is the confirmation of its contingency in the world, of its lack of
necessity. Perhaps the father and mother conflicts discovered by psychoanalysis
and rediscovered in myth are only foreground appearances, specific forms of the
deeper conflict that consists in or arises from the fact that a subject is a result of
a physical process and for that very reason does not experience its self-
constitution, but rather, from its possession of the sole absolute certainty of the
cogito sum [Descartes's "I think (therefore) I am"], gains access to this
constitution as something heterogeneous to it. From the account of an analysis
with Otto Rank we know how the most precise formulation

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of this dilemma looks: "You wanted to create yourself, you did not want to be
born of human parents. . . . You tried to live your life like a myth. Everything
you dreamed or fantasied, you carried out. You are a myth maker." 9The
neurotic indulges himself by allowing the constellations and dependencies that
he finds unpleasant to turn into wishes, into wishes that create an illusion of still
being able to make changes in the actual realities, 'ex post facto.' This includes
the wish to have produced oneself. One stages oneself as though one had done
so.
The desire for absolute authenticity has also been systematically expressed at the
center of existentialism. Thrownness, facticitythese are abstract terms for the
simple circumstance that contrary to his wish to have given himself existence
and the conditions of existence, man finds these already present, as something
produced by the most down-to-earth process of nature, and has to define himself,
in his self-projection, over against nature's preconditions. The reversal of the
Scholastic axiom that existence follows essence, according to which essence first
arises from Dasein ['presence': Heidegger's term for (human) existence], means
precisely this. This position appears, in retrospect, as the final resistance to the
overwhelming presumption that one is produced by alien, social agenciesas the
desperate effort to resist this or to undo it ex post facto. It is not surprising that
self-production at bottom again and again winds up as an aesthetic transaction of
self-presentation. It is only aesthetically that one can satisfy the wish not to be
the way one is. Even for Plotinus's God, self-production was already a metaphor,
which was meant to make his existence a pure consequence of his essence, to
suspend the Platonic chorismos [the "separation" between form and matter,
essence and existence] in the highest principle by representing his essence as the
epitome of his will. But this has also become the definition of the aesthetic
object. In contrast to everything 'given' [alles Faktische], the aesthetic object is
the identity of conception and appearancein other words, the infallibility of the
wish as reality.
For one myth to be distinguished as an ultimate and unsurpassable pure
representation of its 'form' is the highest stimulus to dealings with the mythical,
but is not a status that can be shown to be final. Beginning and end are
symmetrical also in that they escape demonstrable tangibility. Myth has always
already passed over into the process of reception, and it remains in that process
no matter what violence

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is applied in order to break its bonds and to establish its final form. If it is
present to us only in the forms of its reception, there is no privilege of certain
versions as more original or more final. Levi-Strauss has proposed that we
define an individual myth in terms of the totality of its versions. Freud and
Sophocles would then have to be regarded equally as 'sources' in relation to the
Oedipus material. All variants could lay claim to the same mythological
seriousness. 10The most important consequence of this central thesis is the
abandonment of 'histories of influence' ['Wirkungsgeschichtete'], in the strict
sense, in mythology. The requirement of a spatial or temporal contact for the
'causal' nexus is given up. What is presupposed is more nearly a continuous
productivity than a receptivity that crosses gaps, because fundamentally it is
assumed that any significant individual myth could become virulent, from the
constant fundament of human nature, at any time. Even where a process of
reception can be documented as having occurred, it can be argued that the
disposition to such a reception cannot be distinguished from the disposition to
authentic authorship.
The ethnological material of widely distant cultures favors such a hypothesis. If I
nevertheless do not go along with it, it is to avoid the inescapable Platonism that
would finally have to be granted to every tradition as a result of abandoning
mechanisms of transmission. Then the concept of tradition would enervate that
of history, and finally one would do nothing but point to the contents of a ''black
box" to explain something that, while it does present itself as dispersed in time,
is as little affected by its position in time as the Platonic ideas are by their
appearances. But it is only the temporal definiteness of the earlier and the later
that makes it important that Apollo, originally a "ruiner,"c becomes the beaming
and friendly god; that Hephaestus, from a god of the terrors of fire, becomes the
patron of technical skills; that the old storm-god Zeus becomes the world
orderer; and others too become different.
Nevertheless, the value of Levi-Strauss's central thesis is not set aside if we hold
fast to the concept and the process of reception, indeed if we give it a unique role
in mythology. It remains the case that all versions are constitutive elements of
the one myth, only the irrelevance of their position in time as contrasted to their
ideally simultaneous distribution in space is revalued into the priority of the
temporal mode of order. For that mode provides all the indications of the part
played by the variants in exploiting a potential that, without

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the differentiation of the deforming and enriching assertion requirements in

history,d would remain undisclosed. The same thing that is accomplished for the
ethnologist by the diversity of the cultures under the preconditions of which the
individual myth is produced and elaborated is accomplished in a continuous
tradition like the European one by what we have become accustomed to call
historicity. It can be expressed more simply as the impossibility of always
speaking of a given content, or of conceiving it as always being understood, in
the same way. The negation of this impossibility, in turn, is what is alleged in the
dogmatic mode of thought.
When Levi-Strauss proposes to project all the collected versions of a myth in a
layered structure, as a means of determining the core contents, this is how he
separates out the temporal factor: All variants are assigned to an indeterminate
temporal plane. It is no longer the 'eternal truth,' but it is still a truth for which
the passage of time and its position in time are matters of indifference. For a
philosophical mythology the especially hardened material of myth in its passage
through history is instructive not least because from its resistance to the direction
and the strength of deforming and destructive powers we can gain information
regarding the historical horizons from which those forces impinge. This is why it
is not a value preference placed on European history, if it is almost exclusively
in that history that the passage of myths through tradition can be exhibited. Seen
from the perspective of this possibility, the ethnologist's ideal simultaneity
appears as a mere difficulty resulting from a lack of temporal parameters. His
concept of time is marked by the structure of superimposition, and in view of
this the membership of all variants in one myth turns out to be not a demand but
a rationalized way of coming to terms with a merely contingent state of
deficiency. In one of the not uncommon professional revaluations, the
impossibility of attaining a temporal depth of focus becomes the triumph of
cognitive accomplishment. As such, it avoids the culture-circle theory's thesis of
a constant traditioninstead of a constant dispositionstemming from an already
culturally advanced center of mankind's spatial and temporal diffusion.
This thesis suffers today from the fact that the migrations and physical
differentiations had to be pushed back in time to earlier and earlier phases and
the protracted shared period of cultural development that the theory required
found less and less room in the temporal scheme of prehistory. Also, the
necessary corollary hypothesis seems

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not to be confirmed, which asserted that elements of primitive commonality

should be found precisely where migrations into blind alleys and places where
peoples were pushed aside led to protection from later influences and to
conservation of what was archaic. This genetic theory would in any case have
been burdened with such an exaggerated assumption of constancy in connection
with the capacity of human society to convey tradition that it was the equal of
any structuralism in its demand for 'historylessness.' Moreover, if everything was
already present in finished form, while it is true that there is nothing left for the
process of tradition to explain, everything is left to be explained by the coming
into existence of that original stock. It is not an accident that the culture-circle
theory has harmonized especially well with the doctrine (which had already
caught on, as applied to mythology, in Romanticism) of an original revelation
that is inherited in fragmentary form but not understood. This rounding out of a
genetic theory with heterogeneous ideas compensates for the displacement of all
problems to the beginning of the history of mankind: The myth of Paradise
becomes indispensable once again.
The grand theoretical alternatives are of interest here only because they also
affect the setting of a limit to the reception [of myth] by 'bringing it to an end.'
This idea remains unintelligible if myths, either as anthropologically naturalized
or a prehistorically determined, belong to the groundwork of human culture and
of the culture of mankind, a groundwork for whose unity there is or is allowed to
be no history.
Supposing that the central problem of mythology really is to understand how it is
that the constituents of myth resemble one another so much from one end of the
world to the other, then the fact that they also remain stable in an amazing
manner in the dimension of time, from one end of human history to the other,
cannot be any less important. There is no law of cultural inertia; so explanations
must also be demanded for the continued persistence of cultural contents.
Perhaps the morphological comparability across the synchronic-spatial diffusion
of individual myths is even connected to their durability in diachronic transport.
This would be the case if the stability of the narrative kernels were based on a
readiness to receive them that had to do not so much with preformed and innate
models as with the limited multiplicity of those human circumstances, needs,
and situations that are reflected in mythical configurations and that make these
appear at least formally

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similar. Assuming that spatial and temporal ubiquity are equivalent, one is
compelled to see the conditions of the reception of the mythical as at least not
heterogeneous to those of its origin. In this case, from the perspective of the
former, at least suppositions about innateness would have to be excluded or put
in doubt.
In both cases, in its worldwide as in its 'time-wide' correspondences, myth shows
mankind engaged in working up and [mentally] digesting something that won't
let it alone, that keeps it in a state of unease and agitation. It can be reduced to
the simple formula that the world is not transparent for human beings, and they
are not even transparent for themselves. That does not yet mean that the
explanation of phenomena has always already had priority and that myths are
something like early ways of dealing with the difficulty of lacking theory. If they
were an expression of the lack of science or of prescientific explanation, they
would have been disposed of automatically at the latest when science, with its
increasing powers of accomplishment, made its entrance. The opposite was the
case. Nothing surprised the promoters of the Enlightenment more, and left them
standing more incredulously before the failure of what they thought were their
ultimate exertions, than the survival of the contemptible old storiesthe
continuation of work on myth.
This work presupposes familiarity with what it is done to, not only in those who
perform it, but also in those who have to take it in, receptively. It always
presupposes a public that is able to respond to the mechanism of reception. It
must be able to recognize what has been preserved, what has been deformed or
made nearly unrecognizable, and finally what has been subjected to the violence
of reversal. It is easy to say that this is the typical assumption of a public
equipped with a bourgeois, even a classical, but in any case a literary education.
That this cannot be correct one can infer from the circumstance, which is not
difficult to observe, that during the decades of the purposeful destruction of the
share of the classics in the educational system, especially in the United States but
also in Europe, the utilization and variation of mythical materials in literature
and the fine arts increased to an undreamed-of extent. As a consequence of this
phenomenon many people were motivated to engage themselves with the ancient
world as an amateur interest, and publishers' series promoting it were
increasingly successful.

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To take note of the role of the public in the process of receiving myths is not a
new thing. For the court theater in Weimar, in connection with the production of
August Wilhelm Schlegel's Ion, Goethe suggested that one should kindly instruct
oneself about the context at home beforehand, with the aid of a handbook of
mythology, and not insist that the explanation be supplied along with the play:
"One can show the public no greater respect than by not treating it like rabble."
11This sentence will remain true however the preconditions for supposed
'classicisms' and for the possibility of bringing them about may change. Part of
the aesthetic public's claim to be taken seriously lies in our preserving the
general expectation that it will 'note and notice something' ['etwas merken und
bemerken'] that is not meant to be beaten and lectured into it in the manner of
naked didacticism. To do something to oblige the public [i.e., for its sake] is not
the same thing as to be obliging to it.
Even when simply pronouncing names taken from myth, the actoragain
according to Goethemust pay attention to the fact that they are "important proper
names, indeed names that portray the whole meaning." This meaning can be
made clear, he says, even if the imagination can only be brought to represent to
itself "something analogous" to what they actually refer to.12That is a statement
that very much deserves to be pondered in connection with the function of
mythical names. The imagination has a chance of success, even if no sound
knowledge underlies it. For the names, taken by themselves, the same thing
holds that must be claimed in full for the stories: that they possess a significance
that in itself is capable of making an impression, and they can be appropriated, in
this significance, without regard to definable educational prerequisites. The
impact on the imagination can be ambiguous; it will do what one describes with
the simplest phrase: to occupy it.
The inexhaustibility of the mythical image becomes manifest in its reception, but
not in the manner of something simply being made visible that may already have
reposed, preformed, within it. It is a real epigenesis. But it cannot be thought of
as independent of its continual point of departure, which, for a tradition that is
dependent on 'sources,' can no longer be anything but the final state, gone over
into written form, of an unknown oral prehistory. Even enrichment through the
process of reception, and accumulation of related materials, indicate jumping-off
points for connections, capacities for reference

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in the inherited and available material. A precondition for the Odysseus in the
Divina Commedia [Dante's Divine Comedy] was that, for Dante, Homer was not
inviolable, and the nonhomecoming of Aeneas, culminating in the foundation of
Rome, was incomparably more persuasive than any cyclical significance of the
path from Ithaca to Ithaca could have been.
If a myth is to be brought to an end, because only by its application to a myth
can one convincingly demonstrate what this 'finalization' demands and means,
everything depends on the potential of significance that is unfolded or
engendered in the process of reception. Nothing has been so provocative
aesthetically, and as criticism of the age, as the test of strength carried out on the
modern age's myth of Doctor Faustus.
In the "preliminary version" of Butor and Pousseur's variable Faust opera,
Goethe's "Prologue in the Theater" has become the whole. The refrain is the
theater director's ambiguous mandate to the composer, ''It must be a Faust!" And,
in fact, it cannot be anything else, not because this figure was disposed from the
beginning to be inexhaustible, but because it became that as a result of its
affinity to the consciousness of the epoch. Only by being tested against it can
new forms of self-conception, if there have ever been such already or if there
should be yet, present themselves. By the fact that the prologue becomes the
whole, the endless evasion of realization in spite of the recourse to puppet show
and annual fair, to the "infamous life and terrifying end of Doctor Faust," in the
mythical environment of the "torments of Tantalus, the vultures of Prometheus,
the boulder of Sisyphus," even of Judith and Holofernes, Samson and Delilah,
David and Goliathin spite of this immersion in the medium of the origins, it gets
no further than the prologue, the exhibition of the impossibility of imputing a
Faust to this audience, conceived as capable of choice.
For the original situation of the testing of mythical songs is also supposed to be
realized again in that the decision about the authors' offerings, about the progress
and the end of the "variable play," lies with the recipients. If one looks more
closely, one does not fail to observe that this aesthetic democracy has almost
nothing to decide. An anachronistic oral procedure is suggested, and its incisive
effect is simulated. Or should one say that the public is made the accomplice in
the flight from the task of a Faust: that it prevents the attainment of that goal? Is
it supposed to show that no contemporary public

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would entertain this Votre Faust [Your Faust], because that public has already
itself made the modern age's myth impossible? The public's freedom of choice is
an aesthetic fiction, which passes the title of creativitywhich in the meantime is
no longer cherished or is modestly passed over in silenceto the other side. Henri
Pousseur had passed the commission for a Faust opera for Brussels on to Michel
Butor, as the librettist he wanted. One can imagine that the answer was uttered
there that is in fact ascribed to the composer's friend in the text; "A Faust? . . .
My God! . . . But then, why not?" 13And when the composer checks again with
the theater director as to whether it actually has to be a Faust, he receives the
answer that it must be: "After all, we must take the public's tastes and desires
into consideration."
All of that would be unthinkable if the Faust theme had not entrenched itself
deeply in the consciousness of the epoch. It is not only that every allusion to the
material is bound to be recognized with an "Aha!" and applauded, but also
because one can always anticipate that every reshaping will make clearer, as in
an experiment, the operative forces that emerge from the present situation. What
it means to measure oneself against this material is preestablished by the
superabundance of its reception since the old Faust book and Marlowe's Dr.
Faustus. We would know almost nothing of the significance of the figure if this
work on it had not 'disclosed' itor 'invented' it and superadded it. The weight and
burden of the reception is made manifest here by the fact that the commission
can neither be fulfilled nor refused. In one of the closings it is Gretchen/Maggy
who will agree to the plan for an opera on the sole condition that "It cannot be a
Faust." When Faust/Henri resists, she tells him straight out that she doesn't love
him anymore. In the finale, which the audience cannot vote out, the friend,
Richard, answers the theater director's question, which is now directed at him, as
to whether he will compose an opera for him, with the final word: "No.'' On that,
the curtain falls.
It is the fulfillment of Madame de Staël's commandment that nothing like Faust
might be written againand she would vouch for the French. Nevertheless, the
most important "Faust" since Goethe had already been written, in France, before
Butor announced, with the final no, the impossibility of fulfilling the
commission.
It is an incomparable gesture when Paul Valéry tells us that on a certain day in
1940 he found he was speaking with two voicesthat of Faust and that of
Mephistophelesand all that he did was to write

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down what he said. One perceives, in this overture "to the wary but not
unwilling reader," that here it is not something ultimate that is set against what
was almost ultimate, but rather an end is sought that will measure up to a
beginning that lies far back and can never be surpassed. On the one hand, the
addition of the possessive pronoun, Mon Faust [My Faust], relativizes the claim
to finality in favor of a maximum of subjectivity, which also finds expression in
acceptance of the work's fragmentary state; on the other hand, the exchange of
the roles of tempter and tempted between Mephistopheles and Faust is the most
radical, apparently unsurpassable intervention in the configuration.
As for the relativization, we know from August Wilhelm Schlegel's report of an
experience that the doctor, Zimmermann, had with Goethe in 1775 that the poet
answered his visitor, who inquired about his (already notorious) Faust, by
emptying a bag full of scraps of paper on the table before him and pointing to it
with the words, "Voilà mon Faust!" [There is my Faust!]. 14People have not
given much thought to the question of what this sack with small pieces of paper,
and Goethe's utterance on the subject, could have meant. Surely it is not
supposed to mean that he had written the manuscript of his Urfaust [the earliest
version of Goethe's Faust] on little pieces of paper and stored these in a sack. It
is much more likely that he led Johann Georg Zimmermann astray with the
remains of the torn pages of a manuscript. In Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe
described the terms of responding 'in kind' on which his relationship with
Zimmermann was founded.
The possessive pronoun, the indefinite article, even the plural applied to Faust's
name, are the linguistic indexes of relativization and subjectivization. A plan of
Lessing's for a Fausta plan that remained fragmentaryis mentioned as early as
1755 in a letter to him from Moses Mendelssohn. In his Hamburg period he then
speaks of "my second Faust." Our most important source of knowledge of this
lost Faust, the account of Captain von Blankenburg, uses the plural when it
ascribes the revision of the first plan to a time "when 'Fausts' were being
announced from every corner of Germany." Lessing, the reporter was told ''for
certain," had "only waited for the appearance of the other 'Fausts'" to publish his
own. The manuscript had then gone astray in a shipment from Dresden to
Wolfenbüttel.
The "waiting" for the other Fausts may contain a hyperbole, since in 1775 it
came to a publicly documented conflict with Goethe's Faust

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plan. While Schubart's Deutsche Chronik auf das Jahr 1775 [Chronicle of the
year 1775 in Germany] reports that Lessing had "sold his admirable tragedy Dr.
Faust to the managers of the theater" in Vienna, it contains in a footnote the
quotation from Reichard's Theater-Kalender auf das Jahr 1775 [Theater
calendar of the year 1775]: "Goethe too is working on a Dr. Faust." 15So
Lessing delayed with his eye on Goethe. This is confirmed by a remark of the
Berlin Enlightener, Johann Jacob Engel, to Döbbelin, that Lessing would
certainly publish his Doktor Faust as soon as Goethe had come out with his.
Lessing is said to have added to this declaration: "My Faustis fetched by the
devil, but I want to fetch G . . . 's from him!"16The loss of the chest containing
the manuscript, which Engel asserts will "be Lessing's masterpiece," has
protected posterity from having to decide who won the competition.
Lessing's plural is an expression of satiety, almost with the implication: too
many Fausts. Therefore it is a Romantic revaluation of the plural when Achim
von Arnim, in his foreword to the [German] translation of Marlowe's Faustus in
1818, makes the statementsuggesting the inexhaustibility of the topicthat there
have not been "enough Fausts written yet." According to the evidence of his
diary for June 11, 1818, Goethe read this translation and thus also Arnim's
challenging remark. Can this have contributed to his putting the stamp of
definitive completion on his Faust? Only in 1825 does he again resume work on
it, work that in the diary for February 11, 1826, is described as "continuation of
the main business," and that does not leave him free until 1831.
Not without a role in relation to this final application of himself to the Faust
theme will have been the fact that in 1824 another man had coupled the
possessive pronoun with the name of Faust, to Goethe's face. For October 2,
1824, there is only a laconic note: "Heine, from Göttingen." The visitor had
announced himself with the request that he "be granted the happiness to stand
before you for a few minutes." On the Brocken, he said the desire had overcome
him "to make a pilgrimage to Weimar to show his admiration of Goethe," and
accordingly he had come on foot.17The demythologized version of the decision
on the Brocken and the pilgrimage reads differently: "In the autumn I made a
walking trip to the Harz Mountains, which I roamed in all directions, and visited
the Brocken, as well as Goethe on my return journey by way of Weimar."18He
had been terrified "to the depth of my soul'' by the toothless Olympian in his
human decrepitude;

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only "his eye was clear and sparkling." He had felt the contrast of their natures,
felt scorn for one who did not attach little value to his life and did not desire to
sacrifice it defiantly for an idea. And he felt himself since that time as being
"truly at war with Goethe and his writings."
Of his having addressed a declaration of war to the poet of Faust, Heine himself
tells us nothing. But could Maximilian Heine really have been so imaginative in
his memoirs, even though they first appeared in 1866 in the suspect Gartenlaube
[The Arbor, a popular magazine], as simply to invent his brother's laconic
exchange of words with Goethe? Goethe, he says, after inconsequential and
condescending overtures, had suddenly asked Heine, "With what do you occupy
yourself currently?" And the young poet had quickly answered, "With a Faust."
At that Goethe had been taken aback and had only asked, in a sarcastic tone,
whether he had no other business in Weimar. 19If that were invented, it would
have to have been invented by Heinrich Heine himself.
There was more involved in the background of what Heine said to Goethe than
the latter may have heard in it: the popularization of the material that the
Olympian had placed under embargo. This hidden imputation goes further than
Butor and Pousseur's leaving the sequences up to the public. The authenticity of
what Heine is supposed to have said to Goethe is reinforced by what he says to
Eduard Wedekind in a conversation in the same year. The conversation had
come around to Goethe's Faust: "I also plan to write one, not in order to get into
a rivalry with Goethe, no, no, everyone should write a Faust."20Heine already
thought of a rigorous reversal of the configuration, for his Faust was "to be the
exact opposite of Goethe's." The latter, he says, is always active, giving orders to
Mephistopheles; he wants to make Mephistopheles the active principle, who
should "lead Faust into all sorts of devilry." Then, of course, he could no longer
be a negative principle.
What Heine considers the exact opposite of Goethe's Faust enables us to measure
what a distance still exists between this challenge to Goethe and the point where
Valéry takes a hand in 1940. It points in every respect to a world in which the
knower has become superior to the evil one in what he can do, and the demonic
principle can remember his past glory with an indulgent smile. From Valéry's
perspective there is no longer any vacillation about the fact that the Faust

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material is now represented exclusively by Goethe's work. Every audacity of the

reception must relate to the independent form that that work gave to its figures
for the entire century that followed it. At the same time, it is evident that Valéry
was not an intensive reader of Goethe; it is doubtful whether he ever read Faust
II. He is not familiar with Goethe philology, and so the strange story of a remark
of Wieland's about the change in Goethe's intentions regarding the end of Faust,
a story reported by Bernhard Rudolf Abeken, will never have reached him. Only
once, Wieland said, in the earliest days in Weimar, did Goethe break his silence
on this subject in an animated social gathering, when he said: "You think the
devil will fetch Faust. Just the reverse: Faust fetches the devil." 21Now this is
not Valéry's problem, for he shifts the exchange of roles further forward, into the
relationship of tempter and tempted, itself; he rediscovers the Epicurean in
Faust, who knows how to find the immediacy of enjoyment, which alone can
still be tempting.
Valéry's Faust problem is no longer who fetches whom, but of what could that
highest moment consist, which was the subject of the old bet. The scene in the
garden, which combines the biblical Paradise and the kepos [garden] of
Epicurus, answers this question at the same time that it dismisses any idea that
duration could be secured for the pure immediacy of experience. One must
compare this to the end of Goethe's Faust, in which the large-scale blessing of
mankindthough only for the blinded Faust, prey to illusionsstill does not of itself
repel the wish that it should tarry.e Valéry's inversion of the relationship
between Faust and Mephistopheles is not indecision regarding the outcome, and
is also not the isolated notion of overturning the traditional relationship, but is
instead the consequence of the different answer that he gives to the question of
the highest moment.
Therefore, this Faust is not one who is fetchedneither by the powers above nor
by those belowbut rather one who is resigned. A Faust who in the end gives
upseen from a point of view that is overburdened with the figure of the doer, that
is an enormous deformation.
What it means to make an end of myth can only be discussed by weighing the
powers that are requisite for the purpose. When Goethe does not allow his great,
though not guiltless, hero to go to hell, in spite of the bet that was well and truly
won by Mephistopheles, this strikes us merely as the avoidance of a barbarism.
The fact that it

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takes some doing to accomplish it is related to a sin of Faust's that did not derive
from the passion of curiosity alone. The break with the tradition of his
damnation becomes clearer when he is still entirely the one possessed by the
drive for knowledge, who transgresses the limits of God's mysteries that are set
for man. Evidently Lessing had wanted to develop Faust entirely out of the tragic
quality of this passion, and had concentrated the devil's temptations in the
provision of unusual means by which to bring about success in knowledge. Then
his intervention in the tradition of the materialnot making the exponent of this
passion of the modern age suffer damnationseems all the more serious. He must
only renounce precipitancy in the pursuit of the progress of knowledge. In
Lessing's case, the situation is not so much that immoderation of the striving for
truthas the demand for instantaneous and complete knowledgeshould not be
culpable, as rather that what this human excess suffers should in any case not be
hell. Lessing's conception is more closely connected than is Goethe's to the
modern age's consciousness of itself as an epoch of the exclusiveness of the
knowledge drive. From this perspective, Valéry's liberation of the Faust figure
from all theoretical curiosity is brought into still clearer relief.
When seven spirits of hell present themselves to Lessing's Faust, he asks them
which of them is the swiftest; only the seventh satisfies him, because it claims to
be as swift as the passage from good to evil. He abuses the others as "Orcus's
snails." This Faust of Lessing's is himself an anti-Lessing insofar as before the
alternatives of possessing the whole truth or continuing endlessly in the striving
for truth he, unlike his master, would desire the whole truth, and immediately.
He is a despiser of the principle of gradualness. But it is this principle that
stamps the program of the Education of the Human Race. Lessing's Faust is an
enthusiast, because enthusiasts often have a clairvoyant vision of the future, but
"for this future he cannot wait." He wants it to come quickly, and wants himself
to be the one who is able to make it come quickly.
"A thing over which nature takes thousands of years is to come to maturity just
at the moment of his experience." 22An index of this impatience is that among
enthusiasts the idea of the transmigration of souls, of the repetition of life,
possesses no attractiveness. The enthusiast is a type who at bottom always flirts
with the intervention of omnipotence, which could grant right now what, despite
the absence

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of difficulty and resistance, it delays and makes dependent on circumstances. It

is a principle opposed to his Faust when Lessing says, "It is not true that the
shortest line is always straight," The myth of the transmigration of souls is
Lessing's answer to the objection that the progress of knowledge in mankind as a
whole condemns the individual to the accidental benefit of what happens to have
been achieved, and to the accidental lack of what has not yet been achieved. It
enables us to surmise why, for Schopenhauer, transmigration will be the most
perfect and to that extent the final myth. Lessing, too, treats it as the oldest
hypothesis: "But why should not every individual man have been present more
than once in this world?" His Faust, on the other hand, is the one who would
answer in the affirmative the question that Lessing designed for a negative
answer: "Do I bring away so much from one visit that it is perhaps not worth the
trouble of coming again?" All of this presses toward the sentence with which the
Education of the Human Race, not accidentally, closesbecause it combines the
dogma of immortality with the myth of return and thus postulates the
indifference of time for a subject who would otherwise have to take insuperable
offense at the mere contingency of his position in the history of the human race:
"And what then have I to lose? Is not the whole of eternity mine?"
What Lessing had described, in the notes for the prologue of his Faust, as an
error and as the origin of vicenamely, to have "too great an appetite for
knowledge"appears from the perspective of the Education of the Human Race as
the expression of a consciousness of time that is hard pressed, that is bound fast
to finitude, and that lacks the generous scale of both dogma and myth. Faust is
the figure of a world of interminable pressing forward, in which one can never
have enough time and can never use it quickly enough. One needs more than one
life. Valéry's contradiction can be related to this central point of the Faust
tradition: His Faust's highest moment is one of the complete indifference of time,
of unsurpassable presentness, but also consequently of unrepeatability. This is
the formal element, in Mon Faust, by which [the] myth is brought to an end.
Valéry's Faust is no longer a figure of the hypertrophic appetite for knowledge.
To contrast him with this tradition means also to picture him again as the
Epicurean, who holds out to Mephistopheles, who is engrossed in the
temptations of the modern age, the old tactile enjoyment, sensual experience.
The appetite for knowledge no longer

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needed defense; what did, no doubt, was what one would ever be able to make of
its successes, to do with the time that was gained or was still to be gained as a
scope perhaps for unexpected thingssay, for the enjoyment of one's self and of
the world (an enjoyment that is always old, not to be pushed forward by any
progress) in the garden scene with the demoiselle de cristal [crystal girl] to
whom Valéry gave the quite simple and unambiguous name "Lust" [German
"pleasure"]. His Faust is not in need of redemption [Erlösung]; he is entirely
satisfied with the solution [Lösung] of absorption in the moment. So Lust too is
not the earthly or the heavenly Gretchen; she does not entangle him and does not
redeem him; she is a tactile element in the impressionism of the garden scene.
Let us not forget that the garden was the location of Epicurus's school; here
Faust learns everything that is still worth his learningabove all, the standstill of
time, the relaxation of this pressure, from which Lessing had wanted to free his
Faust in another, now no longer feasible, manner. Jauss has shown that Faust's
discovery of sensualism in the garden scene is stylized after Descartes's dream.
23This also is no accident, if one bears in mind Valéry's lifelong argument with
Cartesianism, especially in the Cahiers. I also think of the experience of
'conversion' to positivism that is related by Ernst Mach in the Analysis of
Sensations of 1886: "On a bright summer day out in the open air the world with
my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more
strongly coherent in the ego. Although the actual working out of this thought did
not occur until a later period, yet this moment was decisive for my whole view."f
Is it so difficult to imagine that Valéry saw no other possibility of bringing to an
end the myth of the figure of the craving for knowledge, the myth that fascinates
the modern age, other than by letting his Faust be dissolved in an entirely
undoctrinaire sensualism, whose evidence is tactile?
Then this Faust would not only be a counterfigure to Goethe's. As such it would
probably have to have been set up differently, and in a clearer relationship, quite
apart from the question of how well and completely Valéry actually knew
Goethe's Faust. But his Faust is more than an anti-Fausthe is an un-Faust: the
possibility of a Faust brought to an end, as the beginning of his impossibility. To
the bewilderment of Mephistopheles, the garden scene is still pure myth,
repetition of the Paradise scene, recognizable by the handing over of the fruit of
which Lust has taken a bite. We do not need the variation that the

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apple here is a peach (cf. péhé),g particularly since in the biblical text the fruit is
not specified at all. Mephistopheles is not promoted to "undevil"; he exhausts his
entire obsolete noncomprehension in order to arrive at the statement: "C'est une
reprise" [It's the same thing all over again]. Faust is correct when he says that
with Mephistopheles the fate of evil itself is at stake, and that could also be the
end of the soul.
Faust wants to and can be happy again, in spite of the fateful lapse of the ancient
promise that it would be theory on which man's happiness would be founded.
This Faust begins with memory; he dictates his memoirs to Lustnot the memoirs
of an individual but those of the epoch whose prototype he is. He has become
historical to himself, and only the garden scene enables him to escape from
understanding himself as historical. He announces to the "disciple" that he is
tired of everything that prevents him from existing. When Faust in the garden, in
the midst of dictating his memoirs, finally speaks of the magnificence of the
evening, and Lust mechanically repeats this from her transcript, Faust interrupts
her: "Mais non . . . Je ne dicte pas . . . J'existe" [No, no . . . I'm not dictating . . . I
exist]. It is the end of the Cartesian consciousness in these moments: an "I" that
thinks nothing. The universe that had meant so much to Faust has become a
matter of indifference to him as what fills this consciousness; therefore it thinks
nothing. This nothing, of world, is at the same time the everything of the
presence of the self for itself, which Faust must formulate almost in the formula
of the biblical God: "Je suis celui que je suis." [I am he who I am]. His work of
art now is only to live, and his greatest work: to feel, to breathe. It is the moment
that would have made the classical Faust lose the wager, this état suprême
[supreme state], in which all questions and all answers are disposed of with a
smile.
If I described the garden scene as positivistic in the sense of Mach's early
experience, as sensualistic, since in it everything becomes a cloud of sensations,
then this is only half of the case. It is also mystical. For in contrast to all theory,
which is based on 'intuition' [Anschauung, literally, "viewing"] and its original
identity with optical perception, and understands everything else with metaphors
from this field (right down to the 'nonintuitive' [Unanschaulichkeit, the
"abstract" or "formal"]), mysticism is, in its tendency or indeed in its fulfillment,
tactile. It wants to touch, and in exchange for that it accepts obscurity where

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intuition is denied to it. Why? Because it believes that in touching it achieves an

immediate relationship to reality, to a reality, even an unknown one.
This interweaving of touching with consciousness of reality is everywhere in
Valéry's garden scene. The self-predications of existence, life, breathing, and
looking, which are constructed according to the Cartesian model of the cogito,
find their unexpected intensification in what could be the still more present
element in the present situation (and, for the old Cartesian, that always means
also the more compelling evidence): "JE TOUCHE . . . " [I touch . . .]. In
touching, the distinction between activity and passivity, in which the "I" is
strictly delimited vis-à-vis what is no longer it or not yet it, disappears. The
unsurpassable reality is when the occurrence of touching arises indistinguishably
both from touching and from being touched: "Quoi de plus réel? Je touche? Je
suis touché" [What could be more real? I touch? I am touched]. The great
problem of Cartesianism, the problem that Valéry had penetrated so deeply and
had circled around so untiringlysolipsismis not refuted, not made obsolete; it has
only lost its subject, just as it has lost the "other" as a problem of certainty. For
Faust, despite the fact that he still believes himself to be experiencing his
presence to himself 'ecstatically,'h Lust is more certain than he is himself. It is
the moi pur [pure self] of the Cartesian tradition that has evaporated in this
convergence of sensualism and mysticism.
We do not know what consequences the garden scene was supposed to have for
Faust and Lust, how they could finally separate from one another. From the
highest state, they fall back into the relationship of dictation. That they did
separate we know from the "Solitaire" section ["The Hermit"literally, "The Only
One"] and from the "Féerie dramatique" ["Dramatic Fairy Story''] that brings
everything to a finish. For here Faust becomes the witness of the curses of the
universe ["Les Maledictions de l'Univers" is the subtitle of this section]: on the
summit of the iciest solitude, the negation of the supposed success in the garden
scene. Is this its refutation? Very probably. Unless the desperate conjecture
should be correct, that Valéry originally intended to put the "Solitaire" before
"Lust."
It is true that the hermit is a Nietzschean figure, even linguistically a result of
reading Nietzsche; but he is not simply an expression of the deadly boredom of
the eternal return, of the solitude of the superman as one who has been led
astray, not by the principle of evil, but by

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his own potential. The nihilistic dimension does not suit Mephistopheles; he
quickly goes back down from the height, calling to Faust that they will meet
again, he will wait for him further down. That is what finally miscarries so badly
for him that it confutes him. It is true that Faust has not so much overcome the
prejudices of his history as he has dissolved them, but Mephistopheles retains
them entirely; he remains the residue of medievalness that was necessary to the
modern age so that that age could establish its distance from itnot from evil, but
rather from the difference between good and evil. That man always remains the
same is the epitome of Mephistopheles's prejudices, and that he himself does the
samethat, he is forced to hear Faust tell him, is his historical error.
What Faust experiences on the summit of the mountain is, according to his own
words, the enormous extent of nothingness in everything. But the vertigo in the
face of abysses, by which Pascal had still been overcome, is now unknown to
Faust: "Je puis regarder le fond d'un abîme avec curiosité. Mais, en général, avec
indifférence" [I can look into the pit of an abyss with curiosity. But, in general,
with indifference]. The abyss and the hermitthey are the metaphors of nihilism,
the images of the modern age's failure in the face of a question that it posed for
the first time in this nakedness and for which it had forbidden itself every
dogmatic and every mythical answer: the question of the reason for being. The
subject is announced in the hermit's displeasure with Faust, which he expresses
with the laconic four letters: "Tu es"you are.
It is almost a matter of course that a last Faustwhose finality is supposed to be
the self-discovery of his own impossibilitymeets with the questionableness of his
right to existence and to its conditions in the world. The "Solitaire" section
answers the question what is left for Faustwhat is left for the Faust if a Faust has
become impossible. The answer takes the form of the alternatives: either to
deride the conditions under which it has become impossible to be a Faust, in the
curses of the cosmos, or to accept with resignation one's own impossibility, in
the lap of the fairies.
Valéry would then have remained entirely on the lifeline that began with his
Leonardo essays: He would have followed the exploration of the possibility of a
Leonardo with that of the impossibility of a Faust. For that, however, the garden
scene must precede the encounter with the hermit. Only the first presents the
groundless as the really real.

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As such it is, of course, unreliable, momentary, fleeting, and

unrepeatablesomething, in other words, on which a Faustian existence can no
longer and cannot again be grounded. Part of Faust's impossibility is the
exhibition of his relationship to the question of the reason for being, in the
momentary groundlessness of the garden scene. It is only from this that there
follows that which puts an end to himthe experience that precedes resignation.
After the absolute one-time-only quality of the experience in the garden, the
monotony of eternal recurrence that is embodied in the hermit has become
unbearable. But when the hermit plunges him into the abyss, Faust also refuses
the mercy of young existence that he is offered by the fairies. Here already his
last word is noas it is again in Butor.
In every claim to bring a myth to an end the more far-reaching, if only implied,
claim is exposed that one brings myth [as such] to an end when one displays one
final myth. The evidence that it is the last myth requires a totality, a perfection
whose fateful effectiveness consists precisely, not in the fulfillment of the
intention that commands us to forgo further production of myths, but rather in its
making it possible for the first time to experience the fascination that does not
allow one to rest until one has imitated the model, equaled the standard that it
sets, or even surpassed it. Under the conditions of the modern age, which cannot
invent godsscarcely even allegoriesany longer, that means to put new, from
abstract to highly abstract titles in the place of the old names: the "I," the world,
history, the unconscious, Being. The type of effort that is involved in satisfying
the paradigm established by Idealism's fundamental myth is exemplified again in
Schopenhauer's transmigration of souls, in Nietzsche's eternal recurrence of the
same, in Scheler's comprehensive schema of the God who is in the process of
becoming, with his division into impulse [Drang] and essence, and in
Heidegger's story of Being, with its anonymous speaker.
Such total schemata are mythical precisely in the fact that they drive out the
desire to ask for more and to invent more to add. While they do not provide
answers to questions, they make it seem as though there is nothing left to ask
about. The standard [Normierung] that a 'final myth' has to satisfy was, if I see it
correctly, first laid down by Schopenhauer. For him the myth of the
transmigration of souls is the epitome of a story that comes as close to
philosophical truth as any story that could be devised. It is to be considered, he
says, as the "non plus ultra" [that than which nothing is higher] of myth, its
richest

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and most important instance. 24Wherein does this quality of the myth of
reincarnations consist? In contrast to Nietzsche's idea of recurrence, it does not
make the world return to what it once was, repeating its passages eternally,
without change. Instead, the subject returns to its world, not as something that is
eternally the same, but rather, according to the measure of what it can expect, it
returns into the form of existence of which it is able to make itself worthy. It is
not the expectation of iron repetition of the course of the world, once that course
has been produced by action, that extracts the highest form of responsibility
from the subject. Its attitude to the world, its epoche* [restraint], approaching
that of the ancient world's 'wise man' once more, relieves it of precisely that
overload of reality, to the extent that it withdraws itself from it.
In 1830, Ludwig Feuerbach resolutely opposed any thought of the
transmigration of souls with the argument that it drew "the great and serious
tragedy of nature into the vulgar sphere of bourgeois, economic Philistinism,"
and made "the deep abysses of nature into shallow country streams" in which
individuals look at their reflections and along which they pick pretty flowers.
Feuerbach had in mind particularly the 'cosmic' transmigration of souls, from
star to star, and reproached it with totally overlooking "nature's terribly serious,
dark and dismal aspects."25But what is instructive in the manner of this
objection is the irresistible urgency of opposing to the great final myth the
outline of a myth, once again a final one, of one's own. Since there is only room
for one final myth, the rivalry between candidates for that position takes on
characteristics of dogmatism. What shakes the one that occupies the position
already is not so much the reproach that it is false as rather the objection that it is
unbearable: that God created the world for the migrating souls in the manner of a
treasury official or an economist. The young Feuerbach sees before him an
entirely different type of mythical god, that of the contemporary poet in his state
of creative absentmindedness: "God forgot himself when he created the world;
no doubt he produced nature intentionally and consciously, but not as a result of
intention and consciousness, but rather as a result of his nature, behind the back
of his consciousness, as it were. It was not as a shrewdly calculating head of a
family or construction foreman, but as a self-forgetful poet that he framed the
great tragedy of nature.'' This is not yet the God who experiments with man's
freedom, the God for whom the world is a risky adventure.

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For that, man not only had to understand himself as an experimenting being,
who can fail himself [the experimenter], just as he was able to create himself;
history also had to contain a greater risk than that of man's success or failure:
that of his possible self-destruction.
Only from this new self-experience does something like a new form of
Scholasticism's cosmological argument arise: If the world is such that it contains
an absolute risk, the God of this world can only be a God of absolute risk. "God's
own destiny, his doing or undoing, is at stake in this universe to whose
unknowing dealings he committed his substance, and man has become the
eminent repository of this supreme and ever betrayable trust. In a sense, he holds
the fate of deity in his hands." Hans Jonas entitled this myth of his a
"hypothetical" one. 26
It has the form of an odyssey, for its hero, so that a world might exist, betook
himself to a foreign place, "divested himself of his deityto receive it back from
the odyssey of time weighted with the chance harvest of unforeseeable temporal
experience: transfigured or even possibly disfigured by it." Organic life is the
summation and the culminating point of this odyssey, an "essentially precarious
and corruptible being, an adventure in mortality." What does this God seek in his
wanderings? He seeks to "try out his hidden essence and discover himself
through the surprises of the world-adventure."
Feuerbach's wish not to see a Philistine behind the world is certainly more than
fulfilled by this God of the great adventure. But is the other intention that Jonas
has with his myth also fulfilled: not only to present, impressively, the risky
character of the world, but also to make plausible to man his responsibility for
more than himselffor the absolute? "We literally hold in our faltering hands the
future of the divine adventure and must not fail Him, even if we would fail
ourselves." As in Nietzsche's idea of recurrence, the issue here is the production
of a most extreme seriousness, which has expanded, in scarcely a century, to
include responsibility for means of which Nietzsche could not have dreamed,
even for a superman.
The weakness of thisyet againfinal myth, which though hypothetical is after all
meant to contain a little truth, is contained in the laconic question why man is
allowed so little carelessness when his God is metaphysical carelessness in such
prototypical excess that he ventured to create a world that is so capable of
miscarriage. Is an ethic of faithful stewardship of the world really the only
logically consistent attitude to the presuppositions of this myth? Would not

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man have to give back to his author, calmly and perhaps even with malicious
pleasure, the responsibility for having chosen to experiment with him?
In the end an equally hypothetical but no less true variant of the myth could not
be excluded, in which man prevents the homecoming of this metaphysical
Odysseus, so that he cannot set out on new adventures. In correspondence with
Jonas, Rudolf Bultmann 'demythologized' Jonas's myth by describing man's
responsibility as the responsibility for someone else's "work of art," and saying
of the absolute subject of the world adventure that this concept of God is
"ultimately an aesthetic concept." 27It is fascinating to see how the master of the
"demythologizing" of the New Testament confronts the man who disclosed the
fundamental myth of Gnosticism and wants to deny him the renewal of the form
of the mythical, as a category that is now only aesthetically satisfying. Jonas
defends God's risky venture, and does not deny that what is at issue is "the joy of
the divinity'' as approbation of the world's success and that this would at the
same time be "relief," because "the danger of miscarriage and betrayal was
great."
Jonas responds to Bultmann's objection by saying that in this hypothetical myth
the aesthetic itself becomes the content of the ethical: "We who want to exist and
therefore accept the sacrifice of incarnation, must justify this incarnation. . . .
Reflection of and response to existence in art, knowledge of existence in science,
are thus man's ethical duty. By fulfilling himself in this manner he fulfills a need
of existence as a whole. Objective knowledge can still be called aesthetic, but its
acquisition is ethical." It is, as Jonas finally admits to the Christian theologian, a
myth of incarnation, but without the presuppositions of the dogma of the
Trinityin other words it is a myth that, since it still keeps open the question of
the failure or success of the world, probably does not want to gamble away the
proviso of messianism either.
Looking back from here at Schopenhauer's "non plus ultra" of a myth, one can
grasp more precisely what its distinction consists in. It is the exclusiveness of the
subject's responsibility to himself and for himself. Schopenhauer gave myth its
highest value by trying to preserve in it, if not to intensify, Kant's concept of the
postulate:i Immortality, he said, should not be an object of knowledge and
should not be a dogma, and if it were it would be a false one because it would
involve

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a confusion of the appearance and the thing in itself. The story of souls remains a
myth, for practical use. It is preferable to the myth of the posthumous judgment
of an individual, unrepeatable life, "partly because it fits the truth more closely,
partly because it is less transcendent. . . . " 28If it were possible to anticipate
with certainty that a judgment will be held over the quality of an individual life
and what happened to occasion it, this would necessarily destroy the morality of
the actions in it. Calculation of results in terms of reward and punishment would
be compelling, and thus the motive of respect for the moral law would be
nullified. If one expects another life that is dependent on the quality of the
present one, one need not see the improved conditions of one's return as the
reward of moral conductone can desire them as the aggregate of the
preconditions under which it would be easier to satisfy the demands of the
[moral] law. Thus only when it is expanded does the postulate of immortality
become the myth that excludes calculation.
Kant himself had given serious consideration to the idea of the cosmic
transmigration of souls, when he was able to pronounce only an infinite
progress, on the part of the moral subject, as adequate to the absolute demand
posed by the moral law. But how was such a progress conceivable? Surely only
if the moral quality of each finite course of life permitted one to expect more
favorable conditions for moral action in the altered world of the next life. In
other words, a reduction of the danger of moral resignation in view of the
divergence between worthiness of happiness and the reality of
happinesshowever little the moral subject may make the convergence of the two
a condition of its submission to the moral law.
If one imagines such altered life-worlds as altered in regard to the socialization
of moral subjects, who have less need to fear that others will be intent on the
advantages of immoral action, then it is natural to picture them not as the
relevant future, in each case, of human history but rather as involving transition
to other cosmic bodies. While a philosophy of history could postulate that the
appropriately qualified subject returns in a period of more highly developed
legality, so as to obtain the greater ease of morality in it, the myth of the cosmic
transmigration of souls can postulate the leap in spaceinto other worlds, that
isand assume the existence there of beings of a higher rationality as partners in
moral intersubjectivity.

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Admittedly, the result of the cosmic transmigration of souls contradicts

Schopenhauer's retraction of individuation; in contrast to the latter, it justifies the
world by taking the edge off the contingency of the spatial and temporal
conditions of this existencein other words, it reconciles individuation and
dependence on the world. To that extent, given Schopenhauer's model of the
highest form of myth, a positive answer to the question of the reason for
existence, an 'ontodicy' [justification of existence], is also possible.
One has first to exhibit this 'ontocidy' as a logical outcome of the idea of rebirth
and the transmigration of souls, in order to contrast to it Schopenhauer's refusal
to accept this logic. If, for him, existence is only the manifestation of will, and
the latter is the basic cause of suffering, the augmentation of the moral subject
can only augment, along with it, the harm done by individuation. Consequently,
in his version of the myth the transmigration of souls is only the recompense for
suffering that one has inflicted: the reincarnation of the one who caused
suffering on the side of those who have to suffer. A mythical ius talionis [law of
punishment in kind] requires that "all sufferings which in life one inflicts on
other beings must be expiated in a subsequent life in this world, through
precisely the same sufferings. . . . " 29This equivalence evades every positive
claim, because "the highest reward [is one that] the myth can only express
negatively in the language of this world by the promise, which is so often
repeated, that [those who deserve it] shall never be born again." So all
transposition of merit takes place on the negative side only, while on the positive
side the lines disappear, the convergence between deserving happiness and
enjoying it is denied.
This asymmetry is the exact reverse of that in the case of Kant, where the
postulate of immortality is admitted and fortified in the claim of one who
deserves happiness to become happy, but all that is left for one who does not
deserve it is that he can have no interest whatever in immortality.
Anyone who considers these forms of a 'final myth' to be obsolete rubbish will
be mistaken; the oppressiveness of contingency, which lies behind the myth,
does not cease. Ernst Bloch returns, in 1977, to a discussion of death and
immortality conducted in Königstein on the day of Adorno's death in 1969, and
desires, on the day of the murder of Jürgen Ponto,j that it be published in the
final volume of his Gesammelte Schriften [Collected writings]. The interval that
is encompassed

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by these dates is perhaps itself an aspect of the subject. 30A 'philosophical

eschatology' must also consider when its questions can be posed and when it is
inexcusable to refuse to listen to them. It will no longer be able to produce
proofs that this or that conception of the end of all things and of man's 'last
things' is the correct one. But it wall want to analyze the stock of such
conceptions and discuss what they have meant and can still mean to the extent
that they find people who are convinced by them, or even merely find agnostics
who want to know the meaning of something that they do not believe they can
know.
What, seriously, is the meaning of the transmigration of souls, if it was both the
final and the most highly selected myth? If it was meant to be a representation of
the highest form of conceivable justice, its problem lies in the fact that everyone
now alive would already suffer the consequences of such justice in his present
existence. But evidently no one is aware of this fact. Hence the transmigration of
souls appears to us as an identity without any consequences. It remains without
the consciousness of ever being the same one again, and consequently without
the serious expectation of having to experience, oneself, the pain that others
suffer as a result of one's actions. If I cannot know who I was before I was what I
am, or who I will be after I have been this, both things seem not to concern me.
Even as the one who is struck, no one feels the justice that lies in the fact that he
was once the one who did the striking, or even merely that he could have
been.31
That too is myth as distance from fear and hope: an immortality that one would
not need to fear. But also an immortality the absence of which one cannot look
forward to, since the retraction of individuation does not mean that one who
existed at one time, if he reaches his goal, will still be affected by having
reached it. He deserves not to exist any longerbut consequently, by the same
token, he does not deserve ever to have existed.

Translator's Notes
a. The term Idealism should be understood to refer to German Idealism, as the
terms Idealismus and idealistisch generally do in German.
b. " . . . macht aus der Geschichte wieder eine Geschichte. . . . " The words for
story and history are identical in German (as they are in the Romance languages:
histoire), distinguished only by the articles employed.

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c. Apollo's name has been traced to the Greek verb apollumi, to destroy.
d. On historical "assertion requirements" see the author's discussion of the
changing system of questions in our tradition, in The Legitimacy of the Modern
Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pt. 1, chap. 6.
e. Verweilen, to tarry, is what Faust wagered his soul that he would never ask a
moment to do. At the end of Faust II, blinded and tricked into thinking that he is
guiding the construction of a new life for humanity, he does ask it.
f. Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the
Psychical, trans. C. M. Williams (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1914), p.
30, n. 1.
g. Pêche "peach," in French, is very similar to péché, sin.
h. In ekstatisch, here, we need to be aware of the Greek root, ekstasis, literally,
"standing outside" (a sense of the term that was revived by Heidegger), as well
as our emotionally tinged idea of ecstasy as exalted delight, trance, and so on.
i. For Kant, God, freedom, and immortality are postulates presupposed by
practical reason, though they are not objects of any possible knowledge. See "On
the postulates of pure practical reason in general," in Critique of Practical
Reason, trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), pp. 137ff.
j. Jürgen Ponto, a leading West German banker, was murdered in his home by
members of a 'leftist' underground group on July 31, 1977.

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PART III
THE THEFT OF FIRE CEASES TO BE SACRILEGE

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1
The Reception of the Sources Produces the Sources of the Reception
There are supposed to be Malay peoples who are so light, so magical, almost
formless, butterfliesbut it is the South Seas, it is a dream, it is not us. Europe is
the continent of abysses and shadows. Just think how in our brightest land, in
Greece, Prometheus was forced onto the rock, and how he suffered!
Gottfried Benn to Käthe yon Porada

One of man'seven contemporary man'sfundamental experiences is the transitory

quality of flame, of fire, in reality and also as a metaphor for something that is
extinguished as easily as life is extinguished. The difficulty, which has become
an unusual one, of not having a "light" [in German, "having no fire"] is now only
an echo of the consciousness that fire is something that can be lost. If this is
something that need not give us grounds for concern, that is only because we
have learned, and know, how to make it. Only a retrospective consideration of
man's early history that penetrates into the depths of time allows us to guess at
the borderline situation in which the accidental acquisition of fire had passed
over into its permanent possession, perhaps under the pressure of a change in
climate. Myth touches on this thresholdone of the lowerings of the level of the
absolutism of realitywith the idea that fire had to be stolen from the gods and
brought to men.
Something that was always incomprehensible, too, was the self-sameness of the
flame, which moves and can also stand still again,

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as though it does not use itself up and as though it is the form given to a matter.
What actually happens in combustion is, historically, one of the things man most
recently came to understand. Where he needs and uses fire, where he attributes
part of his technical skill and his capacity for culture to it, there arises, as with
other things, the suspicion that it would eventually after all have to use itself up,
become weaker, degenerate, and require renewal. As late as the Stoics, this idea
is the basis of a systematic account of the 'world fire': Its initial power of giving
form gradually weakens and degenerates into a power of mere destruction. It
puts a final end to each world epoch with a world combustion. This cycle, too, is
seen in the perspective of an organic background metaphor: Fire has its
vegetative periodicity, its world seasons. How impressive is the idea of fire's
self-creation is shown by the worldwide distribution of cults of fire renewal.
They still contain something of the idea that while fire is, indeed, a protected
possession at the center of life and of religious rites, this precious thing must
nevertheless be surrendered, in the interests of its purity, in a great gesture of
humility in the face of its quality as something that cannot be taken for
grantedthat its possession must be risked in order to be maintained.
One would expect old handicrafts that depend on the use and possession of fire
to be closely associated with and to lend expression to its fostering through
ritual. If, following the hypothesis that was at first restricted to ancient Egypt,
one regards the cult as the more original element in comparison to the myth, and
the story as a mere interlinear version of the stereotypewhich has become
unintelligibleof a ritual, then one will recognize Prometheus as the old god of the
renewal of the fire in the workshops of the Attic potters and smiths. To them, the
fire that gives form had to have a higher origin. That is why the craftsmen in the
Kerameikos quarter of Athens received their annually renewed fire from runners
bearing torches from the distant altar of Prometheus in the grove of Academic
Apollo. Such palpable phenomena are the first stage on the way to a
generalization that extends the idea to the lives of everyone.
The acknowledgment of dependency, in rituals of worship, is a way of making
sure of continuance and nondestruction. Prometheus guarantees to men that their
culture cannot be interfered with. Only he, as a Titan, could have stolen fire, not
those for whose preservation he did it. For only he could endure and outlast, and
in the end triumph

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over, his punishment for the crime. According to one presentation of the myth,
Prometheus is not fully liberated; he continues to carry with him, through the
world, the chain by which he was fastened by the leg, and at its end a piece of
rock broken from the Caucasus.
The myth does not allow his figure to return to its initial condition. It is a
representation of irreversibility. This only becomes clear when one sees the theft
of fire as the provision of the technique by which to produce fire, as the
psychoanalytic interpretation of myth especially has to do because otherwise it
does not get the archaic fire-making equipment that it needs: the rotating rubbing
stick and the softer board, with a socket, against which it rubs. When one knows
how to make fire, one has become resistant to divine wrath. That is why Zeus
simply cannot reverse the theft of fire by taking it away from men, so as to keep
it as the exclusive property of heaven, its place of origin. In the end nothing has
changed for the gods, but everything has changed for men. Having been created
by the Titans, they must reckon with the ill will of Olympian Zeus, but they have
someone who has survived that ill will and prevents it from having
consequences, someone whom they can count on as having tamed Zeus.
This diagram gives the potters' god a disposition to guarantee more than the
possession of energy by his craftsmen, namely, the entire form of life of
mentheir having outgrown, through culture, the naked state of natureand
ultimately their 'theory,' as something that continues to need flame only in the
metaphorical function of light. The Prometheus myth represents the archaic
division of powers in its pure form. One may not import into this the idea that
the myth gave Prometheus the motive of love for men. They may have first
become his creatures because it had long been established that he patronized
them, and their Titanic origin was thus at least connected to the one member of
the discarded generation of the gods who had been an ally of Zeus against the
dynasty of Cronus. It is entirely in the manner of myth when we learn nothing
about why Prometheus is prepared to risk Zeus's wrath and persecution in order
to show so much favor to men. What is decisive is not that there was a relation
between the potter and his products but rather the image of the unrepentant,
unweakening one who, while a captive and tortured, remains the stronger.
It was inevitable that the giver of fire would be related to burnt offerings in
worship. That is why not only was the fire for the potters

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and smiths delivered by torch-bearing runners at the festivals of Prometheus and

Hephaestus, but also at the Great Panathenaea the sacrificial fire was brought in
a race to the heap of wood burned in honor of Athena. That will have produced
the myth of the relationship between the two. When Athena aids Prometheus in
the theft of fire by secretly giving him access to the sun, it should not be
forgotten that she is the daughter of the Titaness Metis, whom Zeus had made
pregnant and then swallowed because an oracle of Gaea had warned him that
Metis, though she would bear him a daughter, the next time would bear him a
son who would be destined to dethrone him. In every contact with the tribe of
the Titans there is hidden the germ of a conspiracy; there is suspicion pointing in
the direction of the gods' fate of being supplanted in power. If Goethe is logical,
though genealogically mistaken, in ascribing to Prometheus a father-son conflict
with Zeus,a what is involved in Athena's assistance in the theft of fire is more
nearly an old rebellion. Homer still knows something of a plot between Athena
and Hera and Poseidon to shackle the father; but Thetis foresaw this and scared
off the conspirators with the help of one of the hundred-handed ones [the
hekatoncheiresgiants].
Prometheus's relation to the fire used in sacrifices contains another point of
departure for his friendliness to men. The possibility that he might come to men's
aid in resisting the excessive demands of their gods and their priests is a natural
one for the fire-bringer. That he should receive organized worship in return for
helping men to arrive at an easier mode of sacrifice, in which they eat the good
meat of the sacrificial animals themselves and leave only the bones and the fat
for the gods, is a justification of which only myth's deft touch would be capable.
It may even be that the more serious conflict over the theft of fire was at one
time derived from this, since the gift of fire need not originally have involved
theft. Zeus's withholding fire from menthe fire that they owed to the gift of
lightning from heavenwould originally have been a punishment for the stinginess
in sacrifice that showed itself in the sacrificial deception.b Men's unauthorized
enlargement of their share of the product of nature, the curtailment of a practice
of sacrifice that was expanding beyond what people could keep up, would be the
oldest background, and Prometheus's defiance, with the theft of fire, of Zeus's
cynical verdict "Let them eat their flesh raw" would only be secondary. Of
course,

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to put that in Zeus's mouth would still have been entirely impossible for Hesiod;
it first appears as a late interpolation by Lucian.
Kurt von Fritz has justly concluded that the sacrificial deception had originally
been successful. It would have been carried out by the mortals themselves, not
directly by Prometheus but on his advice. What Hesiod relates about this would
then be the reformed version, which no longer wants to believe the highest god
capable of succumbing to the cunning of the patron of men. This conjecture is
probable if only because it was only success in the sacrificial deception that
could make permanent the unpunished reduction in the share of the product of
agriculture that went to the gods and priests. In fact the circumstance that in the
common form of animal sacrifice the gods did not receive the better portion is a
suitable expression of the stage in the decline of the will to submission that is
represented in myth, and especially in the individual myth of Prometheus.
Nothing had more pressing need of the sanction of myth than refraining from
zeal in sacrifice.
As unclear as the beginning of the story of Prometheusthe Titan's definite
commitment to man's fateseems, then, in what has been handed down to us, the
versions of its upshot are equally various. On the one hand there is what persists
in narrative in our own time, and has become emblematic: the chaining of
Prometheus to the Caucasus, or elsewhere, where his liver is eaten by the eagle,
and daily restored; on the other hand there is the liberation of the Titan by the
greatest of Zeus's sons, or else under the pressure of his secret knowledge of the
Olympian's possible fall as a result of his next paternity. The question of the age
of the two denouements has often been posed and never been satisfactorily
answered. We can accept that as meaning that both of them do justice to the
fundamental need, which is addressed in the myth, to see the permanence of the
human possession of culture, the irreversibility of the development despite
Zeus's ill will and revenge, established. For this purpose it is enough that the
Titan who is allied with men defies Zeus, whether as an unbending and immortal
sufferer or as one who is liberated and returns home to his sanctuary in Athens.
Something that is instructive in regard to the possible priority of one version is
the analogy that can be seen in Prometheus's brothers, the Titans Atlas and
Menoeceus, who are sons of Cronus's brother Iapetus and are thus members of
the same generation as Zeus. Menoeceus is struck down by a bolt of Zeus's
lightning and Atlas is condemned to carry the vault of the heavens. Here there
are evidently

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no liberations or pardons. But Prometheus does have a special position, because

he had been an ally of Zeus in the struggle with the Titans. His deliverance from
the eagle, by Hercules, is attested on Attic vases as very old. Here the figure of
the deliverer is just as important as that of the delivered; not only because the
former is designated by myth for such acts of deliverance but even more because
as a son of Zeus he really has greater freedom of action vis-à-vis the father.
Goethe could not have made Prometheus the son of Zeus if the figure of
Hercules had come to his attention in time. The potter modeling man out of clay
in his workshop, whom Goethe had before him, is still too distant from the other
deeds and sufferings to already have the appearance of passion and of needing
liberation that go with a Sturm und Drangc god. Hercules is a decisive
participant in the definitive transformation of what one might call the overall
mythical situation. The extirpator of monsters also becomes the softener of his
father, who is warned against new procreations and has to be satisfied with the
last and mightiest of his sons.
The question of what was in Hesiod's original text and what is interpolation is
controversial. He has difficulties with anything that puts Zeus's position in an
ambiguous light. So he does not include Prometheus's final liberation. In the
Theogony the chaining of the Titan to a column or a postnot yet to a rock, and
without any other indication of locationis in the present tense. Hercules is
allowed to do something to alleviate Prometheus's torment, by killing the eagle
and putting an end to the eating of his liver, but may not put an end to the chains
or the post. It is understandable that Zeus does not permit the deliverer from
monsters to do more than kill the eagle, because the variant of the story in which
Prometheus is unchained is inescapably bound up with the assumption that
Zeus's power had been at stake and that he had only been able to preserve it at
the cost of releasing Prometheus. This is something that Hesiod cannot and may
not speak of. Since Aeschylus knows the version involving Prometheus's
liberation, it may have been an Attic local myth relating to an interest in having
Prometheus return to his sanctuary, while to Hesiod his continuing in chains may
have been a better guarantee of the continuance of Zeus's power. This conclusion
is analogous to the handling of the hekatoncheires [the ''hundred-handed"
giants], who are freed from their fetters in return for the aid they give to Zeus,
but are nevertheless sent back to their place of exile in the underworld.

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One who is supposed to be the final god can no longer be capable of being
outwitted. That throws our attention back to the initial problem of the deceptive
sacrifice, and determines that Zeus knew about the trick of extracting the meat
from it. He does not prevent it, even though he sees through it; no doubt so as to
put the advocate of the rights of men in the wrong and to let his rationality
appear as shortsighted stupidity. For it subjects Prometheus to the necessity of
fetching back from heaven the fire that is taken away from men. With that, the
mythical configuration begins to be suited to tragedy.
With his eyes open, Zeus lets Prometheus, in his efforts on behalf of men,
become not only ridiculous but also guilty. Thus he can assume, in his harsh
persecution of Prometheus, the just role of one who punishes wrongdoing. This
basic pattern of tragedy, over which Plato becomes indignant, is still the pattern
followed by Paul, who was familiar with tragedy. He has his God promulgate a
law that man cannot comply with and that inevitably makes him guilty. The
story that underlies Paul's Letter to the Romans is the story of a tragic hero
whose deatheven if it is only the death of one with whom he is mystically
identifiedis the only way out of a situation that he got into precisely as a result of
the Pharisaic will not to incur guilt. What helps him is the replacement of reality
by a symbol: baptism into the death of another person.
Prometheus's sacrificial deception, too, is the production of a symbolbecause
what he prepared and offered in place of the real sacrificial animal is an image, a
substitution, a sign. From that time on, symbolic pieces of the sacrificial animal
could be burned on the altars of the godsthe deception could be made permanent
and the god could be expected to put up with this because the guilt was
delegated to the Titan who was punished. But the higher concept of a mere token
of one's intent is also, at the same time, a dangerous one, because the god who is
content with a symbol, who is no longer thought of as one who participates
realistically by partaking of the sacrificial offering, must now weigh the giver's
disposition, must in the end even look into his heart. That is what myth had not
known and what, once again, makes religious lawsshort of the realism of
atrocious and enormous sacrificesimpossible to perform or comply with.
When it seems, in Hesiod, as though Prometheus's second transgression, the theft
of fire from heaven, is only the consequence of the

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punishment that had been inflicted on men as a result of his first transgression,
the deprivation of sacrifice, this will be the result of secondary systematization.
It once again lets Zeus appear to be in the right, especially since the dispute in
Mekone about shares of the sacrifice designates the end of an epoch in which
gods and men had dined together. What seems more original than this
construction is that Zeus saw in men alien creatures of the Titans and did not
grant them the fire that they needed, not indeed for naked survival, but certainly
for an easier existence. In Hesiod's construction the deprivation of fire is not the
original, savage condition of man, whom Prometheus helps to get onto the path
of civilization, but instead is already the doom resulting from the gods' having
been deceived. Consequently the theft of fire in the hollow stem of a plant
(narthex *) must have been not so much the stealing of an element that belongs
only to heaven and to the gods as, rather, frustration of the punishment, and
mockery of the god. The fact that the deprivation of fire is already the
consequence of an act that was unfriendly toward the gods conceals the hostility
of Zeus toward men that is founded in the gods' dynastic proceedings. The idea,
renewed by Horace, that there are elements in nature that man has no right to,
whose possession or mastery is sacrilege: water, in the arrogance of seafaring,
air, in the flight with Daedalus that ends fatally for Icarus, and fire, in
Prometheus's theftthis sketch of a system, which spares only earth as an element
fitting for man, seems to have been originally foreign to the Prometheus story.
In the version given to it in Hesiod's Erga [Works and Days], the etiology of
work is connected to the gift of fire; the illegitimate easing of life by means of
the heavenly element is compensated for by the toil of prolonging life with its
aid. Entirely independent of this, in both versions of the myth the epitome of all
the misfortunes that man suffered as a result of Prometheus's favors is the advent
of woman. She is, as it were, the god's counterdeception of mankind.
Hephaestus, the blacksmith-god, was given the job of creating a mirage that was
to combine stimulation of desire and lifelong vexation. If one disregards a
psychological account of the poet's reasons for describing the origin of woman in
this way, then the core of the poetic construction is the strict symmetry of crime
and punishment: With the same irrevocability with which man had come into the
possession of fire, he is committed, through Pandora, to his sexuality. The poet
sees this as a condition, designed to be prone to illusion, in which man was to
undergo what

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Zeus had been meant to undergo and had undergone when he was exposed to
ridicule by the theft of fire. The fact that Zeus concludes his speech announcing
man's punishment with scornful laughter shows that he has arrived at the goal of
his desire for revenge.
What Hephaestus accomplishes with the ingenious demiurgic production of
Pandora is the correlate, in the realm of mechanics, of the version according to
which Prometheus himself, as the potter-god, made men and put life into them
with Athena's help. The Athenians always denied that the tutelary goddess of
their city provided more than help for Prometheusthat she also loved him. In this
way they let it appear as though Zeus, in order to gloss over his passion for
revenge and his cruelty, in connection with Prometheus, had started the rumor
that Prometheus had been seduced into a love affair by Athena. Thus everyone
had to understand that the strongest means of coercion were called for in order to
protect the virgin goddess.
The Prometheus myth, whatever form it appears in, has culture-critical
implications. It is not a matter of indifference whether Zeus regards men as a
foreign relic, in his cosmos, of hostile gods, and would rather they did not exist,
so that he wants to make them disappear into Hades and cease to be visible, like
the other members of the past dynasties, or whether men were attempting, using
cunning and knavery, to secure for themselves an advantage in the world and an
increased share of its products, contrary to old rights of the gods, merely in order
to provide themselves with a pleasant world. If the theft of fire was Prometheus's
defense against Zeus's desire to destroy men, then this deed and those for whom
it is done have the almost self-evident justification of self-preservation; if it is
the thwarting of a punishment decreed by Zeus, then the culture that is made
possible by fire is originally founded on unjust gain and on illegitimate desires.
If Zeus, after the conflict over the sacrifice, not only withholds fire but conceals
their bios [life, means of living] from men, then what they win, under
Prometheus's protection, is self-preservation, but at the same time they also,
indirectly, provide themselves with more than what was meant to be withheld
from them. Thus the Erga explains the origin of work as the result of an
impoverishment of the world, a world that had absolutely been intended to
provide sustenance to man: "For the gods keep hidden from men the means of
life. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year
even without working."d All of that operates on the level of

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punishment and ill will, certainly, but not of the will to destroy. Still, men want
more than just to live.
The other aspect is a more nearly allegorical interpretation of the withholding
and conveyance of fire. Men are by nature stupid, like the animals, not worthy of
existence. Zeus wants to destroy them and assumes that they cannot last in the
state they are in. Then it is Prometheus who first makes men into men. This
'deeper interpretation' of the myth is already on the verge of interpreting fire as
the faculty of creation and invention, because it is a precondition of the
transformation and refinement of all materials from nature. Culture, then, is a
form both of instruction and of the awakening of self-initiated action.
Prometheus is not first the potter who makes men and then the fire-bringer;
rather, he creates men by means of fire; it is their differentia specifica [specific
difference], as it will be again in anthropological paleontology.
The story of Pandora relates unmistakably to the theory of culture that casts
suspicion on the origin of abundance and of the superfluous. In that connection
the most striking characteristic of the gods' dispatching of woman would be the
noveltybewildering for a masculine world that is to be pictured as warlikeof
waste. What this adds is a trifle, an annoyance, not a threat, in comparison to the
secure possession of fire and to the easing of the burden of sacrificial cults. That
is why the tendency toward the burlesque that adheres to the figures of culture
heroes and no doubt also to that of Prometheus can pass over to Pandora: She
brings the evils, but she does not take away the gain, for which Prometheus takes
responsibility. So one will not be able to say that Prometheus achieved nothing
for men in the endthat each of his tricks was frustrated by a countertrick, most
clearly by the dispatching of Pandora. Considered seriously, that is nothing in
comparison to the acquisition of the definitive practicability of existence.
One can see what Hesiod strives for and would like to achieve, but one also
perceives the insuperable resistance of his mythical material. The concealment
of fire, of the bios, has gone to the heart of the possibility of life. The Erga can
depict the burden of this life and its intensification by the extravagance of
women, but it can and must assume the elementary possibility of this life. To be
sure, the figure of Pandora becomes demonized in that her consequences go
beyond what is appropriate to Hesiod's portrayal of female characteristics, for

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his male audience: Among the evils in the jar that she opened there were, above
all, "countless plagues that wander amongst men." But even these are, as it were,
fragments of Zeus's will to destroy, of which Hesiod does not and cannot speak.
For him the interpretation of Pandora's name as "the all-giving one" is also no
longer available, since after all her jar only contains the worst part of everything.
A picture on a red-figured mixing jug kept in Oxford shows Pandora with
outspread arms, emerging from the earth: For an earth divinity the name would
be intelligible, as would be her demonization for the singer's audience, loyal to
Olympus.
Aeschylus, in his Prometheus trilogy, put the theme of tragedy in its purest
mythical form: It would be better for man not to exist. As a formula,
Bacchylides, in his fifth ode, first placed this in the mouth of Hercules, who
sheds tears one single time, in Hades, over the fate of Meleager: "For mortals,
the best thing is not to be born and not to see the light of the sun." In Aeschylus's
Prometheia, that holds not as the irremediability of a subjective condition of
despair but rather as an objective finding of the myth, expressed not only in the
new god's intention to destroy the creatures produced by Cronus's generation but
even in Prometheus's acknowledgment that that intention is justified. It makes
the myth into more than the mere story of the successful assertion of the right of
human beings to exist. Prometheus enforces the revaluation of the contemptible
species of one day into a world magnitude that even Zeus could not make
invisible again by making it disappear in Hades. To have turned the objective
worthlessness of human beings into more than their capacity to existinto their
worthiness to existis an offense against the world order that Prometheus himself
does not deny.
The myth, as it is presented in the tragedy, does not even have the suffering
Titan assert a higher right justifying the preservation of human beings.
Prometheus depicts this species as deserving, rather, to perish; it was composed
of thickheaded creatures, homeless troglodytes. If, to be capable of survival, they
had only lacked fire, then Zeus would have been wrong to despise them; but they
lacked fire only as the final step in completing and making feasible the skills that
Prometheus brought them, before which they had vegetated, bewildered, with
dull senses. The chorus of Oceanides [daughters of Oceanus] is right:
Prometheus overrates human beings. But he was only able to 'create' them
because he had pulled them out of complete worthlessness. He

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could not provide them with any legitimacy in Zeus's cosmos, but he could make
it impossible for Zeus to implement his verdict that they were not worthy of
existence. If Zeus had wanted to drive the humans to despair so as to make them
bring about their own obliteration from the cosmos, Prometheus had frustrated
this by giving them a reality, fire, and an illusion, "blind hope." The illusionary
element points to the fact that it could not be a question purely of making the
humans happy; they were deceived about their status naturalis [natural state],
and that also was a misfortune.
Aeschylus found a solution to the difficulties that Hesiod had still had with hope,
this most obstinate of human characteristics. In the Pandora story the woman's
curiosity had let all the evils escape and descend upon mankind; only hope was
left behind, for the woman who was stricken with horror, in the jar that had been
her dowry. As an illusionary connection to the future, hope would originally
have been one of the evils; but, precisely as such, would it not have been
allowed to have its effect? As the real prospect of better futures it would
scarcely have belonged among the evils in Pandora's dowry. Here, then, Hesiod
evidently had not fully worked out how to deal with his inherited obligatory
material.
The tragic writer homogenizes this for the first time by means of the simple
device of making Prometheus the author of a subjective will to existence, on the
part of human beings, in opposition to their objective existential state: by means
of hope. To the chorus, which stands around the fettered one cornpassionately,
he admits his most radical piece of cunning: keeping back from human beings
the groundlessness of their existence. No doubt in order to persuade them to
accept fire, he had prevented them, by means of the blindness of hope, from
looking their true lot in the eye. For he admits this even before he speaks of
having given them the fire with which they were still supposedat the moment
that this is being saidto be about to discover many skills. Prometheus does, at
bottom, what the gods also do elsewhere in [Greek] tragedy: He acts by inducing
delusion. "Blind hopes" are his form of ate * [folly, delusion].
So trickery is involved when humans survive in the world. It would not have
been enough to make them a present of one thing or another; they had to arrive
at the point of gaining new possibilities for themselves. True, this becomes an
affront to Zeus and to his intention of bringing human beings to what, in his
view, is the best thing for them: not to

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exist at all. But the trick does not deceive the god, only the humans. That is
proclaimed by the chorus, which while it is full of compassion for the suffering
friend of the humans, puts him in the wrong in the conflict with Zeus. It shares
Zeus's verdict regarding the unworthiness of the humans to exist in the world.
The chorus does what is appropriate in the circumstances: It comforts, but it does
not excuse.
If this is a tragedy in which, in an extreme intensification of the 'givens' of the
myth, the issue is not only man's contented existence but also the prevention of
his nonexistence, that nevertheless does not make man himself an actor in the
drama. Friedrich Schlegel was to take offense at the fact that the hero of the
tragedy is a god, even though its subject is the existence of man. But only if a
god stood up to the son of Cronus could the conflict over mankind arise at all,
and end for them in a reliable, consistent way. For only a god could survive the
deadliness of the punishment, could become a monument to the indestructibility
of mankind and force Zeus into what is called, in the language of politics, the
"recognition of accomplished facts." He who stepped forward to resist the
destruction of mankind had to be indestructible. Those who were indirectly
affected by this decision had no business in the arena where it was made. The
fact is already given expression in the ancient Hypothesis ['argument':
introductory summary], when it describes as characteristic of this, as of other
tragedies by Aeschylus, that it is not only splendid and important figures that fill
the scene, but exclusively gods: theia panta prosopa *, and, moreover, only the
most venerable among them: presbutatoi ton* theon*.
Now one of the figures of the tragedy is not a god, though at the end of her
journey she was elevated to divinity by the Egyptians. This is Io, the daughter of
the river god Inachus, who is turned into a doe by Hera, out of jealousy, and is
pursued through the world by a gadfly. In her flight she falls into the Scythian
wilderness in which Prometheus suffers his banishment from intercourse with
and sight of human beings. As Hephaestus, the underling who carries out the
sentence, says, Prometheus is permitted to perceive neither the sound nor the
form of the mortals, having "too great love" for whom had been the motive
leading to his transgression. Persecuted Io presents herself to him in all her
miserytwo victims of the Olympians face one another. At the same time
Prometheus's function of providing an escape from the persecution of the new
gods is paradigmatically displayed. The Titan becomes Io's helper in her flight
and Zeus's accuser before the

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chorus, which, after the guilty victim, now has the innocent one before it. The
importance of the Io scene for the argument leaps out: The objective justice of
Zeus's position with respect to Prometheus, based on the worthlessness of human
beings in their original condition, falls into ambiguity as a result of the way in
which he so manifestly functions like a brutal tyrant toward othersand perhaps,
therefore, toward all.
Contrary to those who despise the Io scene of the tragedyabove all, contrary to
those who thought they had to deny Aeschylus's authorship of the play entirely,
on account of itit must be accorded the highest respect. Not to rest satisfied with
the warding off of the divine intention of destroying mankind, but to show the
restitution of trust in existence in a figure, in the mortal woman who is tragically
deprived of the meaning of her life, was an idea endowed with pure significance,
full of metaphysical consolation in view of the vision of the self-refutation of the
tyrannical world god, for whom his first glimpse of the abyss was still in store.
When she encounters Prometheus, Io, in her deer shape, is on the edge of
despair, at the end of her will to live. What would be gained by going on living,
she asks, and arrives at the conclusion arrived at by all the figures of tragedy,
that it would be betterif it is too late to be allotted the fate never to have
existedto end her torment once and for all. Then, admittedly, Zeus would have
carried out this, too, of his threatsthat he would destroy the line of Inachus, the
founder of the dynasty of Argos. So in this encounter Prometheus is in the same
situation as he was with the whole species of human beings. What he had not yet
wanted to venture on their behalf becomes unavoidable for him as a result of
seeing Io's despair: to shout aloud his mother Gaea's secret that there may be an
end to Zeus's tyranny. An important feature, here, is that he has already
possessed, and protected, this foreknowledge, rather than receiving it now for the
first time, ad hoc.
But the most important transformation or final formation of the myth consists,
not in the fact that his own liberation would not have been enough to bring him
to apply his most decisive instrument against Zeus, but rather in the ambiguous
content of the prophecy itself. Since, as a result of the warning, Zeus will not
take the fatal step of begetting a son more powerful than himself, the poet and
his audience must be credited with the ability to understand the prophecy of the
fall of

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the tyrant metaphorically as well: Prometheus will make an end of the tyranny
by taming the ruler. Io herself, if it is to be possible for her to be consoled in her
extremest desperation, may and must understand the visionary decree in its
drastic, literal sense. The desperation of human beings ends where the god
experiences the limits of his power.
Prometheus, then, is not only the unbending sufferer, who demonstrates his
immortality on the crag as defiance, but also the one who insists on repeating his
actionas between the deception in sacrifice and the theft of fire, so also between
saving mankind and saving the persecuted individualand thus claims general
validity for the deed, the punishment of which he suffers. He shows the horned
Io the path of her future, prophetically describing to her the long flight all the
way to the Nile delta, where she will become the mother of a new race. After her
retransformation into human form she will have a son from ZeusEpaphuswhom
he begets in a more restrained manner than otherwise, namely, by merely
touching her back. In this way, also, he provides his detyrannization in his
relation to her.
Another deep meaning on the part of the poet is contained in the fact that by
saving Io, Prometheus saved the ancestress of his future liberator. Stepping far
back, he sets up this construction and combines with it an indication of the
multiplicity of generations that would still be necessary and the distance to be
covered by their descendants down to Alcmene. She, once again by Zeus, will
become the mother of Hercules. This penetration of the depths of time gives an
ideaalmost a direct perceptionof the length of the Titan's torment even after he
threatens Zeus with the secret from Gaea. Myth, after all, has no other concept of
time but that of the piling up of generations, across which the long-term actions
and reactions take place. Io is a victim of the young tyrant; but her name already
opens a prospect of a last time when Zeus will make a mortal woman yield to
himafter Alcmene, and after the potent offspring of this most subtle and artful
deception, he will no longer trust himself to beget sons without danger. When he
kills Zeus's lightning-eagle, this Hercules already bears the mark (no doubt only
subsequently toned down) of rebellion, or at least of the demonstration that the
god's power is reduced.
Just as Prometheus's action points far into the future, its roots reach equally far
back into the past. Consequently the poet augmented the mythical genealogy,
going all the way to the primeval beginning:

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Prometheusbypassing a generation, that of Iapetus and Clymeneis a direct

offspring of Gaea, the original mother (whose origin was in Chaos) of all
dynasties. That is the source of his foreknowledge of the destinies of the world
of the gods, which is decisive in his confrontation with Zeus. Zeus has to send
his messenger, Hermes, to the criminal on the rock, to press himlike an
extortionist, threatening him with lightningto surrender his knowledge of the
future of the gods. When Prometheus boasts of having helped Zeus already in his
seizure of power, he shows how his power, which now appears so feeble, carried
aloft the Olympian, who now appears just as overwhelming as Prometheus is
weak. His own story encompasses that of Zeus, as though the latter were a mere
dynastic episode.
The turning that led to victory in the struggle with the Titans had resulted from
the fact that Prometheus's brothers preferred to rely on their strength rather than
on his counsel, whereas he himself, following the primeval knowledge of his
mother, counts on cunning as against force. That is meant to indicate that Zeus,
in his confrontation with Prometheus, is close to repeating the Titans' mistake,
by treating his ally and adviser as an insubordinate rival. As a political reflex,
Aeschylus makes the chorus of the Oceanides lament the fact that there is a
sickness in the nature of tyrannis [absolute power] that makes it mistrust its tried
friends and rely on clients and favorites. It is also supposed to have been their
flattery and acclamation, then, that made Zeus plan to put a creation worthy of
the new dynasty in place of the human species. Prometheus upset this
calculation.
Right at the beginning of Prometheus Bound the spectator learns from the mouth
of Cratus [Strength], who together with Bia [Force] drags the prisoner to the
rock, that not only must justice be executed against the Titan, in the name of the
gods, but also a lesson must be imparted: Prometheus should submit to Zeus's
tyrannis and have done with his philanthropos * tropos [habit of being friendly
to man]. In other words, he has a chance to change his ways. That makes clear
the point that he who is a tyrant in the beginning will himself be different in the
end. It cannot be the sheer coercion of fear that is at work when Zeus becomes
reconciled to sanctioning the right of humans to exist, and to committing himself
to law. Otherwise his word would not have the dependability that has to result
from this confrontation. Zeus himelf must become the being ''friendly to man"
that Prometheus was not supposed to be. That requires time; Prometheus does
not precipitate

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it by exhausting his knowledge. He wantsaccording to his own formulationto use

the present tyche * [chance, fortune] to release Zeus's phronema* [mind, will,
spirit] from anger in the future. His liberation from punishment, alone, could not
accomplish his purpose for men, if Zeus's own history does not move him to
acquiesce in men's existence. The process of the division of powers takes on a
more didactic character: The parties give each other lessons.
The tragedy has to suggest the long path through time that is a precondition of
giving and receiving lessons. It is, first of all and above all, Prometheus's
stubbornness that has to be made clear, because it guarantees that he will not
disclose his secret in return for the smallest success, that of his own release.
What he announces to Io, for her consolationwhat he boasts of more and more
loudly to the chorus, with almost ostentatious confidencehe does not in fact
reveal all that thoughtlessly. He knows what a prospect of success is contained in
the great temporal extent of his own suffering, which is intensified still more
after his capitulation-parley with Hermes and his deriding of Hermes's servile
disposition, by his being hurled into Tartarus and by the daily torture
administered by the eagle that feeds on his body. What he suffers now, he suffers
not for the deception in sacrifice and the theft of fire but in order to gain the time
for the final taming of the superior Olympian power. Everything is designed to
show that from now on he suffers as a result of his own decision, that he waits
for Hercules, and for the reliable change in the other.
That there can be nothing definitive and final in the sequence of the ages and
dynasties, that even a Zeus must be capable of being overthrown, is deeply
rooted in the logic of myth, even if the ruling god does finally avoid the risk of
the further begetting of rivals. He cannot escape the fact that it is not by his
nature but rather out of resignation and caution that he evades a test of the
fragility of his power and resists the compulsion to repeat, which myth may
derive from its affinity to the ritual of worship. The Prometheia presupposes this
idea, but only in order to give it a last twist on behalf of the ground of mankind's
existence: If Zeus were willing to become the guarantor of their existence, he
would be spared the blind sowing of destruction. Strictly speaking, Aeschylus
describes for his audience the education of Zeus for the role of the last of the
ruling gods, without presupposing Hesiod's trust in Zeus's attributes.

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For that purpose the failure of a further rebellion is not needed, but only the
refusal of submission, the resistance that continues through millenniums, even
under the most extreme intensification of torturethe obstinacy of one who
knows, who can wait for the hour of the final division of powers. The
persecution of Io is at the same time the demonstration of the fact that the deus
novus [new god] has not yet matured to the point where he could see in
Prometheus more than the bearer of a secret to be extorted. When Prometheus,
left alone again by Io, falls into bragging about the certainty of Zeus's future
abasement, he initiates a test of strength that has nothing directly to do either
with Io's fate or with mankind's: Nothing concerns him less, he says, than this
Zeus, who in any case won't rule over the gods much longer. Such certainty calls
up Hermes, whose rejection, irrespective of anything else, brings the test of
strength to a crisis. It is, again, an instance of the poet's vividness that it is only
now that Zeus's lightning-eagle takes over the execution of the most terrible
punishment.
After the insulting rejection of Hermes, the relation between Zeus and
Prometheus is no longer that of the punishing authority to a culprit who is
persectuted for having aided human beings; he had already suffered for that by
being banished and put in chains. What happens now, at the end of Prometheus
Bound, is a heterogeneous confrontation, in which the only remaining issue is
the continuation of Zeus's power. Nothing remains from what went before except
the open struggle for existence, decided by the various means belonging to the
two sides. Prometheus seems to be the most dangerous rival as long as he has not
revealed who that rival will really be one day. "Time, as it grows old, teaches all
things"e is his answer to Hermesan answer that is expressive of the staying
power of a myth that has to let the new god grow old if there is to be a prospect
of success for human beings.
What we know of the Prometheus Luomenos [Prometheus unbound], from the
fragments that have survived, is at least that the chorus is filled with fraternal
Titans instead of with disapproving Oceanides. Zeus must have released them
after their imprisonment in Tartarus; Prometheus will have brought them up with
him out of the underworld, after his descensus ad inferos.f For this purpose the
poet must have him hurled into the depths, with lightning and thunder, at the end
of the first part. Evidently he did not want to advertise the change in the

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world situation only through the appearance of Hercules and his peremptory
deed in killing Zeus's bird (for us, an unmistakable substitute action, taking the
place of patricide). The change of morals required the positing of a new law, the
persuasion of Prometheus by his primeval mother, Gaea, who will have released
him from the obligation to keep her prophecy secret, and will have done this at a
late hour, only in view of the change in Zeus.
Thus the chorus of Titans stand for the fact that Zeus has solved his 'generational
problem' (of which Hesiod did not yet know anything, though I daresay Pindar
did): He has released his father, Cronus, from Tartarus, and appointed him ruler
of the Islands of the Blessed. Prometheus cannot benefit from the amnesty
granted to the Titans, because his conflict with Zeus is not the result of that old
rivalry about who would rule the godsin which he had after all been Zeus's
allybut rather of the threat of a future rebellion the outcome of which was
preestablished, and to the withholding of the knowledge that was needed in order
to avoid it.
The poet exhibits the Prometheus who has been thrown into the depths and
afterward is hacked at by the eagle as one driven to despair. He too now
becomes conscious of the central complaint of tragedy, that it would be better
not to have existed. Prometheus will have explicitly complained that from him
even the outlet of no longer existing is withheld. There has been much puzzling
over this placement of the central complaint of tragedy in the mouth of an
immortal. To me the poet's intention seems most likely to have been that of
identifying Prometheus with the desperation of human beings and thus
preventing his philanthropic role from being forgotten in his Titanic obstinacy.
We do not know what importance the appearance of Gaea had in Prometheus
Unbound; she must have broken down his obstinacy by persuasion. For the
second play of the trilogy is evidently set in a world of persuasion, as the first
was in a world of force. That represents the function of myth in the form with
which the Greeks were most familiar.
If Prometheus was supposed to believe that it was the will of Zeus not to grant
him mortality, that would also have had a relation to the situation of the
Olympian, who simply could not have allowed the keeper of the secret of his
fate to die, even if he had been able to. Would Prometheus, then, have consented
to surrender the secret because he expected, in return, the satisfaction of his
amor mortis [love of death]?

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Only if it were not the case that everything is oriented toward Prometheus's
mission for mankind, which is fulfilled in the third play of the trilogyPrometheus
Pyrphoros [Prometheus the fire-bringer], as the story of the origin of his Attic
cult celebrationcould we listen further to the conjecture that he ministered to the
eternity of Zeus's regime for the sake of his own destruction. To be sure, the pure
representation of the meaning of tragedy in the desire not to exist would have
expanded beyond all bounds in the god's illusion that this could finally fall to his
lot, too, as the clemency of the hostile god whom he saved.
Prometheus's deluded desire not to exist is, in the economy of the drama, the
pendant to the blind hope with which he had preserved human beings from
despair. Gaea must have shown Prometheus that the unjustifiable illusionism of
that blind hopeand similarly his continued existence as the friendly guardian of
their fire placeshad in the meantime become more realistic as a result of Zeus's
moderation.
We must still glance at the role of Hercules. No doubt he does not come to
Prometheus with the specific intention of an act of liberation. Rather, while
passing by in the course of carrying out the tasks he had to perform in order to
qualify as a god, he will have comprehended the monstrous character of the
scene and killed the eagle. It has been said that it could not have been fitting for
him finally to loose the Titan's chains as well. But the killing of the eagle may be
the weightier deed. The eagle was, after all, not only punishment for something
that was prohibited but also Zeus's means of combating the opponent of his
regime. It is not a small matter when Hercules handles his father's lightning-
eagle like one of the other monsters and Zeus does not dare to punish this. No
doubt he would not have prevented the greatest and last of his sons from
unchaining Prometheus, eitherbut Hercules is not even allowed to have thought
of this: His mind was on monsters, not on benevolence.
No, it is not because Hercules would not have been permitted to do this that he
does not take the chains off the Titan, but because this had to be done by Zeus
himself as the completion of his detyrannization. Zeus is not to be surprised from
outside and from below, but rather to act in a way that expresses the moderation
that he has acquired. If the liberation had been completed by Hercules, it would
have anticipated the late invention of the deus ex machina by Euripides, which
Siegfried Melchinger interpreted, no doubt correctly, as the

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expression of an ultimate unseriousness, an ironical suspension of the tragic

entanglement. It is true that that is a legitimate way of dealing with myth, but it
is foreign to Aeschylus and cannot be the last word of the world- and time-
encompassing conflict of his Prometheia. Instead of that, he has the satyr play,
Prometheus Pyrkaeus [Prometheus the fire-kindler].
The title of this satyros [satyric drama], which is supposed to have been
presented as the conclusion of the Persians, has the ambiguity that is suitable to
the genre: It signifies the "originator" of fire, in the sense of the bringer of
salvation, but also in the sense of the "arsonist." The Greeks always had an
awareness of the ambivalence of the benefactions of their gods. According to
Deichgräber's conjectures the satyros that was aimed at Prometheus contained a
scene in which the satyrs, full of curiosity, crowd around the fire, which as yet is
unknown to them, and observe its brightness with delight, only to apprehend
immediately and painfully that it is all too easy to burn oneself. There are vase
paintings of Prometheus bringing fire, with enthusiastic satyrs dancing around
him and grabbing for the narthex * [giant fennel] stalk. In one of the surviving
fragments the talk is of an injured satyr, and by all indications it was a burn that
had to be dealt with there.
At the Dionysia, after the three-part tragedy with its horrible and frightening
things decreed against men by the gods, the satyros had to change the exhausted
spectators' mood to one of welcome relief. The result did not need to be a
coherent 'total work of art' [Gesamtkunstwerk]. Thus in the Persians there is
nothing pointing ahead to Prometheus the Arsonist, as is the case in other
tetralogies as well. In the satyros, at any rate, the poet did not need to decide
whether he wanted to represent Prometheus's foundation of culture more as
friendliness to man or as an outrage against the gods. The donation itself appears
in its ambiguity as a gift and a danger, but neither of these is located in the
dimension of salvation or doom. The metaphor that is hinted at here for the first
time, that bringers of light are also unavoidably bringers of fire, only served at a
late date to express doubts as to whether the truth is worth the price of the
conflagrations that it can ignite.
It is frivolous to suppose that this satyros of Prometheus the fire-bringer and
arsonist could have been the most poetic piece among the ancient
transformations of the myth. For one moment, the work on the myth may have
seemed already to be completethat is the

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essence of its moments of evidence. The dancing satyrs with their singed beards
are the final transformation of what had begun with the chorus of the Oceanides
and its disapproval and had been reflected upon with the chorus of the liberated
Titans, even though this satyros was hardly performed in connection with the
Prometheia. Jacob Burckhardt cautiously posed the question, in connection with
the comic characteristics of the life of the gods even in Homer, on which the
later burlesquing of the gods depends: "Does the path out of the fearsome into
the beautiful sometimes lead through the comic?"g Part of the command of
poetry "over the whole conception of gods" among the Greeks after Homer and
Hesiod, for Burckhardt, is the fact that the soul "from early on sought to raise
itself up above fear of the supernatural." On the path of this effort "the daylight
of the liberating epic song dawned, perhaps all at once, as a result of an
unexpected uplift." In this process it had been the poets of the great epics "who
above all transformed the gods into beings who resembled menthough at the
same time they were entirely marvelousand freed them from their grotesque
appearance while also freeing the listening people from fear.'' In the course of
this depletion of power by means of myth and the poetry that works on myth, the
form that has the greatest ease is the most difficult to achieve: Beauty may in
fact be something that can never be arrived at except by a passage through the
'shaking-off' process of the comic. In the language of Aristotle's theory of
tragedy: Catharsis can be experienced as aesthetic facility.
This sort of 'playing down' makes Prometheus, too, into a figure of comedy. In
many mythologies of diverse culture circles, the prototypical culture founders
have been brought down to the level of roguish, often grotesque figures. There is
already reason for that in the fact that an original craftiness has to be ascribed to
them if they are to succeed in providing for men against the will of more
powerful gods. This fundamental schema belongs to the mythical scenery on this
side of the absolutism of reality; it serves to interpret man's experience, which
includes both the endangerment of his earthly existence by inaccessible powers
and the improbable bearableness of life that is nevertheless achieved. There has
to be one who does not have to be taken as seriously as the great offices that
administer destiny and who nevertheless makes life possible.
But no myth would be credible that made this happen in the easiest, and
therefore the least dependable, way. The friend of humans who

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is near to or equal to the gods must be rebellious and steadfast in relation to

those above him, affable and untiring in relation to those below. To reconcile
character traits is not the business of myth, so the compatibility of attributes does
not need to be established.
But the sly and artful adversary of the ruling gods, who seems to mock their
power and who dares to play tricks on them, is risky as a partner for men too.
Consequently it is important, in the process of the general lowering of the level
of mythical frightfulness, not only that someone plays a joke on the higher ones
but also that humans, in dealing with him, venture a measure of provocative
familiarity, that they in turn can have some fun with the friend of mankind. A
cult is always a pattern for its inversion, veneration for provocation and
excessive demands: One must be able to make sure and to show on what good
terms one stands with the friend of mankind.
Once [Greek] tragedy had given the figure of Prometheus its full seriousness, the
greatnessmarked by inescapabilityof the desire not to exist, one no longer needed
to fear that the fate of hubris that was endured on behalf of men and against the
god would be capable of being distorted or neglected by a cult festival or
torchbearers' race, or even by comedy. Conscientiousness includes looking at the
story as a whole and from every point of view. The poet of the epic synopsis of
the gods had still not concerned himself at all about Prometheus's later fate. It
did not seem so inappropriate to him that this braggart should have disappeared
from the stage of the Olympians for good. In the Attic cult, Prometheus's
position was so central that what one could least of all afford was indifference,
whatever the opposite of that might be.
Both [Greek] tragedy and comedy enjoy the protection of a kind of immunity, as
part of the cult. Comedy avails itself of this license with less respect, and
exercises it with less restraint. Of a work by Cratinus entitled Ploutoih we have,
as remains, only one papyrus. If the comedy is thought to have been presented as
early as before 435 , its distance from Aeschylus's Prometheia in time was
B.C.

scarcely three decades, perhaps only two. But what we would have before us,
according to the conjectures that have been made, is more than a parody of the
tragedy. We have to picture the chorus of Titans once again, here called ploutoi
and now in the very situation that had been prophesied by Gaea as the disaster
that would befall Zeus if he failed to avoid it: He has been overthrown, and
according to the text that has been

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preserved, the demos [the people] rules. The change of regime has set the ploutoi
free for the first time, and they have come to Athens to the altar of their brother
Prometheus, who, decrepit from his many sufferings, eats the bread of charity
that belongs to the established god of the Attic artisans. Although the Titan's
struggle has, then, gone even further than in the tragedy, the situation is
evidently a melancholy one. True, Zeus has been overthrown, but taken as a
whole, the new ochlocracy has left the gods no pleasure from their dynastic
fluctuations. The struggle was as futile as it was successful. This conjectural
completion of the picture may go a bit too far, but the extent of the playful
destruction of the mythical material must have been remarkable. Prometheus as a
pensioner of the Athenians, the Titans out visiting relativesthat is the idyll as the
twilight of the gods.
In Aristophanes's Birds, Prometheus enters the scene when Peithetairos, by
building the city in the clouds, has cut off the supply of nourishment, from the
smoke of sacrifices, to the gods. By starving the gods, the birds expect to regain
the dominion over the world that is due to them. Iris, the messenger of the gods,
has already proclaimed Zeus's intention of revenge. At that very point
Prometheus appears, just as punctual as he is competent, to advise the humans.
He has more accurate knowledge than anyone else about the potential conflicts
in the system of the gods. Even if only the barbarians' gods are still able to
threaten Zeus, still it will be all the easier to provoke them against him when
they are prevented from partaking of sacrifices. An embassy from the gods also
falters over the question of food. The outcome of the political dealing is that the
apotheosis of the birds no longer changes anything, but only confirms an
established state of affairs, in which the power of the gods had already become
unprofitable. True, the efforts of men in making sacrifices, which had flagged
for a long time, are revived on behalf of the birds, and after their siege is raised
the gods share, parasitically, in the surplus value. But being a god is no longer
something special when so many want to enjoy a god's privileges and so few pay
the tribute that produces the enjoyment.
Now the joke of the topsy-turvy world is that the onetime fearless Titan,
Prometheus, appears, inof all conditionsthese, where his enemies' power has
broken down, as a fainthearted sissy. The culture hero who, in the mask of the
jester, extracts what is still left for men in spite of the jealousy of the gods,
escapes the divine surveillance not so much by cunning and slyness as by
costuming. His freedom

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is that of the fool, which has always left him free to dofor, and in, one moment
morewhat is otherwise strictly forbidden by power. It is the role of the sinner,
already ready to repent and do penance, who once more, in the night before the
great fast, applies himself to sinful activities as though to a duty, and evades
divine omniscience, otherwise thought to be constant, by means of his mask. For
the spectator of the comedy, the persecution of Prometheus has degenerated into
a harmless hide-and-seek, with all the characteristics of neurotic delusion on the
part of the persecutee, which has long since made him forget his own triumph.
Anxiously suppressing the god's name, the disguised Prometheus, covering
himself with a parasol, asks the man whether he can see "a god" behind him. The
one who is asked answersthe joke being his inability to suppress the namethat,
"by Zeus," he sees nothing. The immortal, in turn, makes himself ridiculous with
the sentence, which he could not have spoken in the tragedy, that it will be the
death of him if Zeus sees him here in the camp of the besiegers. Playing on
Prometheus's name, Peithetairos compliments him that that was "cleverly
provided for."i This is the stature of the herald who is supposed to announce the
decline and end of Zeus's power. Nevertheless, he performs his function for the
spectator, here as in the tragedy. In this world of timidity and tomfoolery the
reality of the gods becomes a friendly background when the old enmity is now
merely invoked, by Prometheus's speaking of the hatred for the gods in his breast
and receiving the man's confirmation that, "by Zeus,'' he has always been a god-
hating man. The faded recollection of the mythical pattern itself, its manifest loss
of identity as a means employed in comedy, belongs in the category of reception
that we call "bringing to an end."
The old friend of mankind has turned into a doubtful political figure. He who
once stole fire is now a petty traitor; when he comes on the scene of the cloud
city he comes directly from Olympus, where he has been given the rights of a
native. He is no less paltry as a conspirator, since he incites others to revolt and
urges them to persist while he himself evades the consequences. In every way,
what was once resistance to tyranny has degenerated into the mere intrigue of a
late age of banal conflicts. Even the great gift of fire no longer seems great. The
climax of the contrast to the mythical tradition is arrived at when Prometheus
reminds the man of his benevolence and gets the answer, "That's right, people
bake fish on that fire of yours." To judge the

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monstrousness of the attack on the sentiments of the audience, one has to bring
to mind how familiar the image of the rebel and the sufferer was to it.
It is surprising that up to this point there has been no need to speak of
Prometheus the potter who made human beings. It was bound to be a source of
disappointment that this trait, which had such important consequences in the
reception of the myth, could be such a late addition as the state of the sources
declares it to be. Nor has it let the philologists rest from the effort to attribute to
the fundamental contents of the myth the forming at least of human beings of the
male sex from clay. Wolf Aly postulates a text originating in the middle of the
seventh century that goes beyond what we find in Hesiod and in tragedy in
B.C.

this respect. But this neglect of the fact that the earliest use made of such an
important datum is in the fourth century cannot be accepted. By coming to
B.C.

terms with the fact that the formation of human beings was not originally part of
the myth that encompasses so much of the history of gods and men, we arrive at
the possibility of understanding it as a consistent extension of the myth. The
process may have been assisted, intuitively, by the fact that Prometheus had
become the god of potters, or had been amalgamated with such a god, and that
people had before them the way in which the power of his fire also made
possible the production of ceramics in animal and human form.
What is more important is that the supplementing of the myth contains an
assignment of motive, that is, it already practices a bit of 'mythology' [i.e., study
or interpretation of myth], which had to have been foreign to the archaic content.
The elevation of Prometheus to the demiurge who produces human beings
makes comprehensible his readinessotherwise so difficult to explain, though not
at first needing to be explained, eitherto take upon himself unheard-of things on
their behalf, as his creatures. The intensification of his sufferings, in tragedy,
required an elaboration of the figure that went beyond frivolous entanglement in
the consequences of the deceptive sacrifice and the theft of fire. In the case of
the mere provocations of the divinity it could seem as though the favors granted
to human beings were only incidental side effects, intended not so much to favor
them as to annoy the tyrant. It is true that tragedy found the formula, as a censure
of Prometheus, that he had had all too much love for human beings, but it gave
no reason for that. That he had not left the product

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of his hands in the lurch appears, then, as a secondary rationalization of the

myth.
If one looks at it from the opposite direction, one can see Prometheus's modeling
of human beings as a hyperbolic representation of his establishment of culture.
His late installation as the author of the human species would be an extrapolation
of the increases in the necessity of the Titan for the humans' existence that epic
and tragic poetry had produced. Man's extremely needy and pitiful initial state
had induced the chorus of Oceanides, in Aeschylus, to reproach Prometheus with
overestimating man; but precisely this low initial level allows him to enumerate
the whole catalog of his life-promoting benefactions, which are, exactly, what is
added to nature. The benefactor, by confirming Zeus's contempt for human
beings, keeps at a distance from the responsibility of a creator. He is the "foreign
god," whose motive in espousing the cause of the forlorn beings is, precisely,
love, because it is not duty and obligationjust as will be the case with Marcion's
foreign god half a millennium later. If Prometheus had already, at this point,
been the humans' maker, the fact that his responsibility had originated in that
way would only have served to unmask him before the chorus. The humans are a
pitiful and discreditable legacy of the fallen generation of gods, suited to
justifying that generation's departure; but it remains unclear whether Cronus's
dynasty can be said to have a demiurgic connection with the origin of the
humans or whether they merely carry on, in themselves, the general state of the
world prior to the 'cosmos.'
Prometheus stands up for what has come down from the Titans, even though he
himself deprived that dynasty of its vindication by assisting in its downfall. But
the new god must, all the more, not be permitted everything. The preservation of
the human race, which prevents the novice from representing himself,
tyrannically, by a competing race, becomes an identification, which from this
point onward could not be expressed more elegantly than as the result of
demiurgic responsibility. But since it was first expressed this way by comedy,
the possibility cannot be excluded that the point was not so much to lay claim to
the creator's protection and accomplishment as to ridicule the weaknesses and
blemishes of his creatures. At any rate, the contrast that is brought out between
the worthlessness of humans and the production of the possibility of life for
them brings us to the threshold of this conjecture. If man is indebted to
Prometheus for everything

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that he is, it is no longer a surprising leap to make Prometheus into the demiurge
of the species and thus to make pottery into the metaphor for all acts of original
production. Prometheus becomes the figulus saeculi novi [shaper of a new age].
This assignment of mythical roles may not have been entirely inconvenient to
the 'theology' of Zeus, either. After all, it carries with it relief from responsibility
for the dubious creature, man. Ultimately, in Plato's myth, Zeus will be endowed
with the generosity of having given human beings what Prometheus himself
could not have given them: their position as citizens in the polis.
The supplementation of the potter who made human beings by Athena as the
dispenser of life for the ceramic bodies must have been invented still later. Her
role may have been developed by analogy to the one she had played in
connection with the theft of fire. The possibility cannot be excluded that it is a
case of induction from the complex surrounding Pandora. For there, already in
Hesiod, all the gods had taken pains to make the deception attractive to
Epimetheus. Only since Lucian does Athena supplement Prometheus and
legitimate his work, as a daughter of Zeus, by dispensing souls. The use of this
motif on sarcophagi points to a connection with the belief in immortality, for
which the Titan's merely demiurgic work, with its dubious legality, may not have
been sufficient to guarantee the future continuance and the fate of the soul
beyond the body and the body's grave.

Translator's Notes
a. The dramatic fragment Prometheus, which Goethe wrote in the autumn of
1773 (developing ideas and taking over a few lines from the ode of the same
name that he had written that spring), presents Prometheus as a rebellious son of
Zeus: Goethe, Werke, ed. E. Beutler (Munich: Artemis, 1948- ), vol. 4, pp.
185 197.
b. Hesiod (in the Theogony 535 560) describes how Prometheus tried to trick
Zeus by offering him the artfully arranged skin of an ox, containing only its
bones and some fat, while he hid the meat and the organs in an ox's stomach and
gave it to men.
c. "Storm and stress" is the title given to a literary movement of the 1770s and
1780s in which the youthful Goethe and Schiller played leading roles.
d. Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb
Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 5.

 Page 327

e. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 1.982, trans. J. Scully and C.J. Herington (New
York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 77.
f. Descent to those below, namely, the dead. This is the phrase that is applied to
Jesus' supposed descent into hell to bring salvation to those who died before he
came into the world.
g. J. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, in Gesammelte Werke (Berlin:
Rütten und Loening, 1955- ), vol. 6, p. 34n. The following quotations in this
paragraph are from pp. 38 34 of the same volume.
h. "Wealths," personified by the chorus.
i. The name Prometheus in Greek means "forethought" or "providence."

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2
Sophists and Cynics: Antithetical Aspects of the Prometheus Material
Thus the gods justify the life of human beings, by living it themselvesthe only
satisfactory theodicy!
Nietzsche

Although Prometheus as the modeler of man is first attested, in literature, in the

comedies of Philemon and Menander, nevertheless this intensification of his role
as donor of the good things of life into that of the one who produces the species
belongs among the logical consequences of Sophism. The tendency of its high
esteem for the figure of the Titan converges with that of its theory of culture and
its anthropology. In the relation between nature and art, for Sophism, the share
of nature in the formation and development of man diminishes and the influence
of artificial and artful practices on the way he is established in the world
correspondingly increases. That also holds as a normative principle: The
furnishing of rhetorical and political behavior with its rules and arts presupposed
the rolling back of obligations that were based in nature, as what is simply given
and authoritative.
Plato gave what was no doubt a parody of Sophism's method of justification
when, in the Sophistes [Sophist], he constructed the great argument concerning
the Eleatic disjunction that there is nothing but what is and what is not. From this
it follows that even a delusion produced by demogoguery would have to be
counted on the side of what is, because whatever it is, it cannot be placed on the
side of

 Page 329

what is not. In the caricature of this argument, something of the logic of all
aesthetic self-foundations is anticipated: If the images cannot be saved, by the
concession that they merely resemble the truth [or are "probable":
wahrscheinlich], from being defamed as lies, then they seize the aura of truth for
themselves and claim to be its sole possessors.
As the protagonist of a theory of the origin of culture that was specific to a
school, Prometheus, for Sophism, came into the neighborhood of allegory for the
first time. This was to be one of his future destinies. With the Sophists, the unit
of theory dealing with the genesis of culture was not one sectarian doctrinal
heading among others, as it was for instance for Democritus, but was rather the
central item among the prior decisions, which are indispensable for any
technique of education, as to whether man is found in a 'crude' or a 'refined'
condition. For specialists in providing for and taking care of life, such as present
themselves successfully here for the first time in European historypeople who
believe themselves capable of everything and promise everything to everyonethe
main thing must be to make it plausible that man is a creature who is
fundamentally left in the lurch by nature. Man would have to wander blind and
deaf and helpless through the world if he could not be helped, without regard to
the possession of reliable truths, by inventive craft. The polis then logically
becomes the sum of the circumstances justifying such provision of help. No one
is permitted, in it, to impugn the justification of rhetoric by laying claim, for
himself, to the possession of truth.
Protagoras will have produced the model for all the later theories of the origin of
culture; even Democritus merely reverses the deductions that could be drawn
from this prior assumption, by making the naked state of survival, at the
beginning, into a criterion of what he regarded as later superfluity. It also seems
that Democritus invented the expression "the art of politics" (politike * techne*).
Sophism had no affinity for his critical application of the theory of the origin of
culture, as it was to be appropriated by writers from Lucretius to Rousseau. For
Sophism, culture is a necessity of nature itself.
But how culture precipitates out, what specific forms it takes, what ingredients it
makes use of, and which it lets fallthese are not prescribed in advance, but are
open, to be determined by the processes in which the skillful strength of the
rhetorical logos, as opposed to its weaker natural forms, decides everything.

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With that, we have before us the potential antagonism between Sophism and all
philosophy of the Platonic kind, which, with anamnesis or innate concepts,
excludes the idea that man is originally poor, considering him to be in need of
finding himself but not of exogenous realization through the intervention of an
educator who is superior to him. After all, Sophism saw not only the audience of
its rhetorical art as a plastic creature but also, before that, the adept of its own
exercises. In both casesdirectly in one, indirectly in the otherwhat Prometheus
was supposed to have done to man, early in history, was merely repeated.
Nothing could have been more natural than to reach for this mythical key figure.
It helped Sophism to acquire an anthropological framework that put it, with its
rhetorical technique, in the righteous position of using the only means available
in an emergency, just as man's original condition had justified the Titan in
deception in sacrifice and in stealing fire.
Sophism is what seems to follow most precisely from this myth. The reproach
that in their instruction for political action the Sophists had developed no
conceptions of ends, but only an arsenal of means, detours around the
implication of their anthropology that man is referred to means because he is not
equipped with knowledge of ends and, for existential reasons, cannot wait for
such knowledge to be found. Consequently their praxis is poiesis *.a Here, too, it
is by no means (any more than it is in any other case, with the Greeks) the god
who has, perhaps, taught men what they must know and must (for their
salvation) observe, regarding him. Prometheus is a key figure for anthropology,
not for theology.
If the Sophists were thought to have conformed to Plato's formula that they made
the weaker logos into the stronger, then in doing so they would have acted in an
entirely Promethean manner. Prometheus could not believe in the power of the
truth, but only in that of a word that he had ready and kept secret until it would
have its most favorable degree of effect. It is not an accident that the doubters
who want to deny Aeschylus the authorship of Prometheus Bound argue from its
supposed traces of Sophism, which would imply that the age that is ascribed to it
needs to be reduced. There is in fact a seamless transition here, which would
make a transposition seem possible if other criteria were disregarded.
One of the perspectival illusions of our picture of history is that, in the outcome
of antiquity, we see the antithesis of Platonism and

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Aristotelianism as the all-dominating exhaustion of the scope for fundamental

ideas about the world. In fact, for both of them their almost exclusive success in
overcoming two other tendencies became decisive: in the one case, in
overcoming Sophism, and in the other, atomism. In contrast to this, the sharp
differentiation between Plato and Aristotle is an internal dissension in
metaphysics, a case of the narcissism of small differences. The cutting out of the
two great figures of the end of the fifth century , Protagoras and Democritus,
B.C.

reburied the access to the problem, which had scarcely been formulated or
become formulatable, of how man 'makes' himself and his history. The
victorious metaphysics prevailed by affirming, reassuringly, that there remained
nothing essential to be accomplished in the world. The decisions had already
been made in the realm of the Ideas or the formsin other words, by nature.
And if man is the appearance of an Idea or the realization of a form that is firmly
established in the cosmos of the Ideas or of the forms, the myth of Prometheus
loses its importance or requires further, radical correction. What supports and
answers for the individual is the whole, so that the idea of using cunning or force
to surmount opposition to man and to preserve him has ceased to fit anywhere.
In the reflected splendor of the Ideas, one can no longer even ask whether man
belongs in reality. In or after this metaphysics, the idea that a creature that is
present in the world could be worthless, that it could be better for it not to exist,
can no longer be conceived by any god, and no Titan needs to refute it. [Greek]
tragedy has become fundamentally impossible when it cannot be better for
anything or anyone not to have existed or not to exist any longer.
Aristotle opposes those who assert, of man, that he is not well constituted but the
most deficient living creature, left naked and unprotected by nature. Here he
aims quite literally at what Plato had put in Protagoras's mouth when he
represented him as demonstrating, with the aid of the myth of Prometheus and
Epimetheus, the teachability of all human abilities. One can gather from this art
myth what was meant to be made impossible by the ironical adulteration of
Sophism's attachment to Prometheus. For in the decisive point, the question of
the art of being a citizen, it contains a revocation of Sophism's picture of
Prometheus.
Perhaps Protagoras's twice-repeated reference to the fact that he is already an old
man and probably could tell the young people a

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story [that they have not heard before] is meant to help us understand the
interruption of his intention, in the course of the story, as a sort of slackening of
concentration: Something emerges that has escaped professional regulation. This
also easily explains why this one single time in Plato's dialogues it is not
Socrates who stands before the mutually exclusive alternatives of logos and
mythos. Nor does the Sophist make the Socratic use of myth, letting it take the
place of a logos that cannot be furnished, but rather describes the two means of
expression as being, for him, interchangeable at will or deliverable one after the
other. In the end it emerges that, in fact, the wrong person is not able to make
proper use of the instrument of Socratic thoughtthe master Sophist does not
know what must be the purpose of a myth, and stylizes it into the geniality of
age: "Should I give you a lecture or tell you a story?" This reflects on the young
Socrates in the dialogue: He does not yet have any idea how the relation between
myth and logos, in the limiting case of the extreme questions, will develop into
the center of his mode of thought. Here, at any rate, in the portrait given in
Plato's Protagoras, in his introductory conversation with Hippocrates, Socrates
emphasizes his youth and his consequent inability to solve the great problems,
and therefore also to set straight, already, the relation between myth and logos,
which Protagoras misunderstands. It must not be forgotten that the introduction
of the art myth into philosophy is not the putting forward of an original claim,
but is rather an act of resigned acquiescence. It is Plato's subtlety that makes
Protagoras, despite his age, know nothing of this, and makes his myth get out of
control as a result.
The brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus are occupied with producing living
creatures out of earth and fire and what mixes with them. The cleverer brother
lets Epimetheus persuade him to leave to him the furnishing of the creatures with
the abilities necessary for survival. When the day that is fixed for completing the
work arrives, the preoccupied Epimetheus has the bad luck to overlook man.
Thus man becomes the akosmeton * genos ['disorderly' race], which has a double
meaning, referring both to his inadequate equipment and to the offense against
the quality of the world as a cosmos [an 'order']. Prometheus's responsibility
results from the fact that he left the decisive part of the demiurgic work to his
brother. In order at least to make survival (soteria*) possible for the naked and
unprotected creature, he becomes a criminal, by stealing techne* [skill] from the
gods: the skills of forging and weaving,

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together with fire, which without much allegorical ceremony represents the
possession of logos. It is the general substitute for what had eluded man when
the animals were equipped.
Now the decisive thing is that this ex post facto reestablishment of equality with
all living creatures by means of a substitute endowment is not sufficient even to
keep the human beings in existence. They live scattered over the earth and have
no organized state, and one must suppose that all the consequences arise from
that, which Hobbes was the first to connect with the status naturalis [natural
state] as something contrary to reason. For Zeus had withheld from human
beings the part of knowledge necessary for self-preservation that would have
enabled them to be citizens of a community. While the other gods allowed the
other kinds of skill that were under their care to be stolen, Zeus is set apart as the
one who did not allow himself to be robbed, the one for whom even this Titan is
not a match. But that means that Prometheus is an inadequate protector of
mankind.
What the Sophist attests to in the myth is the precedence of the art of being a
polites * [citizen] over all other survival arts. In doing so he unintentionally
denies to Sophism's mythical reference figure the capacity to acquire this art for
men and to convey it to them. It is Zeus himself who, through his messenger,
makes men a gift of two new capacities, aidos* and dike*, honor and a sense of
justice. They enable people to live united in dries and states. Whereas the
demiurgic abilities had been stolen from the gods, the political ones are Zeus's
gift. The designation given to the gifts does not suggest that one could also
receive them through the teaching of the Sophists, instead of receiving them as a
divine donation. That the granting of the virtues of citizenship is not merely a
fine addition and supplement to what Prometheus had stolen is already evident
from the fact that, as something withheld by Zeus, they occupy precisely the
position of the bios [means of living] that was hidden and withheld in Hesiod.
That this reoccupation by the narrator reached his listeners and was understood,
in turn, by his readers was something that the author of the dialogue could take
for granted.
Now, Protagoras discusses the point of the myth as though Zeus had not granted
the capacity for civic existence directly, but rather had done so indirectly, by
way of the teachability of the characteristics of the polites. But he does not
derive this inference from the myth itself, but from the actual functioning of the
polis: It would not be

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able to punish those who fail to obey the norm for citizens if it did not proceed
from the assumption that effort, practice, and instruction make one able to fulfill
the norm. If one who evades that norm is subjected to censure, anger, and
punishment, then it must be possible to have expectations of him that include the
premise of teachability.
Thus, together with the Sophist's offer to teach systematically what is teachable,
the hero of Sophism has also fallen into an ambiguous light. He had undertaken
too much with his campaign of robbery against the gods and had underestimated
Zeus, so that only Zeus's generosity had satisfied the requirements of survival
after all. Zeus punished the Titan in the new and subtler manner of the god who
had grown old and wise, by exposing his dilettantish looseness in humanioribus
[in human matters]. Since Plato invents this myth for the master Sophist just as
he does his supposed secret Heraclitean doctrine, he maliciously makes him
narrate the proto-Sophist's debacle. Prometheus's mistake no longer lies in the
theft of fire, with which he merely tries to make up for his brother's negligence,
but rather in his own neglect of what is unteachable, of the human need for aidos
* and dike*, which, expressed by the will and the power of Zeus, just cannot be
appropriated and passed on, like things. The point that they cannot be stolen is
expressed mythically by Zeus's being above the level of having dealings with
cunning and thievery.
So it is the height of philological nonsense to remove from the composite
construction that is put in Protagoras's mouth the elements that could not
possibly be derived from a Sophist's lecture. It is precisely the art myth that
makes it possible for someone to chatter away, in his senile loquacity, and for
the story unexpectedly to push toward a consequence that is entirely
inconvenient for him and his cause. In the end it is also an example of the kind
of inevitability that Plato's Socrates loves so much that what cannot be stolen
cannot be bought either. Consequently, when Protagoras, in the end, does not
hesitate to talk about money, he has already run afoul of his own myth. What
Zeus had bestowed was shielded against the negotiability that is possessed by
things.
This sort of thing is not unique in Plato's works. In the Gorgias he takes up a
trait of Prometheus's that is already found in Aeschylus, where the Titan protects
human beings from staring, fascinated, at their coming fate of death, by inspiring
them instead with blind hopes. That could fit into a description of the effects of
Sophistical rhetoric,

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as Plato likes to see it. But in the tragedy Prometheus had been praised for being
so helpful to mortals by freeing them from the spell of fatefulness. Now, in the
myth of the judgment of the dead, Prometheus has to carry out this, too, not as
an unauthorized benefaction running counter to Zeus's sentence of death, but
rather as a mandate of Zeus. As such, it is part of the Olympian change of
dynasty: Zeus changes the procedure established by Cronus for admission to the
Islands of the Blessed. It is supposed to be made just, by Prometheus's
withdrawing the prior knowledge of death from those who are alive, so that they
will not be able to falsify the true character of their souls. A deception becomes,
ironically, an aid to truthfulness; no one is supposed to prepare his moral reality
out of fear of death or speculation about the beyond.
The reform of the judgment of the dead aims at undisguised realism. It has the
dead, stripped of their bodies, appear before similarly disembodied judges. In the
spirit of the new doctrine of souls, Zeus takes care that all encasings and
clothings by the body and of the body are kept apart from the final result of life.
Even as a functionary of Zeus, Prometheus is still a master of deception when he
helps to banish death from the consciousness of the living so that it can become
their truth without reservation. It is Sophism in the service of a myth that
explicitly wants to be understood as logos. With the means belonging to a past
world of the gods, Prometheus has become an assistant in the reform belonging
to the new era. What he can furnish men with as an aid in life, by shielding them
from their frailty, has become useful, by a higher deceptiveness, in exposing
their moral reality. Being deceived, they cannot conceal themselves.
Thus the taming of Zeus has been followed by the demotion of Prometheus. The
old conflict has changed into either the intrigues of comedy or serviceability for
Sophism. Allegorical interpretation will provide additional uses. When the
Stoics have to harmonize the highest divinity with their central philosophical
concept of providence, the proximity of meaning between pronoia [providence]
and Prometheus, as ''forethought," helps them to such an extent that the Titan
finally, long before Goethe, can become the son of Zeus. That idea is first
documented in John the Lydian [Joannes Lydus, b. 490] in the sixth century , A.D.

and it is part of a process of the genealogical coordination of concepts that have

become allegorical that is equally characteristic of both late antiquity and
Christianity.

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It was also inevitable that Prometheus wound up between the fronts in the
evaluation of culture. He had been saddled with too many accomplishments on
behalf of men. In Aeschylus, fire is already mentioned only incidentally as one
of the gifts he conveyed. The catalog of the things he first establishedfrom
writing to astronomy, from seafaring to the interpretation of dreams, from
medicine to the apex of all sophismata [clever contrivances], numbersbecomes
correspondingly longer. For Plato this was still too little, since Prometheus had
not been able to do anything for political affairs. In the line of followers of
Socrates that began with Antisthenes, the overcoming of Sophism combined
with rejection of luxury to produce a negative image of Prometheus. Hercules
becomes the Cynics' mythical model, through an allegorical interpretation of his
deeds. If the liberation of Prometheus is also one of these, then it can only
represent his being loosed from the embrace of Sophism, his recovery from the
liver ailment of coveting public honor, as Dio Chrysostom has Diogenes say.
With a different conception of manthat of his possible natural growth and
original capacity for happiness'Socratism' and Cynicism (no differently from
Aristotle) opposed the assumption that man's original condition was one of
worthlessness and incapacity for existence. Diogenes of Sinope, who in any case
is supposed to have declared tragic delusionb to be stupidity, says that Zeus was
right to punish Prometheus for the theft of fire. But his reason is not that
Prometheus's action had brought him into conflict with the god's mythical
jealousy, but rather that his gift to men caused their natural powers to grow
slack. They did not need fire because they were helpless; instead, because they
received it as a luxury, they became accustomed to the artificial helplessness of
culture. Prometheus was the author of their corruption, which is how Rousseau
will rediscover him. When Menander blames the creation of women on him,
above all, then this is also at bottom a polemic against luxury and waste, whose
origin the Greeks, since Hesiod, ascribed to woman. It was just, so says the
comedy, for Prometheus to be punished by being assigned such a modest honor,
in his cult, as the torch race.
Nietzsche will not think of this sort of opposition to Prometheus by Socratism
when he sets up the antagonism between Socrates and tragedy as a central one
for the Greeks. Here his concept of the tragic is derived for Aeschylus's
Prometheia. Through the mask of the Titan he hears the god Dionysus himself
speak. Socratism, he says, destroys

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myth in its essence. Nietzsche has a concept of history as composed of active

agents: Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes are capable of making Dionysus
fall silent. Even the late recantation in the Bacchae does not change this, because
Euripides is only the dramatic mouthpiece of Socrates. The latter, by declaring
virtue to be knowledge, derived man's whole potential from the. conscious, if not
theoretical, accomplishment of virtue. If Socrates, as Nietzsche says in The Birth
of Tragedy, is a "turning point and vortex of so-called world history," then this
turning is directed against Prometheus and toward the 'bourgeois' mode of
consciousness. What was destroyed there, of course, is no longer more than a
background that shows through, even in its realization in Aeschylus. For "myth
never finds its adequate objectification in the spoken word." In the poets of
tragedy, too, it has always already begun its decline; when their heroes speak,
they do this, "as it were, more superficially than they act."
What Nietzsche, thus, does not permit is work on myth as a great and
burdensome effort of the generations to put superior power into their picture, to
draw what is too large to themselves and down to themselves, with the full right
of one who thereby makes life possible for himself. What appears to the admirer
of tragic pessimism as philistine degeneration is this as the depletionalready built
into myth, and again and again propelling itself onwardof what stands even
further back than myth, as something itself unmythical, because imageless and
faceless, as well as wordless: the uncanny, the unfamiliar, reality as absolutism.
Why does Nietzsche want the tragic pessimism of, at least, the Prometheus story
to be preserved? The answer is simple: because he knows, in advance, the
metaphysical consolation for it. It is art. Where the need for consolation
diminishes, where remedies of geniality and comfort and finally of frivolous
thoughtlessness become visible, art, for Nietzsche, loses it functional position,
which is associated with irremediability. "The deus ex machina [has taken] the
place of the metaphysical consolation."c Euripides's invention says everything
about the abyss that it conceals behind its mitigations. What Nietzsche was not
to see was the real tragic subject of Aeschylus's Prometheus story: man in his
natural unworthiness to exist. It was precisely for this tragic hero in the
background that the deus ex machina had already existed, before the mythical
drama begins and without his coming on stage as such: This was Prometheus
himself, as the one who had made the

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impossible possible, who had preserved and justified life for the mortals. The
Cynics will go further than Nietzsche: They will blot out even this deus ex
machina of man's early history from the list of their witnesses to the truth, as the
origin of the great departure from the capacity for suffering and a diversion from
the realism of human self-assertion.
The Cynics' disdain [of Prometheus] is opposed only at a late datetoo late for all
despisers of ancient culture and for the many kinds of extractors from itby the
emperor Julian, shortly before the summer solstice of 362, in his polemic
A.D.

Against the Uneducated Dogs,d written from Constantinople. The Cynics had
aroused the imperial wrath by being pleased by the ascetic features of
Christianity and discovering that it agreed with them in despising culture.
Sufficient cause for the emperor to take a stand against this epidemic of satiety
with the achievements of a mode of life and to make himself, as the protector of
what had fallen into contempt from both sides, as strong as it was still possible to
do.
The same thing had happened to the Cynics' theory as has happened to similar
theories that result from taking offense at the difference between theory and
practice: They are meant to be a theory of practice itself, something that is most
impressively formulated as a theory composed of the disdain for theory, which
overlooks itself, in the process, making itself invisible by means of the device of
practicing the negation of theory in general as the negation of other theories.
This is combined with the ritual of acting in accordance with rules in which the
transformation of the world is simulated as an event that has already taken place.
Plato's Socrates had shown how to do this by making the philosopher an object
of laughter for those around him; the Cynic had intensified it by his effort, by
despising the supposed values [Werte] of those surrounding him, to force them
to despise his supposed worthlessness [Unwert]. It is the rhetorical way of
furnishing oneself with confirmation of one's being different, which one never
has complete confidence in, oneself. Under the influence of Stoicism, nature is
played off against what is not nature, and culture's sensitiveness to what is, at
any rate, held against it as 'nature' is presented as proof of its feebleness. The
demonstration against Prometheus proves one's realism regarding the human
cause: Man can exist without the Titan's fire, which itself is nothing but that
blind hope that causes people to overlook reality. What is admitted as reality,
now, is only what can scarcely or still barely be born. Here is one of the common

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attributes of Cynicism and monasticism. Monasticism's origins can be regarded

as a sort of simulation of the increasingly lacking opportunity for martyrdom.
When testimony to the reality of the cause on behalf of which the limit of what is
bearable is supposed to be touched can no longer be furnished by the easy means
of dying, then it should still at least be furnished by scorning life. This paradigm
of 'practical realism' never dies out, because its rhetoric is unrivaled. Only the
rituals change.
This is the state of affairs at which the emperor's pamphlet is aimed. The Cynics,
he says, have become one philosophical sect among others, by no means, indeed,
the worst and most contemptible, but still a dogmatic formation, which must
allow itself to be included under the criterion that applies to all of them. If
disdain for philosophy has itself become a piece of philosophy, the leap into
naked reality by means of mere negation would have failed. The ancient
procedure, which never becomes obsolete, is that someone who wants to be
entirely different is brought under a concept by the others and has to let it be said
of him that the culture that was the object of his exodus pursues him inescapably
as the pattern of his invertings and overcomings.
At this point the name of Prometheus is mentioned, and one sees immediately
that he is recalled to mind, against people who despise his benefactions, with all
the philistine comfortableness that Nietzsche sees as resulting from the Socratic
heritage. Julian receives him as part of his renewal of paganism with a refined
and systematized pantheon and a central cult of the sun: Prometheus, he says,
brought gifts from the gods down from heaven to men. Nothing was allowed to
be stolen there any longer, nothing needed to be stolen any longer, because late
paganism was supposed to make it unthinkable that the gods' benevolence could
ever have withheld anything from men. The fire from heaven, then, is the
distribution of rational power and spirit to them. Reason, here, is not only light
but also warmth, which is so quickly missed when it merely illuminates things.
By representing the providence that rules over mortals, the emperor writes,
Prometheus makes nature warm, as though artificially, with a warm exhalation,
and by that means gives all creatures their share in immaterial reason.
Homesickness for the lost cosmos, which makes the concept of providence so
attractive, becomes (in this interpretation) the consciousness of possible
coziness.

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This "logogony" [verbal battle] of Julian Apostatae not only makes the
enlivening warming of the whole of nature coincide with the awakening of
reason but also harmonizes myth and metaphysics, belief in the gods and
philosophy, so as to gather the deadly unraveling of the late age together once
more in a homogeneous world view based on the spirit of the pagan tradition.
After all, he says, it doesn't matter a bit whether one regards philosophy as, as
some believed it to be, the art of arts and the science of sciences, or as the best of
the possible ways of becoming like the gods, or as obedience to the instruction
of the Delphic god to know oneself. The unity of the origin, which stands behind
the foreground appearance that is the sectarian formations, guarantees the inner
unity of philosophy. Julian is the Romantic of antiquity as it comes to its end; his
great remedy for its maladies is going back to the origins. There Prometheus
stands.
He functions in the context of a defense of Diogenes of Sinope, not so much
against those who look down upon him as against epigones and imitators. Such
an appeal to the founder of a school, in order to attack the school by pretending
to defend it against its decline, is a classical element of the rhetoric of the
schools: to put the disciples in the wrong in their alliance with the master. If
Prometheus was not supposed, as in the traditional outfitting of the myth, to have
been incapable of giving life and soul as well to the bodies of the creatures he
had fashioned, but instead had himself been the great establisher of the unity of
animated nature and the culture that both illuminates and warms, then the great
Diogenes could not possibly have played off the one piece of this establishment
against the othernature against culture. Julian finds his formula for the
simplification of the world in the image of Prometheus by crediting him with
everything that myth's separation of powers had broken up into a mesh of
competences and conflicts. He knew that for the Cynics the founder of culture
had for centuries counted as the protagonist of the corruption of mankind,
because he did not abandon them to unprotectedness and the coldest
clearheadedness, but on the contrary condemned them, with his fatal gifts from
heaven, to the feeblest helplessness. There also, to base an argument on nature
meant to regard everything as capable of enduring and fit for life as that thing is
given in nature, and to describe any addition, even if it should be a product of
natural talents, as a deviation from the well-founded norm. That made the Cynics
put Zeus in the right, against Prometheus, and it forces Julian the Apostate to
represent

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Prometheus without the reference person of his conflict. He is not the one who
steals fire; he is a functionary of the sun, the highest and most beneficent
divinity, whom he also calls the begetter of man.
When Julian advances this, it has been an anachronism for a long time. The
attempt, in opposition to the Cynical, Neo-Platonic, Gnostic, Christian, and
ascetic depreciation of the cosmos, to make it appear once again as a sum of
man's desires, serves above all to convert such hankering into organized state
power. The attempt of Synesius of Cyrene, at the beginning of the fifth century
, in his book On Dreams, to restore to Prometheus those "blind hopes" that
A.D.

came to the forefront in his tragedy and to make him into an allegory of the
consolations based on the future that were available from the interpretation of
dreams seems more in keeping with and more consistent in its articulation of the
spirit of the age.
The importance of hope in the world, Synesius says, is so great and so salutary
that according to the judgment of weighty authorities man could not endure life
if it were still placed, as it was at the beginning of the world, immediately
opposite only the threats that endanger it. Prometheus had given men hope as a
remedy that made them conceive more confidence in the future than in the
hostile present. Hopes had such a power that one who was in chains, if he would
only allow himself to follow his spirit's longing, would already see himself
liberated, would take part in a campaign, become a leader and, immediately, a
captain and finally commander-in-chief, would gain victory, make the thank
offering, and, adorned with the laurels of victory, would have the victory feast
set before him, a feast having either the excellence of the Sicilian or the
sumptuousness of the Persian sequence of dishes, whichever he preferred.
So Prometheus is the bringer of illusionary gifts, the ancestor of the pleasure
principle, the Titan of the cheerfulness even of the prisoner. To that extent
Synesius has attempted to stand firm against the devaluation and revaluation of
the cosmos with a myth that, in those of its beginnings that are within our
knowlege, could not promote trust in the nature of the ruling gods. The
devaluation of the cosmos is the devaluation of the present; it can only be born
in imagined retrospect from the future.
The volatilization of the mythical outline of the Prometheus story is the
volatilization of the services that the Titan was supposed to have rendered to
human beings, that is, of something that, while it was

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indeed accompanied by blind hopes, was not composed of them. The "new
Sophistic,"f which knew how to turn everything into oratorical ornament and had
no more need of anthropological than it had of mythical justificationbecause art
for the first time presented itself as its only justificationcould deal just as
playfully with the ideal figure from Protagoras's fictive myth as it did with
everything else. For it, the Prometheus who fashioned man became the emblem
of the wordmongers of the imperial age. They areif indeed self-consciousness
was ever pushed to such a level before in relation to the production of wordsthe
forerunners of the 'genius' manners and excesses of the Sturm und Drang period.
Lucian has to or wants to defend himself against the spiteful charge that he is a
Prometheus with mere words.g If one could assume that Goethe had read this
piece of Lucian's before his "Prometheus" grew up in his mind, the
transformation of Prometheus into the aesthetic creator of the world would only
have been a change in the value sign.
After all, there was, since 1745, Gottsched's version, and then the four-volume
translation of Lucian by J. H. Waser that was published between 1769 and 1773
in Zurich, for which Wieland had written an advertisement in 1769. Wieland's
own translation first begins to appear in 1788. Goethe, as we know from his
book inventory of 1788, owned a French translation that was published in
Cologne in 1670. By whatever means the appropriation may have come about,
"that splendid piece" Götter, Helden und Wieland [Gods, heroes, and Wieland],
entirely in the style and the spirit of Lucian, will appear in immediate proximity
to the Prometheus fragment, in 1773. However much of the idea of [the artist's]
'creativity' may also go back, as Walzel has shown,h to Shaftesbury, and
contribute to the Prometheus syndrome, the linkage between the image of the
potter who makes men and the literary author was established in Lucian, by his
satirical resistance to the imputation of this very identityor may even have been
invented to combat the invented taunt that he was nothing but a wordmonger-
Titan.
The mockers would not, after all, he says, have called him a Prometheus on
account of the trifling value of the material that the pottergod, on the one hand,
and the wordmonger, on the other hand, made use oflike the Athenians, who had
already jokingly called their potters and stove-makers Prometheuses. The
common factor would lie more in the novelty of their productions: in the fact
that Prometheus himself had thought up human beings, whom he wanted to
fashion

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as a sort of especially clever and graceful animal. That is an aspect that has not
been emphasized up to this pointthe superiority of being inventor and maker in
one. As a wordmonger, he says, originality is not the value that he strives for as
such and by itself; the novel aspect of his invention, which was the combination
of the philosophical tradition of the dialogue with elements of comedy, is only
justified by the fact that it pleases. "If I didn't think this, I should consider it right
to have sixteen vultures eviscerate me for not understanding how an ugly thing is
only made uglier by being novel."
It is true, he says, that the blending of dialogue and comedy would allow one to
execute a different comparison with Prometheus, since the latter, "as is well
known, was accused, as a major offense, of having invented the means by which
to make man and woman one." Although the Prometheus story, in its connection
to the myth of Pandora, had a relation to sexuality since Hesiod, still the
invention of the combination of what is incompatible [Vereinigung des
Unvereinbaren] is a remarkable thing to attribute to Prometheus at this point. It
would have had to be more natural to connect the writer also to the Titan's other
crime, the theft of fire. But Lucian does not use this for a positive point of
contact from which to go on to impute to himself the enlightenment of his
readers, but only examines the reproach of theft. That gives him an opportunity
to emphasize what, despite all his protests, he has at heart in the entire text: his
originality. Whom is he supposed to have robbed? He was not aware that anyone
before him had already "brought to light such prodigies."
If the wordmonger [Wortemacher] here resists being compared to the man-
maker [Menschenmacher], then it is because he insists upon his standards. Of
him at any rate, he says, it cannot be said that he seeks only innovation, without
recognizing his responsibility for quality. The sideswipe is aimed at
Prometheus's creation, not at its creator.
In one of the dialogues for which Lucian has to defend himself against this
reproach of being a Prometheus en logois [in words], he puts personages of the
tragedy together once again: Hephaestus (in Gottsched's and Wieland's
translations, Vulcan), Hermes (in the translations, Mercury), and Prometheus.i
This dialogue has the features not so much of a comedy as of a proceeding in
court. Prometheus's self-defense is not an end in itself; it is a critique of the gods'
behavior in matters relating to a patronage of man that is now presented as being
in the gods' own interests, or at least as not violating them. Titanism

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presents itself as theodicy; it is only through man that the world became worthy
of existencein Gottsched's German: " . . . die Erde nicht mehr wüste, und ohne
Schönheit, sondern mit Städten, gebauten Äckern und Weinbergen ausgeziert,
das Meer schiffbar . . . die Insuln bewohnt, überall Altäre, Opfer, Tempel und
Feste . . . und alle Strassen, und alle Märkte der Menschen mir dem Jupiter
erfüllt . . . " [. . . the earth no longer barren and unbeautiful, but instead adorned
with cities, tilled lands, and vineyards, the sea navigable . . . the islands
inhabited, everywhere altars, sacrifices, temples, and festivals . . . and all the
streets and all the marketplaces of men filled with Jupiter . . .].
Thus it is also with the theft of fire: After all, nothing is lacking from the
heavens' fire after the human beings have received some. Here we have a new,
disarming argument based on the nature of fire: Someone else's fire is not
reduced when one lights one's own at it. In this case it would have been sheer
jealousy toward men to persecute the conveyor of fire. But gods were supposed
to be exalted above jealousy and, on the contrary, the bestowers of everything
good. Still moreand this is typical of his Sophistical apologyeven if Prometheus
had stolen all the gods' fire, this would still signify nothing, because they have
no need of fire whatsoever, neither to warm themselves nor to cook their
ambrosia nor to provide themselves with light.
And then the defender of the theft of fire forgets that he himself had been the
mythical perpetrator of the deceptive sacrifice: Human beings, he says, need fire
not only to eliminate their lack of warmth and light and to cook with but also,
not least of all, in order to present the finest sacrifices to their gods. Prometheus
had first put men in a position to prepare this favorite pleasure for the gods. But
here the self-comprehension demonstrated by the example of Prometheus
becomes aesthetic. What had suggested the deceptive sacrifice to Prometheus
had not been the protection of men's interests at allwhat had mattered to him was
the trick, the joke, the foolery. The new god, the upstart Jupiter, had been taken
in, and had taken himself too seriously to make anything but a tragedy out of the
affair and "to have such an ancient god as me crucified on account of a little
bone that he found in his portion." What a disproportion of meanscharacteristic
of the insecurity of newly established power"to involve the entire Caucasus,"
with chains and eagles, on account of a teasing. This was just the kind of length
to which an offended parvenu would

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go. What would he have done if he had been cheated of an entire ox?
Here the mighty Sophist can point to his creatures, to men, and recommend them
to the god as an example; after all, they let their occasionally nibbling cooks get
away with perfectly comparable things. There is the upside-down world again:
Human beings behave more sensibly than the gods. The god makes a piece of
foolery into a tragedy because he cannot forget that he is a god and is continually
responsible for proving it.
The scene is on the Caucasus, where the eagle that will feed on Prometheus's
liver is awaited. Zeus's two employee gods have to choose a location for the
enchaining that is high enough to prevent the human beings from coming to the
aid of their creator but not so distant that they would lose sight of the crucified
Titan. The emphasis on his being the one who fashioned man, which epic and
tragedy were as yet unaware of, has created an intensity in the relationship, in
relation to which the conflict with Zeus is only background.
Since the author had to reckon with a culturally informed audience, he must have
intentionally included the full range of literary references. When Hermes speaks
of the deceptive sacrifice, he knows about it from his Hesiod. That, Wieland
notes in connection with his translation, is a ''comical anachronism, the likes of
which Lucian often makes his gods perpetrate, because in the mouths of beings
that are, as it were, constructed out of inconsistencies and contradictions, they
have a peculiar charm." The satire makes use of its distance in time from the
archaic: Even Mercury knows about all that only because he "learned it, as it
were, in school."
The same thing holds for the allusion to Plato's Apology, with its Sophistical
demand for reversal: Prometheus, like Socrates, demands for himself more than
acquittalhe demands to be fed at the public expense in the Prytaneum. That is
part of the model of declamation that Zeus's emissaries are willing to hear from
the proto-Sophist while waiting for the eagle. Its effect can only be that even
these listeners, who belong to the other party, are eager for the change that
Prometheus's prophecy of the arrival of Hercules announces, even before the
execution of the punishment has begun.
In antithesis to Epicurus, Lucian makes men the center of the gods' interest. His
Prometheus, the master of rhetoric, explains this by the fact that otherwise they
would have nothing to compete with. He

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formed creatures out of mud, he says, who were "similar in form to us gods,"
precisely because he saw a deficiency in the divine nature, "as long as there were
not mortal beings as well, with which they could compare themselves and thus
perceive their own privileges that much better." This inversion is the heart of the
satire. The anthropomorphic construction of the gods becomes the theomorphic
construction of men.
And now he was supposed to have failed in this undertaking because there were
misdeeds and adultery, war, incest, and patricide among human beings, when,
after all, these things happen every day among the gods, and no one criticizes the
begetters of the race of the gods, Uranus and Gaea, on account of that. If the life
of the gods, in Epicurusalso with an eye to what is ultimately possible for the
wise manis supposed to be freedom from care, then the Prometheus story, as
seen by Lucian, epitomizes the production of care in the gods. Prometheus, with
his creatures, has taken something upon himself, and, by them, has also given
the other gods troublesome business. His defense is that a life of leisure between
the worlds would militate against everything that can save even gods from
dreary boredom. True, he has been punished for producing men, but at the same
time his fellow gods have not come up with anything better to do than to become
lovers of their wives, unceasingly going down to them and doing them "the
honorsometimes as bulls, sometimes as satyrs or swansof begetting gods upon
them." Myth appears as a comprehensive process of the entanglement of gods
and men, and in the rhetoric of this Prometheus, that is men's opportunity to pass
from their former worthlessness into a state in which their existence is necessary
for the gods themselves.
It is only a subtle way of expressing this entanglementthat is, it is more than a
rhetorical trickwhen Lucian's Prometheus justifies his human creatures by their
being 'made in the image of'j gods. Rhetorically, it is an argument that silences
the accuser; it is subtle because the justification of the image is made ambiguous
by the defamation of the original. When Prometheus asks where he could have
found a better prototype than is presented by the most perfect of all figures, then
this also contain unassailability as a result of relativization. One thinks of the
best of all possible worldswhich the Stoics, after all, already hadand the
objection, which always suggests itself even

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if it is scarcely expressed, that in that case the actual world would disprove the
right of the best of all possible ones to exist.
The Greeks never perceived anthropomorphism as an expedient employed by a
faculty of imagination that is not a match for the divine: They had thought that in
giving their gods the idealized form of human beings they were merely giving
them what they owed them, not what was satisfying to themselves. True,
Burckhardt thinks that Phidias's Zeus was produced in what was already the
relatively unbelieving age when Anaxagoras was teachingbut the Greeks were
"relatively unbelieving" as far back as we can see. To assert that there was a time
when they were not so is the pure obligingness of philological invention that
seeks to bring them closer to the difficulties of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries as they grow unbelieving. On the other hand, Burckhardt cannot quite
bring himself to believe that Lucian on his own ground would have had his
Prometheus say that he made living creatures who resemble the gods: "Could
this possibly be a Jewish influence in Lucian?" But it is only this device that
makes it possible to push frivolity to the point at which, in ridiculing the gods,
Lucian does not hurt them at alldid they still have need of ridicule?but rather,
indirectly, their likenesses. For this satirical purpose he makes the former [the
gods] invent the latter [men] for themselves, as his Prometheus does. The
mistake in Burckhardt's remark is the assumption that Lucian reversed
something (under the influence of foreign texts) that the Greeks had only been
conscious of as proceeding in the other direction: "The gods are ideal human
beings,'' and the Greeks had made them as Phidias had made his Zeus.
On February 1, 1870almost two years, therefore, before the appearance of The
Birth of TragedyNietzsche said, in a lecture entitled "Socrates and Tragedy," that
the ruin of the genre "began with dialogue." The latter, he says, was Socratism,
even older than Socrates. Confirmation of this thesis can still be found in the last
offshoot of the combination of myth and dialogue: in Lucian's Dialogues of the
Gods. To present Zeus and Prometheus in dialogue, as the first of these does, is
something that tragedy would not have presumed to do; in tragedy, the deus
novus [new god] was present only through his underling. The distance, there,
between the ruler and the sufferer was exceedingly great; otherwise this
obstinacy of a god against a god would not have been the epochal turning that
reveals itself, at a distant point in time, as the hidden weakness of the newly
risen Zeus. The satirical dialogue

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dares to take the 'bourgeois' step of denying that tragic distance. The
configuration is more important than the content, with its intentionally trifling
insubstantiality. In the casual establishment of proximity, the power-depleting
effect of work on myth exhibits itself.
Nietzsche is perfectly right to say that where dialogue begins, matters become
bourgeois, because commerce is not far away. The actors discuss their problems.
Prometheus wants to be set free; he thinks he has done sufficient penance. Zeus
thinks, on the contrary, that for such crimes as the creation of men and especially
of women the punishment has still come to far too little. But Prometheus does
not blackmail Zeus with his knowledge of the endangered state of his dominion
over the world. He merely makes him the counteroffer of some important
information in return for his release. He does not want to get it simply "for
nothing." To put it in the terms of André Gide's late travesty of the myth, he does
not want Zeus's acte gratuit [gratuitous action]. This god is not good enough
even for mercy.
With the possible exception of the tenth dialogue, between Hermes and Helios,
this first one is the most 'pregnant' one in relation to the work on myth that can
be seen in the Dialogues of the Gods. It exhibits a combination of eschatology
and geniality that is as startling as it is perplexing. This is a result of the dialogue
situation, in which Zeus is on the point of doing something that will be decisive
for the continuation of his regime, and Prometheus offers him a price for his
release. Zeus still feels the old mistrust; he is afraid of being outwitted once
again. Even Prometheus's gesture of humility, to the effect that he cannot gain
any advantage over Zeus by cunning because the Caucasus and the chains would
always be available, is not enough for Zeus. He thinks in terms of guarantees,
and wants to know in advance what Prometheus's offer concerns. Here
Prometheus gives him a sample of his knowledge: Zeus is on the way to make
love to Thetis. That is sufficient. It is not a prophecy that relates to the distant
future and suggests long-term preventive measures and precautions. Prometheus
expresses the urgency of his warning with the admonition that just as Zeus had
once come to power himself, so would the son of the Nereid, whom he was on
the way to beget, deal with him too. Zeus does not even let him finish speaking;
he understands the allusion to the repetition compulsion in the replacements of
one dynasty by another.

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But everything points to the question, Why does the Titan save Zeus from his
fate when Zeus is on the very point of certainly falling into the trap, which he
has set himself, of his downfall? Because, after all, the surrender of the secret
would only be understandable if it were the only way to avert another long
period of punishment and suffering. Not every question can be asked of the
parody of myth, any more than of myth itself. But it does become clear that
Prometheus does not want his triumph and, with it, the repeated rotation in the
filling of mythical positions. This element is an indication of the distance from
tragedy's way of constructing the myth: Like the dialogue itself, the action that
concludes it is a piece of urbanity. Even before he is unchained, Prometheus is
courteous enough to express the wish that Zeus may continue to be spared what
brought him to power.

Translator's Notes
a. Poiesis * signifies "making," "creating," or "producing"as opposed, for
instance, to imitating or perfecting, the primary modes of human praxis for Plato
or Aristotle.
b. The delusion of tragic heroes.
c. A quotation from Nietzsche's notes on "Music and Tragedy" written in the
spring of 1871, in Gesammelte Werke (Munich: Musarion, 1920- ), vol. 3, p.
359. (Information supplied by the author.)
d. "Dog" is one possible, and popular, etymological interpretation of of "Cynic."
e. Julian the Apostate, as the Christians called him.
f. The revived cultivation of rhetoric at Athens under Roman patronage,
beginning in the first century
A.D.

g. The text of Lucian of Somasata (c. 115-c. 200) that is discussed here is
A.D.

"Pros ton eiponta, Prometheus ei en logois," or "Ad eum qui dixerat,

'Prometheus es in verbis'" [To one who said 'You're a Prometheus in words']. It
is also known as "The Literary Prometheus."
h. Oskar Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol von Shaftesbury zu Goethe, 2d ed.
(Munich: Hueber, 1932).
i. This dialogue is usually entitled, simply, Prometheus.
j. Ebenbildlichkeit, the term used in translating the Bible account of Creation.
The scare quotes are mine.

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3
Return from Existential Groundlessnessa
On ne marchait dans mon jeune temps que sur des metamorphoses.
Voltaire, Le Taureau Blanc
[In my young days you could not go out of your door without stumbling upon
a metamorphosis.]
If one agrees, experimentally, with Nietzsche's thesis that the type of self-
appropriation through consciousness, concept, and dialogue that was produced
by Socrates already imported opposition to myth into tragedy, then the other
specific forms of 'mythology'ballegorical interpretation, genealogically
organized collections, the currency of rhetoric, handbooksbecome ways of
utilizing myth that converge in their tendencies. In the language of the process
that is typified in the formula "from mythos to logos," it is, perhaps, the no
longer surpassable subjugation by logos, when myth's principle of formation,
'conceptualized,' dominates the mode of work on myth. Logos exhibits myth, not
as its product, not as one of its authentic processes, but as something that it has
understood and categorizedas though the museum already existed, that late phase
of the successful presentation of what the present preserves so as not to be it any
longer, and in relation to which it always enjoys this distance at the same time.
Mythology has become one of the provinces of logos, insofar as logos has
domesticated archaic reality in the dimension of time, too, and administers it in
the manner of an antiquarian.
In this process the suspicion is entirely excluded that the incorporation of myth
into collections could be more than a matter of

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making it surveyable and accessible. Nietzsche sees the Socratic type, who was
ready to take over, triumphing over archaic greatness. There is not even a
suspicion that the motive force of the process might come 'from behind,' that it is
also possible that the scarcely bearable excess of the burden of being human in
such a way that it would be better not to be human might after all have been
thrown off, surmounted, endured. Is there not, very definitely, a greatness, which
was recognized at a late date, that, when it is embodied in a figure like Tantalus
or Ixion, makes the onlooker suspect the presence of a will to throw it off not
only by never having become it and been it but also by being it no longer and
being certain not to be it again?
In that case the propelling force would come from the nature [Verfassung] of the
thrust that gave rise to myth itself. If Hesiod's Theogony already presents this
intentionality to usthat of gaining, from the figure of the last of the gods, a calm
certainty of his final power over the former worldthen the poem would be more
than an ordering achievement that also ranks as poetry; it would be a myth of
myth itself. So the possibility cannot be excluded that an encyclopedic 'working
up' [of myth] that was guided by concepts rather than by genealogy might
accomplish no less, at its point in time, than a metamorphosis of the world of
metamorphosesas well as, precisely in this form of self-presentation, a literary
preparation [of materials] for the future, which is something that (differently
from chronicles and annals and from archives) simply cannot be intended or
contrived. Ovid's Metamorphoses is a lucky chance, on the border between the
discovery and display of the principle of mythical plasticity and the blossoming
of an imagination and a delight in play that are unconstrained by the derivation
of their materials.
Precisely on account of its disposition over the mythical material, as a world that
was originally foreign to the Romans, the Metamorphoses exhibits aesthetic
distance from any 'urgency' of the experience that is absorbed in the stories.
From the lack of any original relationship to myth, a miracle of interwoven
reception and construction arose that, along with Virgil's Aeneid, is the only
work of antiquity, within the horizon of myth, that draws after it a continuous
history of people being affected and fascinated by ita history such as we are
inclined to credit Homer with but are not in a position to demonstrate. The
European imagination is a network of reference that centers, to a large extent, on
Ovid. Metamorphosis was the key word not only for the

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relationships of the gods, down to the most recent dynasty, but also even for
human history into the contemporary period of Caesar and Augustus, as an
expression of the capacity of even human 'substance' for transformation. This
connection, deriving and sanctioning Rome's identity from a distant source, was
also, and particularly, to give the book accessibility for almost two millenniums,
being comparable in that respect, once again, only to Virgil's epic.
The poet counts on an audience to which the core mythical contents are so
familiar that it can effortlessly recognize and enjoy the adroitness of additions
and transitions, of deformations and associations. Not the least evidence of this
is the fact that the poet does not need to use the name of the shaper of man. That
circumstance paved the way for the 'reoccupation' of his position in a tradition
that for a long time was shielded from Greek material.
When the Metamorphoses ends with the proud expression of consciousness of its
inviolability for all the agesand at the same time the expression of the
congruence of this 'eternity' with the power of Romethen with the explicit
challenge that even Jupiter's wrath will not be able to destroy either of them, any
more than fire, the sword, or age, we get a last glimpse of the Titan, of whom
this could have been said.
The term metamorphoses is not a mere collective title for myths, but designates
the principle of the formation of myth itself, the fundamental form of a still
unreliable identity belonging to the gods who are pressing their way out of
formlessness into appearance. It exhibits unreliability, to be sure, but only as the
stigma of the heritage of that derivation from chaos. Consequently for Ovid, as
already for Hesiod, that beginning itself is part of the story of stories, but here as
the story of the formation of the world itself. The beginning is neither demiurgic
nor imperative, but instead is the advance positing of metamorphosis for
everything to follow. "Before there were lands and the sea and the sky that hangs
over all, nature, in the whole world-circle, had only one face: that of the rough
formlessness that people call Chaos." It is no longer the gaping "abyss" of
Hesiod, but more nearly the hyle * ['matter'] of the philosophers. This raw
primeval mass (rudis indigestaque molis) has nothing abominable about it; it
merely satisfies the secret desire for a complete 'survey' of the story of the world
from the beginning to the present, by making "metamorphosis" into the
necessary mode of processesrather than, say, "mixture," as in atomism.

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It is not by accident that Chaos itself is already a face (unus naturae vuttus),
before the profusion of all faces, already morphe * [form] before all the
metamorphoses. Chaos does not 'explain' what comes after it. It is merely an
untenable state, because it consists of the conflict of its parts, of the collision of
incompatibles. The world process gets under way because it puts an end to
something that cannot endure. The ideal does not draw the cosmos out of chaos,
as in Plato's myth of the demiurge; instead, formlessness is itself instability and
inability to endure, and has to do something to resolve its incompatibility. In that
way it, too, finally tends toward the "forms" of metaphysics, but 'from behind,'
out of the desperation of the origin.
While the story does unfold the principle of metamorphosis, it could not
culminate in the solidity of the world ruled by Rome unless it stabilized itself in
the shape it finally arrived at. Already implied by that is the fact that man, when
he comes on the scene, exhibits, in his shape, the stage of minimal susceptibility
to metamorphosis. He is not only the model of completeness but also that of
finality, which is expressed in the fact that Prometheus, who is only named as
the son of Iapetus, formed him after the image of the all-governing gods (in
effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum). Prometheus's metamorphosis of earth into
the likeness of the gods precedes all the metamorphoses of the gods into the
forms of particular human beings. If the emphasis is not on the potter who makes
men but on his most primitive material, then this myth complies with the
formula of the whole work; but to add the transformed earth (tellus conversa) to
the picture, the abstract and faceless agency of the opifex rerum [maker of
things] who made all the other things in the world was not sufficient. This
differentiation seems not to be a major concern for the poet.
What matters to him is the derivation of the prototype and the alignment of the
copy; this is given by Prometheus's command that man lift his face to the stars.
The formula of this imperative has become a standard quotation in the literature
that follows Ovid [der Rezeption]. It permitted both immanent admiration of the
world and transcendent surpassing of the world: "os homini sublime dedit,
caelumque videre / iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus" [He gave man an
uplifted face and bade him look at the heavens and raise an upright gaze to the
stars]. So the introduction of the shaper of man alongside the shaper of the world
carries no disposition toward Gnosticism. It is explained best bytogether with the
emphasis on the special material

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used by the potterthe difficulty that results from the assumption that the likeness
of the all-governing gods could only be realized by a figure who was subordinate
to them. The biblical Elohim's talk of making man after his own image and
likeness will have been an entirely heterogeneous idea to the tradition that
thought in terms of a demiurge.
From the compositional point of view, the heterogeneous origin of human beings
is no doubt meant to prepare for, if not to point ahead to, the fact that Jupiter will
immediately make the decision to extirpate them by means of the great flood.
Only Deucalion, another Noah, who in Greek mythology is the son of
Prometheus and ancestor of the Hellenes, will survive it. How he succeeds in
this is instructive in relation to the question of whether man forms a legitimate
part of nature. Zeus does not grant the just man his escape and instruct him on
how to manage it; on the contrary, the god is confronted with the accomplished
fact, and acknowledges it, by bringing the catastrophe to an end. The humans,
Deucalion and his female companion, survive, but from a higher point of view
this is a contingent event. Consequently they can have no positive confidence in
the continuation of their life, either.
In this situation, which has not been made more reliable by any assurance from
the god, the vague figure of Prometheus emerges once more, for Deucalion
wishes, in a 'contrary-to-fact' subjunctive construction, that at this moment he
had the art by which Prometheus was able to make men: "o utinam possem
populos reparare paternis / artibus . . . " [Oh, would that by (my) father's arts I
might restore the peoples . . . ].c If the name of "father" in Deucalion's mouth is
not a metaphor for their being descended from the products of the demiurge but
rather is to be taken literally, as in the Greek myth, then all the Titan's ceramic
creatures are lost in the great flood and only his procreative descendants survive.
Ovid has difficulties here because the myth of the flood had divided the early
history of the Greeks from that of the barbarians. The Greeks were descended
from Deucalion, and thus from Prometheus, not from his creations. For the
barbarians, recourse was had to the fecundity of his mother, Themis, who could
awaken children for herself from stones, though their descendants, then, did not
stand in the most favorable light. Ovid does not relate an older feature of the
myth, which is handed down by Apollodorus: Deucalion owes his timely
preparations for the coming flood to a

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warning that he had received while visiting his father at his place of suffering in
the Caucasus. Again it would be the Titan's protection that this time enables his
son and the daughter of Epimetheus, Pyrrha, whom he married, to come through
the flood that is decreed by the wrath of Zeus.
Since these two were not supposed to become the progenitors of the non-Greeks
as well, the re-creation of mankind is ascribed to a very ancient procedure: The
oracle of Themis causes the survivors of the flood to gather stones on the stream
bank and throw them behind them. From them, the men and women of the new
mankind arisewith the exception of the Hellenes, whom the myth allows to be
begotten in the 'proper' manner. It is clear that Ovid could not make this
differentiation into the point of the metamorphosis. True, he makes Jupiter in the
end give his blessing to the escape of the parent couple of the Hellenes, but he
passes over in silence the fact that Jupiter merely has to accept the success of the
protectionagain a demiurgic protection: the building of an arkgiven them by
Prometheus in yet another piece of cunning, although this is made more
agreeable for him by a thank offering from the escapees.
Ovid does not allow himself to be embarrassed by the difficulties of the multiple
origin of mankind any more than the Christian tradition does with the
comparable difficulties of the two versions of the biblical text, which led only at
a late date to the construction of the "pre-Adamites." Just as in Ovid there stood
the lapidary half-verse "natus homo est" [man was made], so the unity of the
generative continuity of mankind remained the most important presupposition of
the Christian salvation story, from the old Adam to the new. Dante quotes Ovid
in the fragment of his Convivio, which he had written during his exile from
Florence between 1302 and 1321, with explicit reference to the dogmatic quality
of the singular: "Nato è l'uomo; (non disse gli uomini)" ['Man was made'; (he did
not say 'men')]. The purpose for which he is using the quotation is a defense of
nobility as a way in which the teaching of virtue is proved in practice, rather than
as an innate quality of mankind. Nobility cannot be an essential characteristic of
birth because otherwise, in the last analysis, the unity of mankind's physical
origin would have to be denied. Something that, therefore, cannot have the
original character of nature must present itself as acquired, as a mode of
accomplishment, as the gaining of virtue. Ovid stands as a witness that the
pagans, too, would have regarded the

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idea that mankind has more than one original lineage as false. It was only in such
a way that one could at least have defended the idea that nobility was one of
these lineages. Dante was not satisfied any longer with the anonymity of the
mythical shaper of man, in Ovid. He cites the name of Prometheus to establish
that entirely decisive singular number of his demiurgic work, and as the pagan
equivalent of the biblical God. This is only one of the most interesting uses of
the mythical name for purposes of argument, but by no means the earliest
instance in which the biblical Creator is compared to the pagan potter.
Between the reception of the ancient world's metaphysical concepts by early
Christianity and that of its mythological system there is a functional and
temporal difference. The assimilation to philosophy was necessary in order to
make intelligible, for an audience that had not been foreseen originally, a
message that was scarcely plausible to it, and to offer that message to that
audience as the solution of its problems, as the fulfillment of its expectations,
indeed as a complement to what had always belonged to reason or had already
fallen to its share much earlier by roundabout routes. But only in the fifth
century is the "compromise" struck of which Manfred Fuhrmann has spoken in
which it was agreed that ancient mythology would be tolerated within particular
poetic genres. In that way the Roman upper class was deprived of the
"conservative privilege" of cultivating, and thus representing, the past in the
materials of rhetoric and grammar.
But the unpunished use of the image world of this past was also a sign of
definitive triumph. Ancient culture was now brought along, in what had been
identified by the Christian polemics of the early period as its most dangerous
formthat of mythas a captive in the triumphal procession. It even ceased to be
obligatory to interpret it allegorically, as concealing Christian truths. Such
ostensive liberality was the display of tolerance that goes with consolidated
power. The continuation of the literary tradition gave notice of the accomplished
subjugation, which was bound to derive its luster precisely from the dignity of
what was subjugated. The toleration of mythology is initially and above all a
manifestation of the historical consciousness that, in spite of the fury that had
been directed at temples, images, and books, one had not destroyed the ancient
world. But alongside this function, the materials of a sanctioned culture [and
"education": Bildung] became, again, capable of being liberated: materials of a
surviving defiance,

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of a late rebellion against subjugation. It is chiefly a latency, not of content, but

of function. Historiography's temporal displacement of the 'Renaissance,' deeper
and deeper into the Middle Ages, is a result of this latency and is itself a piece of
myth aimed at avoiding the Middle Ages.
In the beginning is the assurance of the identity, not of Prometheus and Adam,
but of the Titan and the Creator. Any differentiation between the origin of the
world and that of man, any hint that man's real aid might come from some other
source than the author of the world, would have had to bring with it the
suspicion of involving the Gnostic split between the Old Testament and the New
Testament. The mythical demiurge had not made the world into which he
released his human creatures, and he could not prevent them from falling under
foreign dominion and having to suffer the disfavor of the new cosmocrator [ruler
of the world]. To prevent such ambiguity, with its disposition toward
Gnosticism, from arising required the definiteness of dogma. Since the
beginning of the world, Tertullian explains, there have been righteous people,
impregnated with spirit, who have recognized and proclaimed the one God who
created the universe and formed man out of clay. This, Tertullian interjects, is
the true Prometheus (''hic enim est verus Prometheus"). 1
An affinity to Gnosticism should not be described, in the language of the history
of dogma, as a threat to the substance of Christianity that comes from some
place or other outside it. Gnosticism is, it is true, the expression of a universal
and great disappointment with the cosmosthe systematic form of its
revaluationbut it is also the difficulty of Christianity's self-interpretation, a
difficulty springing from the heart of its own process of formation. If the name
of Prometheus was allowed to emerge in Christian allegorical interpretation and
metaphor, it was only as a prototype of the one God in both functions, as Creator
of men and as their Savior. Consequently the equipping of men with fire could
not be separated from their creation. It is a single act, and there is no question
how and with what legitimacy the fire from heaven came to man, because
(according to Lactantius) it identifies him as an animal caeleste [celestial
creature]. To represent the derivation of fire as a sort of theft of what belonged to
heaven can only be a distortion. The possession of fire is the argumentum
immortalitatis [proof of immortality]. Its use has lost the quality of sheer
necessity in the face of a life-threatening world and has become the

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pledge of the highest destiny: "vitae continet rationera" [it contains the plan (or
purpose) of life]. 2Fire is not primarily the element with which food is prepared
and metal is worked, but rather the substance that points upward. What is at
stake is not the possibility of abiding and of self-preservation in the midst of
hostile nature, but rather the way out of this nature.
The poets become partakers of the old truth. Although they had always dealt
with it only imprecisely, they had nevertheless preserved some of it. Thus they
had preserved the process of the creation of man from clay and his being
equipped with fire, which they had only supplemented by making up the name
"Prometheus": "Res eos non fefellit, sed nomen artificis" [They were not
deceived as to the fact, but only as to the name of the maker].3Because those old
poets lacked access to Scripture, the content of truth that was accessible to them
gradually became distorted.4The Prometheus of the poets has all the marks of
such a debasing process, for if he had been a man, he would not have needed to
make men, but only to beget them, as his father Iapetus had begotten him
himself. But if he had been a god, it is impossible that he should have had to
suffer the punishment on the Caucasus.5
This "church father" [Lactantius] who is, for Hieronymus's taste, all too cautious,
if not undecided, in theology, does not hesitate to cite, from his Ovid, precisely
the three verses that define the Titan's creature by the raising of his face to
contemplate the stars, even if the quotation does not cover with complete
precision what had been announced in the context: "ad contemplationem sui
artificis erexit" [he made him erect, to contemplate his Maker].6This student of
the even more questionable Christian Amobius, and tutor, at Constantine's court,
of the prince, takes still another step in the Christianizing of the Prometheus
whom he sees through the eyes of Ovid, by extracting from the demiurge's
command that man raise his head the biblical formula of ''face to face":
"Stimulated by his upright posture and his uplifted face to contemplate the
world, man looks God in the face (confert cum deo vultum), and reason
recognizes reason (rationem ratio cognoscit)."7The command that carries out the
Creation is supposed both to bind man to nature, as a creature who is provided
for in it and integrated into it, and to impel him to relinquish it and put it behind
him, to seek his destiny outside it. That is why fire, although or precisely
because it comes from heaven, cannot have been stolen

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for man. All the other living creatures only know how to make use of water and
are excluded from the highest of the elements. The firebringer, for his part, only
complies with the Creation command to be of service to a legitimate creature of
the divine will.
The difficulty that had already been created for Ovid by the myth of Deucalion's
flood as the story of the origin of the Hellenes alone recurs for the Christian
author at the turning from the third to the fourth century He regards the
A.D.

biblical account of the Flood as a fact that is generally admitted among his
readers. The deluge occurs as the divine revocation of the human culture that has
arisen up to that point. Only after the catastrophe does God commit himself, for
the survivors, to the pledge not to make that sort of thing happen again. Now the
event becomes an argument against Prometheus and his ability to guarantee the
human race a lasting indemnity against the will of the highest of the gods. The
reference to the great flood is supposed to demonstrate that myth has not arrived
at the separation of powers and that it is better to rely on the guarantees of the
one new supreme power.
Why should this Prometheus have laboriously made his human beings out of
clay if in fact the sole person to have survived the doom of the flood, on account
of his just character, is supposed to have been his son Deucalion, who was
begotten in the most natural manner? 8Thus Lactantius turns the inconsistencies
in Ovid against his God's Titanic rival, with the conclusion: "Apparet ergo,
falsum esse, quod de opificio Promethei narrant" [It is clear, then, that what they
say of Prometheus's workmanship is false].
The Prometheus myth had been the negation of any suspicion that the cosmos
and man's position in it might be ready to disintegrate, and for that very reason it
had to bring to light the Christian author's involvement in 'reoccupying' such a
function. His contradiction makes comprehensible for us, in retrospect, what
assurances against the caprice of old and new gods man's self-comprehension
had received from myth. The biblical God had committed himself, by self-
restraint, to his offers of the covenants, and in the process had excluded only
partial catastrophe, but not the catastrophe of the whole. Of course, at the time of
Lactantius people no longer spoke so expectantly of the end of the world. A
Prometheus who had not after all been able to protect his creatures from the
wrath of his enemy was no longer a suitable ally for them. What is summoned up
against myth in the

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form of the Titan is competition for the greatest patronage of man. The
Prometheus story was not supposed to be able to share that position with the
covenant God of the old or the new dispensation.
But what does one do with a story that cannot simply be denied either? Myths
cannot be lies, if only because they also have to serve as evidence of the
existence of remains of an old truth. That is why Prometheus too is given a
residue of authentic truth, which will be revived again, in connection with the
need for archetypes for aesthetics, in the French Encyclopedia's article on
Prometheus: He was not the god who created man, but he was the originator of
the art of sculpture, of which his likenesses in and mud were the first instances.
By that means he was also to blame for the idolatry of pagan cults, because his
art had filled the temples with images of gods having human forms. 9Only a
small confusion had crept into the myth: The inventor of art had been elevated to
the inventor of nature.
The capacity by means of which the image and likeness of his God learned to
make images of himself was a detestable and indecent art; when Jupiter rose to
the summit of power and sought to establish the worship of himself, he needed a
skillful helper in it. He found that helper in Prometheus, who was able, in the
service of the new regime, to make credible the god who, for the first time, had
human form: "ita verisimiliter, ut novitas ac subtilitas artis miraculo esset"
[exactly like the real thing, so that the novelty and accuracy exist by a
miraculous kind of art].10Thus there comes about, with an apologetic intention,
the early Christian transformation of the figure of the Titan into the prototype of
aesthetic consciousness. But it only produces the embarrassment of not being
able to make Prometheus a pure fiction, so that one can still use the "miracle" of
his art to explain the origin of the worship of images. In Platonic terms, the
misunderstanding would have consisted in crediting the artist, who after all
could only "imitate nature," with the production of the original. But in that case
the mythmakers would have spoken, without knowing it, of someone else: of the
real author of the originals.
The origin of art is intensified and demonized. That has to explain the success of
polytheism: In the artists' likenesses there was more than resemblance; there was
the splendor (fulgor) that fascinated reason, that seduced it by its beauty into
forgetting true majesty and abandoning itself to unreason.11The origin of errors,
a century before Augustine, is more nearly the enticement of beauty than the
great transgression.

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Only when man's freedom has to take responsibility for all that is bad in the
world can the Titan who invented images be forgotten.
The Renaissance brings a new and surprising equation, that of Prometheus and
Adam. It is the first, and cautious, approach to the shift of consciousness to
ascribing to itself, without reservation, man's becoming himself. Here the
equation might be founded, as it is finally by Giordano Bruno, directly on the
fact that both Adam and Prometheus are defined by their relation to something
forbidden: in the one case, to the fruit that is the knowledge of good and evil,
and in the other to the forbidden fire that ignites reason. 12In the equation, what
is forbidden is defined not as something that is not suitable to human nature but
as something that is withheld from it, so that while that nature does lose the
paradise of innocence, it gains that of knowledge. In order to approach reserved
goods, the deprivation of which had become historically intolerable, the
desperation of self-preservation was not enough; cunning and deviousness were
called fora prelude to the spirit of the science that could not accept anything as a
gift.
The equation of Prometheus and Adam was more impressive as an image than it
was durable. The biblical Paradise had depended upon a privilege that only man
himself could reject and leave behind him. Bacon's program for the modern age
was also to be based on the premise that regaining Paradise was a possibility that
was open to man himself. Expelled from Paradise, he had reduced his situation
to the conditions of a survival that was left up to him alone. The Prometheus of
the old myth creates man, without being able to secure for him the favor of the
new god or even of naturea creature of pitiable helplessness and stupidity.
Prometheus has to apply cunning and violence merely to produce the conditions
of naked existence for his creatures, including the conditions of the work they do
to preserve their existence. Reason does not lie in the fact that they possess fire
but rather in the fact that they are able to produce it themselves: the
irrevocableness of the Titan's gift, which is characteristic of the gifts of reason. It
alone cannot be forced to give itself up. If Prometheus was projected onto Adam,
that could only mean that the loss of Paradise was supposed to be seen as a felix
culpa [fortunate fault]: as man's opportunity to be himself on his own account,
irrespective of what had brought him to that point.
In the course of Humanism's preparation for the Renaissance, Boccaccio at first
took over Tertullian's equation of the demiurge with

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God the Creator. But man as he comes from the hand of the Creator or of
natureof that first Prometheus, in other wordsis still crude and unformed, and
needs a second Prometheus, who takes up this initial state as his material and, so
to speak, again creates men from it ("quasi de novo creat"). Thus he produces the
civil being from the natural being. 13Between these two poles, that of the homo
naturalis [natural man] and that of the homo civilis [civil man], the accent can
shift. Over the long term it is displaced in such a way as to allow an
overwhelming share to go to formative work applied to the natural substratum,
work that man performs on man. Of the two versions of Prometheus that
Boccaccio had offered, that of the "second Prometheus" is left in command in
the endthe old figure of the bringer of culture, who takes responsibility for the
man who withdraws from his state of nature and forms himself historically. The
most important step, in this connection, is the denial that what Prometheus does
is punishable; and that is no longer so difficult because the Titan in the Caucasus
can, at least, no longer have been banished by a god who is jealous of man.
The doubling of the allegorical Prometheus produces no dualistic difficulties or
dynastic rivalries, although in Boccaccio's text the connection with Ovid's
second creation of man, by Deucalion, is clearly evident: The laboriousness of
the new formation of man is represented by the image of picking up stones.
What dissolves the inner tension of the duplication is the fact that the formation
is justified on the basis of nature, rather than against nature. The God who had
created this nature in such a crude and preliminary form wanted, precisely by
doing so, to hand it over to itself, to an inner formative process of history, which
was a process that was no longer subject to the mythical jealousy of the gods.
The second Prometheus is the figure of the wise man, originating in the midst of
men, who does not need to expect any rivalry or even mere disapproval from the
first Prometheus.
The enhancement and exaggeration of the image of man that become possible in
the Renaissance are protected by the principle of the nature that is turned over to
itself, that draws on its original teleology. That is what differentiates all
mythologicald renewal of myth decisively from its sources. We may call up the
archaic frame of mind once again, in Burckhardt's words: "That the gods were
jealous was a strong and widely held belief, which pervades all of myth and, in
historical times, is perfectly public, alongside all religiosity. . . . Any

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earthly happiness, any eminent quality is, as it were, an encroachment on the

gods' privilege of happiness and their perfection, and the person in question is
generally blamed for having wanted to 'defy' the gods, or at least for having
prided himself unbecomingly." 14That had become impossible, and the
martyrdom of the Titan on the Caucasus had become incomprehensibleand also
inadmissible, as a 'passion,' in view of Golgotha. The "image of the chained
Titan on the rock" had been, again following Burckhardt, "familiar to all the
Greeks," and had impressed upon them "what position one was really in with
respect to the gods" impressively enough "to keep alive, deep in people's hearts,
a mood of rebellious complaint against the gods and against fate.''15
This image was much more difficult to rehabilitate and explain, in the approach
to the modern age, than the image of the maker of men, who could so easily be
divided between God the Creator and Humanism's embodiment of the process of
the acquisition of culture. The result was that allegorical interpretation had to
accomplish the most violent deformation in the case of the Titan on the
Caucasus. Not only because, according to Boccaccio, he was free of guilt, but
above all because he was not permitted to become a savior of man; he was set
free for the elevated forms of culture that are remote from the issue of self-
preservation. They now had to disengage themselves from the Middle Ages, and
could attach themselves to a justifying figure like Prometheus.
So we are told that it was a misunderstanding and an invention of the ignorant
when the chaining on the summit of the mountain range was seen as a
punishment from the gods. According to Boccaccio, Prometheus retired into the
solitude of the mountains in order to search into the secrets of nature. Even the
eagle is an allegory of the comparatively harmless affliction of insights coming
from a higher source. This rewriting of the story gave currency to the
dissociation of greatness from defiance and relieved the new things that were
pressing forward of the appearance of Titanism.
Myth, in the Renaissance, never became a subject of concern for dogma; it
produced no rebellious oversize figurations of secession from the Middle Ages,
but instead, as it were, clothed its work against the Middle Ages in their
inherited and accredited means. Precisely if one thinks that the title "the
Renaissance" signifies the revolt that the modern age, looking back at its
beginnings, would like to see itself

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as, Nietzsche's view of the Prometheus story becomes a remarkably trenchant

rediscovery. To him, the biblical story of the Fall, as a passive stumbling into a
temptation, will seem harmless in comparison to the active sacrilege perpetrated
by the Titan when he freely steps forth to compare himself to the gods. The
antithesis is forcible, but the way is prepared for it by the leveling off that the
modern age itself had executed on the figure of Prometheus.
This half-millennium that lies between Boccaccio and Nietzsche and that once
again displays every surprise in the transformation of the Prometheus figure,
every combination of its story and its characteristics, also demonstrates in a
unique manner the constancy of the thread running through all of these
phenomena, without which they could not even be understood as the effect of
deforming forces.
Shortly before the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Florentine renewer of
Plotinus, Marsilio Ficino, casts a melancholy glance at the mythical sufferer in
the Caucasus. But again it is not defiance of divinity or suffering on behalf of
men that presents itself to him, but rather the fire of reason that strikes back,
destructively, at its transmitter. In the middle of a didactic letter entitled, "Five
Questions about the Mind," the image of Prometheus suddenly appears. In its
interweaving of Platonic and Aristotelian elements, this theory of knowledge
follows the example set by Plotinus. That which defines the unity of all acts of
the mind is oriented toward the Aristotelian concept of movement: Processes are
determined by their goal, their completion, the state of rest. Consequently the
concept of the nature of the mind is directed toward maturity, full development,
completion: What the world as a whole is capable of, namely, to integrate itself,
in the unity of its movement, as the "universe," cannot be denied to the human
spirit, but must not be missed by it either. It is a metaphysics that warns against
the unrest (which is about to make its historical entrance) of the endless
movement of cognitionagainst the historical form of the infinite will and the
interminability of man's self-realization. 16It is simply not the case that with the
Renaissance and its concept of nature, infinity breaks into consciousness like an
epiphany. There would already be sufficient reason for this not being the case in
the fact that the concept of form, together with that of the renewal of form
(reformatio), is the concept that governs everything, even if the concept of form
no longer has the old sanction of being pre-given, but admits the theme of
discovering form and self-formation. Precisely if the warning

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against reason's tendency toward interminability was to be taken seriously,

nothing more senseless could have been represented to the people at the time
than the idea that man, who on account of reason was the most perfect of the
living creatures under heaven in regard to the vocation conferred on him, should,
as a result of that same reason, remain the most unfinished of all. But that
circumstancethis turning of reason against itself, of its infinitude against its
perfectibilityseemed to have been confirmed by the unhappy example of
Prometheus.
Why and by what is Prometheus tortured? The heavenly fire that he had acquired
with Athena's help also drove him to the highest summit of the mountains,
because this signifies nothing but the elevated position of pure theory. There it
condemned him to the fetters that make him the victim of the greediest of birds
of prey, the tormenting craving for knowledge. But this Prometheus, too, has his
eschatology. He stands for what is only the preliminary boundlessness even of
his kind of theory: When he returns to the place where he received this fire, he
will find peace. As he is consumed by a single ray of the higher light, because it
only kindles his longing for the whole, so he will then be penetrated through and
through by the fullness of the light. The Neo-Platonic drama of Being finds its
manifest form in Prometheus. Whereas he took the fire of reason to himself
wrongly, he will enjoy it, after the detour of catharsis through his suffering from
the scantiness of the portion that was separated off, in the fullness of legitimate
possession. It is the basic pattern of all Neo-Platonic stories about Being. Added
to it is a surplus that was as yet unknown to Neo-Platonism, a surplus that
prevents the path down and back from being wasted: The reestablishment of the
initial state will be richer and more secure than what had been there in the
beginning without any turning away, and what would have remained, without it.
Prometheus alters the condition of the world by his story.
In Ficino's allegorical interpretation, how and by what right human beings came
into possession of the heavenly fire is almost immaterial; Athena's advice is not
given any moral characterization. What, however, is very obvious empirically,
that one does not need to steal fire in order, nevertheless, to have a share in it
and to pass it on, is once again overlooked and is turned practically upside down:
Prometheus had only been able to take and to pass on some of the heavenly fire,
not the heavenly fire. It is true that Athena, the goddess of science,

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had drawn on the divine wisdom, but precisely in doing so she had split up [into
multiplicity] something that could remain wisdom only in its unity and that, as
multiplicity and divided among many, had to take on the pressing form of
seeking and of painful inquiry. Prometheus suffers the fortunes of reason, of its
great detour and wandering through the world.
The remembrance of these wanderings is the precondition of the new final state's
not being threatened or endangered by self-forgetfulness. If this had not occurred
and did not occur beforehand, then it could still occurthat is the amalgamation of
the fundamental mythical structure with the outline of a metaphysics of history.
That is also why Athena's advice is just as fateful as it is necessary: What that
advice ordains, or could not at any rate allow the advisee to escape, is history
itself. Reason must withstand the entanglement into which it is drawn by the
infinitude of its claim and to whose torment of restlessness it is consigned. The
peculiar character of this idea will find its exact representation in Kant's dialectic
of pure reason.e It is the reason that first must deprive itself of itself, in order to
arrive at itself. There was no need of any external seduction, any sacrilege, any
Fall, but only of this yieldingness of reason to its own compulsions.
Ficino now also knows, again, the art myth in Plato's Protagoras, which had
been withheld from the Middle Ages. He puts in Prometheus's mouth what the
biblical God said before the Flood, that he is sorry that he made man: "Paenitet
me fecisse hominem." What Prometheus suffers from on the Caucasus is not
pure theory but pity for men. They have become unhappy, not as a retaliation for
what he gave them, but on account of the gift itself. Here Ficino's allegorical
interpretation has to be directed at the skills, both the liberal and the mechanical
arts, which derive from those belonging to Minerva, Vulcan, Mars, and the
inferior divinities [daemones "demons"]. Prometheus himself is one of these
inferior divinities who participated in the creation and who represent the way it
is exposed to danger when their services and accomplishments are set up as
independent [of the totality]. 17
Multiplicity as the destruction of unityhere, again, is the Neo-Platonic schema. It
is not enough to describe a gift as divine and not to characterize its origin as
theft; rather, everything depends on its integration into the unity of the universe.
Prometheus was able to give to men the gift of speechrepresented by firewithout
stealing it; nevertheless, it does not contain the civic virtues that are
indispensable

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for man's welfare. Disposition over them had belonged, as in Plato's account,
exclusively to Jupiter, who had been beyond the reach of Prometheus.
Consequently the arts and sciences lack a relation to the whole. 18Against the
background of Ficino's revival of Plotinus, that means that the reason that is split
up among individuals is not able to reestablish unity under the conditions of the
world.
One can describe Prometheus's 'mistake,' then, as his having wanted to divide
among many what, by its nature, could not be divided. There is no plural of
reason. He does not suffer for men or instead of men, or for the consolidation of
their culture against an alien will; instead, he consciously endures the lack that
cannot become clear to those affected by it as nonidentity with reason. He
endures the history of what, by its nature, cannot have a history: the One, the
Nous [Mind], the World Soul. He enduresif one wants to reduce it to the briefest
formulawhat it means not to be the absolute, to be a man and not God.
If, in order to measure the distance, one compares Ficino's allegorical
interpretations of the Prometheus material with that of his master, Plotinus, then
one is struck by the fact that no Hercules is mentioned any longer, to set the
chained Prometheus free.19In Plotinus, Prometheus had been the world soul,
which manifests itself not only in nature as a whole but also in man, though in
the process it falls into the company of matter. The origin of the world and of
man is identical with the one primeval soul's turning away from spirit. To that
extent Epimetheus is the preferred figure [of the two]; when hecontrary to all
mythologyrefuses to accept the gift of Pandora, who (as Plotinus arranges
things) is a work of Prometheus's and is merely fitted out in supplementary
respects by other gods, he decides in favor of a life in the spiritual world as the
better one. Prometheus himself is enchained by his product, and indeed so
inextricably that it seems quite logical when Plotinus brings in Prometheus's
great rival among the mythical liberators, Hercules. If we read the passage
correctly, though, Plotinus wanted to assert that Prometheus's being set free by
Hercules meant that Prometheus himself possessed the power to get free of the
chains.20To be sure, Plotinus had appended to this interpretation the statement
that anyone could adopt it if he wished. Of course, Ficino, who had translated it
in this way, first had to connect this self-liberation to his fundamental idea of
man's self-formation.

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Almost simultaneously with this conception of the fate of reason in the world, a
different allegorical interpretation of the Prometheus story comes into being, one
that, according to a letter written by Erasmus of Rotterdam to John Sixtin in
November 1499 from Oxford, had been part of the content of a disputation
between John Colet, some theologians, and Erasmus himself. 21It almost goes
without saying that what is at issue here is the 'reoccupation' of biblical
functions, whereby the son of the first human couple, Cain, standswithout any
corresponding name from ancient mythology being namedin the light of a
'significance' [Bedeutsamkeit] such as could only be awakened and kept alive by
the reception and transformation of the Prometheus myth.
It is not the Creator of the world, nor the father of the race, Adam, but rather the
Cain who was rejected along with his offering of his "fruit of the ground" who
has become the key figure of human history. The driving force of this story thus
turns out to be an archaic dissatisfaction. The pugna acerrima [bitter dispute]
among the contending scholars breaks out when Colet asserts that Cain offended
God by placing more trust, as a tiller of the soil, in his own diligence as a
cultivator than in the kindness of the Creator of nature. Abel, on the contrary,
had rested content with what grew of its own accord (sponte nascentibus
contentus), which his sheep could graze on.
Colet's argument contains one of the fundamental conflicts of the human attitude
to the world. One has to realize that Abel, according to this interpretation, still
behaves as though he were situated in Paradise, and were not the offspring of
parents who have been driven out of it, while Cain does exactly what would
have had to follow obviously from this fate of exile, and what accords with the
curse that went with it: He places his trust only in toil and in the sweat of his
face. But submission with regard to the exile at the same time provided an
occasion for pride in one's success under the most adverse conditions. The
dilemma of all culture criticism seems to present itself already in the earliest
biblical scene (a scene that leads to fratricide) of mankind: whether one can live
in the world with the imputation that it is still a little bit, or somewhat more,
Paradise, or whether one can only survive in it if one regards it as the aggregate
of the negations of Paradise. To that extent, this disputation belongs at the
beginning of the epoch whose pathos seemed for the first time to have taken the
expulsion from Paradise completely seriously, not so as to acquiesce

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in it but, on the contrary, so as to devote all its powers to regaining Paradise.

When the dispute that Erasmus is reporting threatens to become all too forcible
and sharp, he offers his contribution, in the role of a poet, to smoothing over the
dissension and brightening up the meal. What he has to offer consists in the
pretense of a myth, which, however, following Plato's example, his listeners
must promise to regard merely as such (pro fabula). From an old codex of
unknown origin he derives a "story that is very like truth" (veri simillimam
narrationem). Cain, he says, in spite of his diligence, always had to suffer from
hunger and avidity; but then he remembered the "tradition" according to which
his parents had been driven out of a garden in which everything necessary for
their support had grown of its own accord and most abundantly. Nothing draws
his attention to the justice of the punishment that struck those who were
expelled, and everything draws it to the prospect of reestablishing what had once
been possible for nature in that case.
Erasmus disarms the story by ascribing it to an ancient, tattered codex. In reality
he is telling the single variant of the biblical story that registers what is drawing
near [in history]. What Cain had to do was simply to supplement his proven
diligence with an evasion of the verdict. "Dolum addidit industriae" [He used
craft to eke out his industry]. With artful cunning (veteratoriis technis) he
approaches the angel who guards the locked-up Paradise and tries to bribe him
into secretly delivering up a couple of seeds from the prolific sowing of
Paradise. What Erasmus makes Cain demonstrate in his art myth is the power of
rhetoric. God, so he makes Cain say, has long since forgotten the old story and
ceased to have any interest in it. Of course it is not a question of those forbidden
fruits that had brought Adam to his fall. But still more, an excessive zeal on the
part of his doorkeeper of Paradise might even be displeasing to God. Clever
industry, on man's part, could be more satisfactory to him than dull idleness.
Perhaps this God wants to be tricked? "Quid si falli etiam cupit . . . ?"
The analogy to Prometheus's theft of fire is palpable. Cain attends to
Prometheus's business himself; he does not need the assistance of a god or a
goddess, because he possesses the power of speech. The latter is capable even of
making the locked gate of Paradise permeable. It makes the doorkeeper-angel
into an accomplice of the one who is expelled, and brings the one who shuts out
into the position of having

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something in common, in relation to the good that is withheld, with the one who
is shut out: To keep guard over Paradise is even worse, Cain says, than to be
deprived of it; the post does not even leave one the freedom to roam about. The
presupposition of this rhetoric is that the God who is distant from the scene is the
deus absconditus [hidden God] of the late Middle Ages. He is suspected not only
of being hidden but also of not being interested in human affairs, insofar as they
do not affect salvation, in the next world, which has become abstract. As a result,
secrecy in relation to the Omniscient is nevertheless possible, like every kind of
human skill in dealing with natureeven violentlyfor one's own benefit. But the
beginning of every opportunity is having the power of the word at one's disposal.
Even in its most artificial late form, myth still presupposes that the power of the
gods is depleted, if only because of an assumed lack of interest in the world
resulting from the fact that questions of salvation, in the 'beyond,' are regulated
by faith. It is the myth not only of a hidden God but of a God who looks in the
other direction. Cain's rhetoric blossoms because God is not thought of as paying
attention to it. He unfolds before the watchman-angel a panorama of alluring
this-wordliness, the visionary program of an epoch that has scarcely dawned. He
interchanges roles: It is, he says, an obsolete lot (if he had known the word, he
could have called it a medieval lot) to belong in the ranks of the theological
functionaries, to have an office like that of watching over Paradise. "And let me
tell you, this country of ours, with which we console our exile, has woods with
fairest foliage, a thousand kinds of trees for which we have scarce invented
names, springs which issue in all directions from the hills and rocks, rivers with
limpid waters which glide on by grassy banks, mountains that rise into the sky,
shady valleys, seas full of wealth."f He has no doubt, he says, that in the
innermost bowels of the earth rich rewards await him who will dig them out and
probe all her veins. Many things grow of their own accord even here, outside
Paradise: golden apples, luscious figs and fruits of all kinds. One would not miss
Paradise so very much at all if one were only permitted to live here eternally ("si
liceat hic aeternum vivere"). Here the idea is immediately comforting that what
the individual can no longer take from the treasures of the earth on account of
the shortness of his life will be taken by his grandchildren.
It is true, he says, that men are afflicted with sicknesses, but their diligence will
find remedies even for them. He sees plants, he enthuses

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to the angel, that have marvelous fragranceswhat if there were one among them
that could render life immortal? Regarding the for373bidden knowledge of that
fruit of Paradise, he does not understand what importance it is thought to have.
Why should he trouble himself with what does not concern him: "Quid mihi cum
his quae nihil ad me attinet?" He will not fall back one step as long as there is
nothing that persevering industry cannot attain ("non cessabo, quando nihil est
quod non expugnet pertinax industria"). Thus, he says, the narrowness of a little
garden has been exchanged for a wide world.
The quality of the rhetoric does not depend on the moral quality [of the cause].
That is not a matter of course, since according to the anti-Sophistical tradition,
the art of saying things correctly was supposed to gain acceptance for reality and
its goodness. But here, in Erasmus's art myth, it is the worst man who makes the
angel an accomplice in the worst cause, and, in fact, solely by virtue of the fact
that he possesses the best rhetoric: "Persuasit pessimam causam vir pessimus,
orator optimus." Cain is able to bring the angel, even though he has a share in
heavenly bliss, to consciousness of a misfortune he has that has hitherto been
hidden from him. He is bound to a task, Cain says, for which men already use
their dogs, and he has to stand outside Paradise but is not allowed to take any
part in the world. He appeals to their equality in hopelessness: "Miser fave
miseris, exclusus exclusis, damnatis damnatior" [You who are wretched,
excluded, and proscribed, take the part of those who are in the same situation].
This Prometheus under the name of Cain who emerges from Erasmus's ceramic
workshop is a man of the great word even more than of great industry. With the
vision of a world to come, articulated at the beginning of the sixteenth century as
a display of pure rhetoric, he overcomes the fidelity of an angel, on behalf of
man. He receives what recollection made him desire and makes the earth
produce such a rich yield that even the forgetful God who looks the other way
cannot fail to notice how rich labor et sudor [labor and sweat] have made the
thief. God overwhelms him with pests and weeds, storms, and other disasters. He
changes the watchman-angel into what he had been brought into temptation by
wanting to be: a man. Then Cain decides to make a burnt offering with a part of
his harvest. The failure of this move is described in the Bible.
Thus the first attempt at a 'modern age,' projected onto the beginning of
mankind, ends in failure and despair; and it was intended, by

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Erasmus, as a myth of futility. The identification of Cain with Prometheus is

meant to bring the exploit of recovering Paradise into scandalous ill repute. But
it touches on a mental project that had yet to unfold its attraction.
The word, as used by Cain/Prometheus, is rhetoric; it has nothing to do with
magic. A century later it becomes crucial for Francis Bacon, too, to find the right
word; but now this is the original name of each thing, which was discovered by
man in Paradise and which confers power over it. That is a magical, rather than a
rhetorical, fundamental idea. Magic, too, presupposes that God's administration
of the world is characterized by a reduced level of attention and that he might
not notice if man, by means of a new power over things, procured for himself an
equivalent to Paradise, which would enable him to forget his old sin. Theory and
cunning renew their early alliance.
Bacon has a remarkable interpretation of the deceptive sacrifice: Prometheus, he
says, brought out, against the gods, the same kind of foreground appearance to
which men are subjected in the impenetrability of the starry heavens for
astronomical theory. This produces, in spite of, or on account of, the sublimity of
the object, the inadequacy of their knowledge about it. Just as Prometheus does
to Zeus with the sacrificial bull, astronomy offers us only the external side of the
world of the heavens: the number, situation, motion, and periodicity of the
heavenly bodies, the hide, as it were, of the heavens (tanquam pellem coeli).
22The meat, the inner parts, the substancein the language of theory, the causal
relationshipsare not there. But the cunning remains on the side of the weaker
party: Men create for themselves, with much ingenuityand occasionally with
such absurd constructions as the daily motion of the earth according to
Copernicus ("quod nobis constat falsissimum esse" [which I am convinced is
most false])!an artificial world of their sacrificial beast that meets their needs,
even if it has nothing to do with the real state of affairs in nature.23
The connection to the configuration of Prometheus's deceptive sacrifice again
puts man in the position of beneficiary, this time in relation to his needs in the
area of theory; he forgoes the truth so as not to forgo altogether having a
conception of the whole. With the help of myth a theory comes into existence
that looks like a theory of myth itself, but is a theory of theory. The allegorical
interpretation of the theft of fire is more harmless; it shows Prometheus not in
the role of cunning but in that of taking advantage of accident. A blow with a

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piece of flint exhibits the spark, by producing it, and the theft consists merely in
getting permanently in hand what nature has exhibited in passing. 24
If, in connection with the deceptive sacrifice, Bacon has in view the lack of
dependable reciprocity in the relationship between gods and men, between the
knowability of nature and man's actual state of knowledge, then later, in his great
allegorical interpretation of the Prometheus story in the context of the mythical
wisdom of antiquity, the 'status' of man becomes, for him, that of the privileged
center of the world (homo veluti centrum mundi) under the providence
represented by Prometheus.25Apparently, however, this providence is something
that has to come to nature's aid, because man is originally a naked and needy
creature. That is why Prometheus gives him fire as the epitome of what he can
achieve, as the forma formarum [form of forms], the instrumentum
instrumentorum [instrument of instruments], the auxilium auxiliorum [helper of
helpers]. But why did this gift encounter the displeasure of the gods?
The answer to this question stands in epochal contrast to the interpretation of
Prometheus's sufferings that Marsilio Ficino had given. Man, Bacon says, too
soon rested content with the effect of the agency that was bestowed on him,
accepted something preliminary as something final, and saw the summit of his
development as having been reached with the ancient world and its heritage,
especially the heritage of Aristotle. False finitude and satisfaction caused the
living consciousness of the origin of the heavenly gift to stagnate, rather than
keeping it alive by continual new use and new discoveries. The illegitimacy of
the possession of fire consists, then, in the possessor's being pacified by his
single and supposedly definitive acquisition. It is not the favor of the gods that
has been lacking in men's historythey themselves have continued to owe
themselves everything (ipsos sibi deesse).
Thomas Hobbes, in a note to his comparison of the three forms of the
statedemocracy, aristocracy, and monarchyapplied an allegorical interpretation
of the Prometheus story to the preeminence of the monarchical form; he sees the
pantheon as subject to the patriarchal authority of the one Jupiter. This
preeminence must be not only essential but also historical, because it is only by
reference to it that the theory of the political contract, as the rationality of the
transition from the state of nature to absolutism, can be displayed. The
achievements of the other forms of that state could only be derived from the

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appropriation of formal elements [of absolutism] in a situation in which their

original function is not recognized. The ancients, too, had seen this in the figure
of Prometheus. The theft of fire would mean that by human invention, laws and
justice were taken by imitation from monarchy. Prometheus the shaper of man
presents himself as the one who animates the multitude, the dirt and dregs of
mankind, as it were, by means of fire that is removed from its natural source,
into the single civil person whose exercise of power is then called aristocracy or
democracy. The authors and abettors of this transfer of the original principle,
who could have lived securely and quietly under the natural jurisdiction of kings,
have to suffer the punishment, after their discovery, of being raised to a high
position and there being tormented by perpetual cares, suspicions, and
dissensions. 26,g
Prometheus on the Caucasus appears then as the demagogue who, in the political
state that is no longer rationally derived, carries the burden of unnaturalness and
instability of the offices and functions. He has deviated from the initial condition
of political reason, which contains, as it were, the substance of everything it is
capable of. In the process, the other forms of the state were put together
artificially by men (artificio hominum) from the ashes of monarchy, after it had
been ruined by seditions. Prometheus is this ingenium humanum [human
invention]fallen away from the origin of reason and forced into unstable
substitute constructionsitself. But political skill is by its nature incapable of
being just in its own right, and is consequently dependent on usurpation, on the
'theft of fire.'
Although, for Hobbes, existence in a state is practically defined by the fact that it
results from the overcoming of the internal contradiction in the state of nature,
subsequent history again exhibits the differentiation of naturalness and
artificiality. Rationality is entirely contained, once and for all, in a single act and
in the single condition resulting from it. The nonsensical action that is prefigured
by Prometheus is the artistic frivolity of applying the human gift of invention
once again, to its [own original] result. Prometheus does not stand for the
primary act of the foundation of the state, whose form is prefigured, instead, by
Zeus's sovereignty, but for the rampant secondary artificiality whose motive is
seen in the envy that causes the opponents of monarchy to pursue their political
endeavors. Of them we are told that they would surely withdraw themselves
from under the dominion of one God, if they could.

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Jakob Brucker, the first author of lasting influence to compose a history of

philosophy following Bayle's precepts of historical criticism, a history that was
eagerly read by Goethe and was the main source of Kant's knowledge of the
older history of philosophy, made the allegorical elevation of Prometheus to the
role of the first philosopher into a pedantic chapter of his historiography. True to
his master, he even discusses the question of the historical existence of
Prometheus: ''To begin with, we are still not sure who Prometheus was; some
even maintain that there was never a man in the world who had that name, but
that the ancients understood by it the human mind, intelligence, and prudence,
which God gave men so that they could invent the sciences that are necessary for
human life." The attempts at finding in the figure of Prometheus the reflection of
biblical personages, of Adam, Noah, Magog, Moses, are duly reported. To be
sure, a "low level of probability" is conceded to such interpretations. 27
That in a history of philosophy one had, in spite of all the doubts about his
existence, to speak of Prometheus results from the need to test the assertion that
one should regard him as the "first inventor of all the good arts and sciences, and
consequently also of philosophy, among the Greeks." All of the stories attributed
to this figure result from what he had done for the Greeks, when he "improved
their savage and coarse manners, made their dispositions tame, and cultivated
them." For Brucker, the fashioning of men no longer has any rebellious quality,
any relationship to the Fall and the loss of Paradise. Having fashioned men is
only a metaphor for a civilizing performance that "first brought the Greeks'
savage dispositions into a human form." In this context, for Prometheus to be
punished would be totally unintelligible; the chaining to the Caucasus, therefore,
is a misinterpretation of his perseverance in the practice of science. It means that
he "devoted himself to astronomy, on these mountains, for a long time." So,
where it is a matter of eliminating contradictions, Brucker decides in favor of the
consistent version, whereas elsewhere historiography's findings only need be
inventoried: "Thus runs the story; but as to what its meaning may be there is an
endless amount of argument."

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Translator's Notes
a. Seinsgrundlosigkeit, the absence of a (sufficient) reason for existence.
b. Here, and throughout this translation, the word mythology (Mythologie) refers
to the study and interpretation of myths, not to the subject matter of that study
and interpretation. (Though admittedly the line becomes a fine one to the extent
that "work on myth," through which alone we can experience that subject matter,
comes, as the author goes on to say here, to be dominated by the external
perspective of 'mythology.')
c. Metamorphoses, trans. F.J. Miller, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1916), p. 29 (translation slightly revised).
d. On mythological here, see translator's note b, above.
e. The allusion is to the train of thought exemplified in the Transcendental
Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason.
f. The Epistles of Erasmus, trans. F. M. Nichols (London: Longmans, Green,
1901), vol. 1, p. 217.
g. In translating the author's paraphrases of De cive in this paragraph and the
next one, I have used the language of Hobbes's own English version, in Thomas
Hobbes, Man and Citizen (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books,
1972), pp. 224 225.

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4
Aesthetic Brightening Up
To one who thinks philosophically, no story is a matter of indifference, even if
it were the natural history of the apes.
Heinrich Martin Gottfried Köster, Über die Philosophie der Historie (1775)

While Giambattista Vico was not the first who would have granted to myth, or
restored to it, its own specific exercise of reason, he was, in doing so, the first to
have conceded that exercise to it 'systematically' and in the great context of a
theory of history, and, above all, to have made this plausible to the taste of
subsequent generations.
Vico's concept of history does not take part in Descartes's fiction of the zero
point.a That fiction conflicts with Vico's fundamental assumption that history is
the temporal form of experience and consequently cannot set up its new
beginnings without regard for what has been and for what has been handed
down. In this unity of a history of experience that is common to all mankind the
decisions were made very early on. The nicest parallel for the way in which that
occurred is found in the discovery and naming of the constellations by
astronomy, which thus, in its very beginnings, committed perception to a
mythically imprinted system of figures as its means of orientation.
What appears does not only appear but imports something, too, or expresses
something. The power of imagination translates importance and expression into
stories, or extracts stories back out of them in retrospect. There cannot be stories
unless the bearers of importance

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and expression have names. Paradisaic man was, first of all, a giver of names;
man who has been expelled from Paradise would have had to be a name-finderin
embarrassment, he becomes a name-inventor.
The configuration of Prometheus, the eagle, and Hercules enables Vico to make
one of his fundamental decisions: For him it is not the fire-bringer but rather the
vanquisher of monsters who establishes the possibility of human life. We are
reminded that, seen as a whole, the Hellenic and Hellenistic world upholds this
decision in favor of Hercules. In any case, the service of freeing Prometheus
from the eagle is present only in the Attic version, whereas the Doric-
Peloponnesian zone of forms is not aware of Hercules's helpful supervention.
The son of Alcmene, with his deeds and with the physiognomies of those whom
he lays low, could ignite the imagination in a different way from the sufferer on
the Caucasus. One could also say that for Vico, Prometheus's potter's work is too
realistic, too paltry in its limitation to mere survival, whereas Hercules is a figure
of versatility in dealing with the world, one who first proves himself fit for
apotheosis. Prometheus appears, in contrast to him, as the "model of the subject
of the life-world who, because he is ignorant, is driven by constant concern
about the preservation of his existence." 1For Vico, who believes that he knows
how myths arise from an original sense experience, Hercules stands for what can
be called, in the language I use, the "work of myth," with regard to which only
"work on myth" allows us to form conjectureswhile Prometheus is more the
figure of a disabling anxiety, a figure that Vico may have been led to see in this
way, and consequently to banish from the center of attention, by its allegorical
interpretation in Hobbes's Leviathan.
To Vico, Prometheus is suspect. He does not know that Prometheus had helped
Zeus in the struggle against the Titans. Above all, as one who relies on names,
he is disturbed by the separation of "providence" from the most powerful
divinity.b If the "poetic metaphysics" of myth goes back to a primeval source of
truth, if its main content is supposed to be the "rational theology of providence in
history,"c then this historical agency cannot be in conflict with Jupiter.2The
chaining to the Caucasus is part of the binding of the giants by the highest
authority; these bonds include ''fear of the sky and of Jupiter" and his lightning,
and the eagle (who here devours the heart itself) is "reverence for Jupiter's
auspices."

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In the "Poetic Morals" the giants, and among them once again Prometheus
(whom Vico does not associate with the Titans), being tamed, become the
founders of the nations and rulers of the first communities. 3Fear of the terrors
of Jupiter made them desist from their godlessness and their fight against
heaven. The idea of Jupiter was born entirely from extreme fear, but being
domesticated as the fear of others, it leads to a world in which even the giants
have become pious. For the spirit is inclined by its nature toward gigantism, and
has to be bent down to the earth by the recognition of God. But since this
happens in a story, the starting point is never the whole. For the admirer of
Hercules, fear can in fact be transformed into poetry, while the giants become
merely useful chiefs, forced into a settled state in a retired life of dread of
Jupiter's lightning. Retirement here means, at the same time, a condition that is
softened by modesty: The giants hesitated to satisfy their bestial appetites under
the open sky and withdrew with their women into caves, so as to live there in a
hidden lifetime association of love. The origin of marriage as an institution is
inseparable from the retreat into caves, from fear of the terror of lightning in the
open, outside the enclosed space. So the cave is not the original space, but rather
the retreat taken by open defiance, a forgoing of bestial restlessness, with the
sexual bonus of a settled state.
Again, in the "Poetic Economics," Vico makes Prometheus serve to bring fire
from heaven, by taking it from the sun. Vico knows this from the Roman cult of
the tending of the sacred fire, which, if negligence had allowed it to go out,
could only be rekindled from the sun. But the earliest purpose of the granting of
fire was not handicraft and art, but rather the clearing of forests. More than in
this burning down, Vico is interested in the problem of the subsequent fixing of
boundaries without the aid of armed public authority. Among wild men, he says,
this had been the business of a frightful religion, which confined them within
their bounds and consecrated their first walls with bloody ceremonies.4In every
case, what is important is to gain the terminus a quo [point of departure] of
history, which lies on this side of the terrors and is supposed to be entirely
poiesis [making, creation]. Here in the middle of the century of the
Enlightenment and even before the advent of Sturm und Drang, in Germany, the
thesis that genius (ingenium) creates the possibility of human life, by introducing
institutions and ordinances, figures and boundaries, into reality, is already a
Romantic fundamental idea.

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By opposing the Cartesian program of an absolute beginning directed against

everything hitherto existing (as being a possible handicap), Vico avoided the
unsolved central problem of the Enlightenment, the problem of how it was to
comprehend itself historically. The Enlightenment claims to have made a new
beginning by virtue of natural reason, and to be unable to lose this thread again.
But it has the burden of also having to explain, now, how this same reason could
let things get to the point where a radical historical incision even became
necessary. If reason is a constant in man's equipment, on which one was
supposed to be able to depend henceforth, it is only with difficulty that one can
understand why it had not been a constant in the history of mankind from time
immemorial. Reason's absolute self-establishment, in its judicial quality,
inevitably exposed its contingencyand contingency does not make a future more
reliable than its past.
The solutionor the attempt at a solutionlay in disparaging man on the basis of
other constituent parts of his makeup, so that the new epoch could be set free, as
capable of its accomplishment. Kant himself describes the incompetence from
which enlightenment was supposed to enable men to emerge as "self-incurred"
[selbstverschuldet],d but he does not tell us what was the nature of this putting
oneself in the wrong [Selbstverschuldung] vis-à-vis a reason that now presented
itself as so confident of success. Evidently at the time of his often quoted
definition of enlightenment, in 1784, Kant was not yet ready, as he was in his
Religion book, ten years later,e to fit up the old dogma of Original Sin
philosophically, so as to provide himself with an early starting point for reason's
incompetence. And his hesitation was justified, because this solution involved
the acceptance of a punishment that manifestly implied the presence of an
[exogenously] imposed decree [Verhängnis] in history and took away the
legitimacy and the necessary sustenance of any self-willed elevation of man into
a state in which he would make full use of reason. This affinity between, on the
one hand, every assignment of responsibility for the corruption of reason and, on
the other hand, the dogma of Original Sin made it more difficult for the
Enlightenment to answer the question why reason deprived itself of power.
In this regard Rousseau made himself clearer than most people ventured to. He
described the limits of man's environment in the state of nature as the
demarcation line, the crossing of whichfrom the most natural motives of
curiosity and exotic desireswas bound to

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lead history into a detour of which the efforts as well as the gains always
produced new burdens and needs, from which, however, there was no longer any
way to return to rational poverty, either. Irreversibility was part of man's
existence as a being judged capable of any hardship, just as it was part of his
history, even as a history that had already miscarried. The original state could
have been and would have had to have been sufficient for reason, because it was
sufficient for self-preservation. More than that, reason does not include.
That the unreason of the historical detour, which is staged by reason, cannot
have fatal results seems to be guaranteed by the fact that reason, in its turn,
consists in being induced, by the demands resulting from its errors, to practice
control and compensatory steering. Reason regulates the unreason that it set in
motion in such a way that it can be survived by means of ruthlessness toward
itself (hence the idea of the critique of reason).
This conception has all the characteristics that readily suggest a glance at
Prometheus. Rousseau begins the second part of his prize essay in response to
the question proposed by the Academy of Dijon in 1750 with a reference to an
Egyptian ancestor of Prometheus, the god Theutus, who, by inventing the
sciences, had become un dieu ennemi au repos des hommes [a god inimical to
the repose of mankind]. The original note to the text refers to a seldom noticed
subsidiary form of the Greek treatment of Prometheus: the Prometheus
Pyrkaeus, the fragment of a satyr play by Aeschylus, in the anecdotal form in
which it is transmitted in Plutarch. In it the satyr, seeing fire for the first time,
wants to kiss it and embrace it, but Prometheus cautions him not to singe his
beard: "Satyre, tu pleureras la barbe de ton menton, car il brûle quand on y
touche" [Satyr, you will mourn the beard on your chin, because (fire) burns
when one touches it]. So Prometheus brings fireand he warns of the
consequences of his stolen gift. Rousseau was bound to be pleased by that, and
he does not hesitate to abbreviate the text from Plutarch by a crucial clause; for
in that text Prometheus had added to his warning, " . . . but it gives light and
warmth." 5It is by this line of descent, then, that Prometheus comes to appear on
the title page of the ''First Discourse."
Christoph Martin Wieland published his "Dream Conversation with Prometheus"
in 1770, in connection with his essay "On the experiments proposed by J. J.
Rousseau for discovering the true state of man's nature."6Here the newly
established connection between the exegesis

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of Prometheus and the Enlightenment question about the nature of man is more
manifest than it is in Rousseau himself. Wieland sees Rousseau's problem as that
of determining man's natural constitution through experience under conditions
that have long since eliminated this natural constitution. Fortunately for the
reader, the sophisticated iteration that asks whether "in the bosom of society" the
faculty of experience itself would not be deformed to the point of producing an
inability to distinguish what is natural is not considered.
What one can describe as the Platonic problem of such an investigationnamely,
the problem that one must already know what one seeks, in advance, so as to be
able to prepare the means of investigation accordinglyis introduced as a [logical]
circle: "For if these means have to be chosen in such a way that we can be sure
that we ourselves have not foisted on nature the answer that it is supposed to
give us, thenwe must already know human nature very accurately; but it is
precisely because we would like to know it that these experiments are supposed
to be made." Wieland discusses the paradoxes that would necessarily be
produced by the experiment of making human children grow up outside society.
But his thesis is that such an experiment would be entirely unnecessary, even if
the necessary preconditions for it could be produced, because it could not teach
us anything new. Human history, he says, rather than being the monstrous
perversion of what is possible in nature, is, in fact, the execution, on the largest
possible scale, of the experiment that Rousseau proposes. The state of nature is
the sum of the conditions determining the state of history. "The great experiment
has been under way on this earth for many thousands of years already, and
nature itself has taken pains to direct it, so that nothing is left for the Aristotles
and Plinys of every age except to open their eyes and see how nature has
operated from time immemorial, and still operates, and will undoubtedly operate
in the future. . . . No, my dear Rousseau, however poor we wretches may be, we
are at least not so to such a monstrous extent that after the experience of so many
centuries we should still have to undertake new, unheard-of experiments in order
to find outwhat nature intends for us."
If the experiment with subjects untouched by society in the bosom of society
neither can be made nor needs to be made, then it becomes what is now only an
aesthetic configuration, "of the possibility of which one can at least dream." The
dreamer finds himself in the mountains,

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before Prometheus, who is chained to the rock. The two become "the best of
friends in a moment, as commonly happens in dreams."
The dreamer believes that he sees before him the real author of the human
species, who had made men out of clay and water "and found means to give
themI don't know howthis wonderful Idon't-know-what that they call their soul."
Prometheus wants news of men, how they are doing and what use they make of
their existence. The dreamer gives particulars, but he would rather not say what
they were. In any case, he says, Prometheus then shook his head and said
something on the subject that was by no means a panegyric of his cousin Jupiter,
of whom he says that he "did not grant him [Prometheus] the satisfaction of
making his creatures happy." The dreamer tells Prometheus that the sages had
endeavored to remedy this situation, and one of their suggestions had been to
return to the state of nature. In response to Prometheus's query, the dreamer
reports, without appearing very well disposed toward the idea, that people
pictured this state of nature as " . . . thinking nothing, desiring nothing, doing
nothing, concerning oneself not at all with other people, not much about oneself,
and least of all about the future. . . . "
Here something happens that hardly ever happens in philosophical dialogues,
even those in dreams, and that no tragedy could have allowed in the fettered
god's pitiable condition: Prometheus bursts out in "hearty laughter." For he
evidently remembers one of the earliest philosophical scenes, in which there is
also laughterthe tumble of the protophilosopher Thales, at which the Thracian
maid was an onlooker. What he says is that the contemporary philosophers are
still like their predecessors, if they "never see what is right before their noses
because they have gotten used to always looking who knows how far above their
noses." That is almost word for word the commentary that the Thracian maid, in
Plato, makes on her laughter. 7
Wieland's satyric trick is that he makes the mythical creator of man come
forward against the philosophical absolutism of naturalness: "But I think after all
that I, who made men, should know best how I made them." Of course, the
'maker of men' cannot expect to accomplish much with this argument (which
suits the dreamer's century so well): "Your philosophers do not seem to me to be
the kind of people who let themselves be instructed by Prometheus. . . . "
Prometheus says they would behave no differently from Jupiter, who described
the men whom Prometheus made as a "foolish, botched piece of work."

 Page 384

He would have accomplished something better even if he had been intoxicated

by nectar.
How had Prometheus come to make men? Here, there is a gap to fill in the myth.
It was at a moment when he had nothing better to do, Prometheus tells the
dreamer, that he hit upon the idea of populating the earth with living creatures,
with animals of every kind, "among which some are grotesque enough in
appearance to betray the mood in which I made them." It is the world of Rococo,
not that of the ancient world's cosmos, that comes into being here. Even when
Prometheus "finally took a fancy to try a species that would be meant as an
intermediate race between us gods and my animals," this was still "a mere
game." But it unexpectedly turned out to be a creature for which he felt the
inception of ''a kind of love," so that he resolved to make them happy creatures.
What was in his mind was a musical instrument with infinitely subtle strings, on
which nature would play the most beautiful harmony.
Wieland's intention evidently was that this belated decision to enter into a moral
commitment in relation to the product of a pastime should explain the difficulty
of human nature, and the fate it was to have. Thus we get a Pygmalion fable,
which again demonstrates, even in the sculptor's recollection, his enthusiasm for
his product. It made him risk the wrath of his paramount divine relative in order
to procure happiness for men. Prometheus cannot understand how they have
managed not to become happy. After this initially logical interpretation of his
own work, the Titan has recourse to the desperate means that had become
attached to his own myth as a sort of theodicy: It must have been Pandora's box,
the container of the "thousand needs dressed in the color of pleasure."
Strictly speaking, the Prometheus of the dream tums out to be a Rousseauist
himself: He gave his men, he says, just as much understanding as they needed
"in order to be happier than they would have been through the senses alone." But
when Prometheus describes the idyll of the state of nature, of the original
pastoral scene, he loses all credibility for the dreamer because then even more
incomprehensible causality falls to an exogenous trick, to the calamity of
Pandora. What will the dreamer who remains so unsatisfied make of Pandora's
container when he awakens? "What kind of a box could that be, after all, that
was able to produce so much misfortune?" Wieland, in 1770, finally makes of
Pandora's fatal box still another piece of Rococo. It

 Page 385

was, he says, a real box in the literal sense of the word, namely, a box of
cosmetics.
The argument with Rousseau ends in a parody of Rousseau: The supposed
uselessness of human culture is concentrated in the fashion of false youth and
beauty, the embodiment of the difference between seeming and being, the
wretched propensity to deceive "human nature's artless innocence and candor."
The possibility of seeming to be what one is not quickly spread, Wieland says, to
all areas of man's life: Just as there was no longer any natural face, neither was
there any natural character. "Everything was made up and falsified: madeup
piety, made-up friendship, made-up statesmanship, made-up eloquence.
Heavens! What was not made up? Human society now resembled a great
masquerade. . . . " But this art of appearance was naturally followed by the other,
the art of dealing with appearance, of penetrating it, so as not to be a victim of it,
or briefly put, by the necessity of "always thinking of new arts by means of
which to frustrate this art.'' Devices are followed by counterdevices, masquerade
is followed by unmasking, cosmetics by the pathos of the naked truth, rhetoric
by the demand to get down to the facts,f The process that was initiated in myth
becomes independent, and winds up entirely in man's hands. His reason shows
itself to be an iterative faculty. It has to revert, again and again, to what seems to
lie behind it; as critique, it is again in need of critiquequousque tandem? [How
long will this go on?].
The native readiness with which men reached for Pandora's box of cosmetics, so
as to be consumed entirely in the technique and countertechnique of appearance,
leads Wieland from his Prometheus dream to the final thesis of his treatisethat
humans would have lost their original state even if there had never been a
Pandora and her box. Prometheus could consider men happy because he, exiled
to the Caucasus, had no longer been a witness of their history: "One had to be as
extremely enamored of his own product as he was, not to see where the mistake
lay."
But where did it lie? "Creatures whose innocence and happiness depend on their
ignorance . . . are always in a very insecure position. . . . " Only now does one
understand why, in the "Dream Conversation," there was no mention of the theft
of fire: The Enlightenment could not be allowed to have taken place through
Prometheus if it was to be able to take place in the eighteenth century.
Prometheus's

 Page 386

mistake, demonstrated by history up to this point, was supposed to prove to be a

small defect in a conception that, as a whole, was successful, and thus not
something requiring intervention from on high. Not quite enough
understandingthat had to be something that could be made up for by an
educational program.
When Wieland in 1792, in the next to the last of his Dialogues of the Gods,
again touches on the Prometheus myth, the prospect has grown darker. The
Revolution had finished off the Rococo. Rousseau's expectations had not been
fulfilled; the costumed shepherds had not been replaced by primeval natural men
but by the equally costumed virtuous citizens of the ancient Roman Republic.
The political dispute on Olympus about the philosophical parentage of the
Revolution leads very quickly from the "sans-culottes," by way of the "Cynics,"
to the ''natural men," who, rather than any philosopher, had been "the true
prototypes of sans-culottism, the sans-culottes in the purest and noblest sense of
this honorable name," if Zeus's "progressive" daughter, Minerva, should be
correct. And things would return to this original condition, in the final result of
liberty and equality, "if people were serious about these things, and these
beautiful, but evilly abused words did not merely serve a band of cunning
deceivers as talismans with which to rebel with impunity against any authority
and order that wants to set limits to their lust for power and their covetousness."
8
Wieland makes his Jupiter think that the moderate core of the great clamor lies
in the intention, through an "entirely exceptional transformation of the whole
nation," to prepare the promised golden age, at least for a future generation, by
means of an "entirely new kind of national education," which "will not come to
pass among those who are now alive, but of which, when it has finally taken
root, the third or the fourth generation will certainly see the fruits." One must
only, he says, be able to wait. To Minerva's realism it seems iraplausible that a
capacity for waiting, however great, could ever enable the most distant posterity
to enjoy the promised fruits.
Here the name of Prometheus is mentioned once again, so as to formulate an
antithesis between naturalhess and artificiality. No effort on the part of art could
make possible, we are told, what nature has made impossible, "and Prometheus
would just have to find an entirely new clay, and shape an entirely new kind of
men from it," in order to people the Revolution's utopian republic with them. It
had not been enough to grind the monarchy into dust, to produce from it the
plastic

 Page 387

stuff for the new creatures. It is not the philosophical program of utopia that is
mocked by the family of the gods, but Prometheus's demiurgic inadequacy. The
mythical state of affairs still holdsman is not in fact a legitimate creation of the
gods to whose world order such ideas could have been related. The philosophical
work of art called utopia cannot appeal to the given world order, because it is
powerless against the split that is inherent in man's original history.
Jupiter is full of resignation. From boredom, since Theodosius's decree, he has
become a philosopher, and that makes him doubt whether reason could have
been cultivated by the cultural process of history. "To say nothing of the fact that
we gods have lost more than half of our power along with men's belief in us,
would I, for example, make them more rational by means of lightning and
thunderbolts? . . . Haven't we, on our side, long since done everything we could
to help them overcome the imperfection and weakness of their ambiguous
nature?" The gods had led man out of his original savage state, established
family and society, made life easier with agriculture and beautified it with the
arts, introduced laws, religion, and police, and sent them the Muses and
philosophy, "so as to free them from every vestige of the animal-like savagery of
their original condition." Men had been happy and had remained so as long as
they had allowed themselves to be ruled by the gods. But the perfection of this
guidance had at the same time produced the illusion that it was unnecessary.
"We brought them so far that finally they thought they could do without us; they
turned our own benefactions against us, gave us notice that they didn't require
our services any longer, ran after a new phantom of superhuman perfection, and
fell without noticing itby scorning and neglecting the means by which we had
made them into meninto a barbarism that bordered very closely on the crude
bestiality of their original condition."
It is evidently the dark Middle Ages following ancient paganism that is meant to
be portrayed, from Jupiter's perspective. The Renaissance appears as a short
interlude of recollection of the original sources of culture, which again was
ruined by the old game, because "the epoch of the highest enlightenment was
always the one in which every kind of speculative madness and practical
fanaticism were in fullest swing." The education of the human race has failed
because "such weak and impermanent creatures as these pottery products of
Prometheus's" have not stood the test.

 Page 388

Assuming the thesis that myth, as the earliest way of processing the terrors of the
unknown and of overwhelming power, is itself a mode of action that contributes
to the humanization of the world, and that work on myth continues this action as
a historical one, the question necessarily arises as to the reflexive comprehension
of this function and the potential for pursuing its immanent tendency: for
humanizing what is already humanization. To put the question differently: When
was what had always had to be accomplished (and had in fact been
accomplished) raised to the status of a program and made explicit? That this
could be connected with the level of reflection that is characteristic of
historicism is something that one will be able to presume from the outset.
Herder published his scenes entitled "Prometheus Unchained" in the Adrasteag
in 1802. Both the manuscript on which the printed version was based and
another one, deviating from it, have been preserved. The text is preceded by a
prologue dedicating it to old Gleim.h We know what gave rise to this dedication.
Gleim had written to Herder on November 14, 1802, in praise of another poetical
work, the melodrama Ariadne, but had at the same time hinted that if he were
still in possession of his powers as a writer he would write about the "inhuman
myths of the Greeks" and declare himself in opposition to them. The most potent
example is ready to his hand, because he has just read Stolberg's translation of
Aeschylus's Prometheus tragedy. This myth seems to him "to be one of the most
inhuman. A friend of mankind is so frightfully punished! What benefit can such
a myth have among us, we who have better concepts of the gods?" 9
Herder believes that he can undertake to provide the counterdemonstration, and
even has it ready. Caroline answers Gleim on December 30, saying that her
husband had just created his Prometheus Unchained, as a "picture," when
Gleim's "encouragement to make the inhuman myths of the ancients more
human arrived." There is the formula that will still be used, again, by Thomas
Mann. Gleim himself had not written anything about making the myths more
humane; instead, he had discovered his abhorrence of them, from the example of
Prometheus, and declared himself their opponent. But at that point Herder had
already completed a piece of work on myth that he could oppose to this
abhorrence.
The prologue addressed to Gleim does not make any effort to contradict the
reproach that myth is inhuman. Herder acknowledges

 Page 389

that he has always been of Gleim's opinion, that "the harsh mythology of the
Greeks, from the earliest times, should not be employed by us except in a mild
and human way." 10Therefore his experiment in such application should not (as
its genre alone would make clear) be compared to Aeschylus's tragedy; it does
not even claim the title of drama. But if one should not venture "to continue
Prometheus's character, as Aeschylus portrays it, in our time," then what is it in
the antecedent content of myth that remains binding? It is, so Herder's dry
response runs, "a very instructive emblem."
This may have seemed to Herder himself to be insufficiently informative. He
places himself, therefore, in the tradition of allegory, and makes myth itself into
a material that derives from the fire that Prometheus stole and brought to men, so
that anyone who performs work on this substance of a higher origin fulfills an
obligation that is binding for mankind. The elements of the myth are "such a rich
material for the cultivation of a spiritual meaning in their figures that they seem
to cry to us: 'Use the fire that Prometheus brought you, for yourselves! Let it
shine brighter and more beautifully, for it is the flame of the forever continuing
cultivation [Bildung] of man.'" Thus, to justify his purpose Herder not only sets
up myth in the role of allegory, he also relates the method of what he has in mind
to a freedom with the tradition that seems to be specific to him. Francis Bacon
and others, he says, have been granted the liberty to put their meaning into the
mythto whom, then, should this freedom be denied? Especially "when he puts
the noblest, perhaps also the most natural meaning into them, the cultivation and
further cultivation of the human race to every kind of culture; the striving of the
divine spirit in man toward the awakening of all of his powers."
Here there is nothing more to be feared than that, on these premises, the mythical
Prometheus would have become good-natured and philistine. The stage
directions make him sit on the rocks, rather than standing on them. In the
manuscript, at least, his shackled condition is softened into a "loosely fettered"
one, which the text of the first monologue also confirms when it says not only
that time helps one bear anything but also that
bei hochherzigem gefassten Muth
Die Bande selbst sich weiten . . .

[When courage is nobly taken

 Page 390
the bonds themselves become less tight . . . ]

But above all, this Prometheus does not suffer from the futility of his suffering.
His greatest source of comfort is his philosophy of history. Prometheus's chains
are an allegory of the incomplete history of his creatures:
Wenn der Stärkste deiner Menschen
Die grösste That vollbracht hat, wenn du selbst
Die Tapferste vollführt, dann lösen sich
Die Fesseln, und du siehst dein grosses Werk
Gedeihn auf Erden.

[When the strongest of your men

Has accomplished the greatest deed, when you yourself
Have carried out the bravest one, then
The fetters loose themselves, and you see your great work
Succeed on earth.]

Later his mother Themis will say to the liberated Prometheus, from her throne,
that his being chained to the rocks of the Caucasus had been nothing but a way
of aiding his own objectives, preventing excessive demiurgic hastiness with
man's history, persuading the Olympians themselves to become friends to men:
Hättest du,
Was langsam nur geschehen konnte, schnell
Und rüstig übereilt; du hättest selbst
Dein Werk zertümmert . . .

[If you
Had quickly and vigorously pressed forward
What could only happen slowly, you would have
Wrecked your own undertaking . . . ]

Prometheus pushes the cause of his human beings with the other gods, and in
exemplary fashion with Oceanus. This is a compound of natural-law and biblical
elements. Prometheus rejects the sea god's grievance about being disturbed by
man, the seafarer, with an argument deriving from the Stoic tradition:
Im weiten Welten-Raum
Gehöret Alles Allem.

[In the vast space of worlds

 Page 391
Everything belongs to everything.]

That is the principle in accordance with which even the theft of fire appears
merely as the first advantage taken of natural law. It becomes the putting-into-
effect of a property right in nature, which men had merely been too weak to
implement. Prometheus, the demiurge, is on the side of demiurgic man against
the old principle of nature's untouched status as terra inviolata [unharmed earth].
Men, so he announces to Oceanus, would change the boundaries of his realm,
combine one sea with another or separate themand in response to Oceanus's
question whether that would be done justly, the Titan merely refers him to the
fact that men would have the strength to do it. In the manuscript draft that differs
from the printed version it says:
Der Mensch, wenn es ihm frommt
Soll, was er kann.

[Man, if it is to his advantage

Should do what he can do.]

Herder thought he had done all that was necessary to make the Prometheus myth
appear humane when he showed the gods as converts to Prometheus and thus to
man's right to existence. In the divergent draft he has a final scene between
Prometheus and his old patroness, Pallas Athena, in which she pronounces the
moral of the story that is connected with his namethat "foresight" without
virtuous deeds is perniciousand awards the Titan the victory (which, however,
according to the divine order, he can no longer win):
der Götter Göttlichstes
Und Seligstes wird reine Menschlichkeit.

[the most divine

and blessed part of the gods becomes pure humanity.]

The harshness of the myth had consisted in seeing man's irrevocability and his
right to life as being won by the Titan's indomitability, not by his victory. It was
a myth of man's indestructibility, not of the completion of his happiness, a
completion that had to remain beyond his ken and implausible for him. That is
why, contrary to Herder's deceptively attractive intention, the authentic myth
seems more humane than these "Scenes" on the threshold between
Enlightenment and Romanticism. In the myth Zeus does learn of the threat to his
power, but he averts it by forgoing definitiveness in his revenge. In

 Page 392

the divergent manuscript of Herder's work he makes Prometheus answer the

question, conveyed by Mercury, of the secret of the threat to Jupiter's power by
saying that the god will precipitate himself from the throne: The gods are already
abandoning Olympus in order to choose the earthas it is cultivated and
transformed by manas their heaven. The allegorical interpretation of the myth
declares the end of myth, this time as a result of the emigration of its gods.
Herder's Adrastea is a work of the turn of the century. It suggests the
definitiveness of the successes of the past century and the perspective of the
incipient century. But there is something in Kant's judgment that Herder was "a
great artist of illusion," and in Goethe's that "his existence was an incessant
blowing of bubbles." The Prometheus scenes make the relief too easy for
themselves. It is as though he had never taken notice of Jacobi's publication of
the "Prometheus" ode in the Spinozism dispute,i in which Herder too, after all,
took part with his God dialogues in 1787.j True, the unsettled state of the
innermost conflict first became recognizable when Goethe again took up the
material, with his Pandora, but it should at least have been a restraint operating
against this kind of lightweight solution. To put it differently, Herder had failed
to observe how much work on myth, as manifested by the work on this one
myth, still remained to be done.
The issue of the particular sources that are drawn upon in opening out the late
horizons of myth is certainly not insignificant. An important factor is the great
delay with which the Greek texts became accessible and known beyond the
narrowest circle of philologians. For Prometheus, that holds especially for
Aeschylus's tragedy. Mostly, however, the breadth of variety of the alterations
that take place in the reception is founded in the peculiarities of information
coming from second or third hand. One may wonder how Goethe's first work on
the Prometheus myth would have come out if he had encountered a source
different from the mythological lexicon of the pedant, Hederichfor example, the
source that would have been most obvious in the decade of this poetical work:
the French Encyclopedia.
On account of the compulsion of alphabetical completeness, works of this sort,
particularly in their peripheral topics, often represent yesterday's spirit of the age
more than tomorrow's, which they were aimed at. But this same programmatic
weakness leaves room for an exceptional treatment, whereas the article that for
its part already

 Page 393

carries emphasissay, an article by someone like Diderotno longer confers the

license for an energetic exploitation of it as an opportunity, because it has
already laid claim to that license itself. That is why an originality in reception is
so often based on a substrate the antecedent content of which is mediocre.
The article "Promethée" is in the thirteenth volume of the Encyclopedia, which
appeared in 1765. The article is signed "D.J.," so it comes from De Jancourt,
who is certainly not to be counted among the avante-garde of the
Encyclopedists. He consciously avoids, in the myth, the pagan harshness, so as
to make the most of its agreeableness as an aesthetic allegory. Prometheus, the
son of Iapetus and the beautiful Oceanid, Clymene, does, it is true, first make a
man out of clay from the earth, but that does not make him the demiurge of
mankind, but only the first sculptor of their effigies. Here that is no longer an
inducement to polytheism but rather an avoidance of every kind of metaphysical
offensiveness in favor of the purest Rococo. Instead of creating man and
pledging himself to man's fate, Prometheus only formed the first statue of man
out of clay and taught mankind by that means merely how to manufacture their
own works of art: "Il rut le premier qui enseigna aux hommes la statuaire." A
culturefounder, then, who hardly had to do with the first removal of man from
his savage state, but only with his final refinement.
Think how difficult it would have become for Goethe to construct the most
defiant lines of his odek if he had been referred to a Prometheus who had not
made men after his own image but had only had to fabricate images after the
image of someone else.
The Encyclopedist's second leveling off of the myth relates to Prometheus's
being chained in the Caucasus. No more is allowed to happen now except that
the Titan, who had helped Jupiter in over-coming the Titans, is forced to
withdraw into the mountains, "from which he did not dare to depart as long as
Jupiter's power lasted." What gnaws at his liver is simply anxiety about
preserving his life in such a desert land as this, in which the Scythians live, who
always had to bear the brunt of everything desolate and wild. Only as a question
is the possibility added that perhaps the vulture could also be a living image of
the profound and wearisome meditations of a philosopher: " . . . au bien ce
vautour ne seroit-il point une image vivante des profondes and pénibles
méditations d'un philosophe?" Here a piece of the tradition is taken up again
according to which

 Page 394

Prometheus in the Caucasus was supposed to have practiced theory, if not

professionally then at least as a consolation, especially the theory
[contemplation] of the starry heavens. In that case Zeus's whole punitive
proceedings against him could even appear as the mistake that could be derived
from what would have been, to crude Scythian minds, the incomprehensible
sight of the Titan abandoned to the contemplation of the universe.
The Encyclopedist is not satisfied with such an autarkic ancient theoretician's
role. As culture-bringer and enlightener, Prometheus executes, even in the place
of his exile or withdrawal, the function of the age by seeking to educate the
lawless and unmannered inhabitants of the Caucasus to a vie plus humaine [more
human life]. The author of the article asks whether thisthe practice of
enlightenment on the object of the greatest resistance and therefore of the
smallest likelihood of successcould not have given rise to the mythical hyperbole
of saying that Prometheus, with the help of Zeus's daughter, Minerva, the
patroness of all education, had 'formed' man in the beginning: " . . . c'est peut-
être ce qui a fait dire qu'il avoit formé I'homme avec l'aide de Minerve."
In keeping with the epoch [in which this version is written], the element of the
theft of fire turns into the history of the industrialization of the Scythians'
country. Prometheus sets up workshops there for metalworking, and this makes
it appropriate, as a subordinate aspect, that he might have been the first to import
fire, in the stem of a plant described as a "stick plant" [Steckenkraut; the French
original is "ferule"], which must have been adapted to its preservation and
transport over a period of several days.
The Scythians seem not to have shown themselves particularly grateful for their
cultivation. But the motive that causes Prometheus to terminate his stay in the
Caucasus is the absolutely characteristic motive of the century of the
Encyclopedia: He is bored, "ennuyé du triste séjour" [tired of the cheerless
sojourn]. He goes back to Greece, to end his days there and experience the
honors shown to a god, or at least those shown to a hero.
If one follows the Encyclopedist's systematics in every detail, then the
precondition of this return was the end of Zeus's authority. So the end of the
story [Geschichte] already falls within history [die Geschichte]. True, the
Enlightenment author still sees it in the pagan context, but nevertheless sees it as
the process by which the gods lose their power.

 Page 395

Because 'history' has already begun, Prometheus can again choose freely where
he wants to stay and, though an opponent and victim of Zeus, can enjoy
venerationin the polis that has been so far enlightened by the Academic
philosophyin the grove of the Academy. Only after the termination of the
absolute power of the mythical gods, and as they begin to be aestheticized, is it
possible for one of their own, after completing civilizing work in a distant land,
and motivated by boredom, to return to the polis as a highly honored guest
andthe text leaves no other alternativeto die there. The interpretation of the one
myth is, again, the story of myth itself.
Now, if this historicization of the myth is to be secured, all the harsh and
gruesome features of the myth must be blamed solely on the author of the
tragedy. It is only in connection with it that the contradiction arises that the
supposed inventor of the arts and skills, the originator of all the useful
knowledge in the world, is nevertheless unable to do anything against Zeus's
tyranny. For the tragedy, we are told, it is ultimately not power but destiny that
determines what happens with the gods. Jupiter cannot think of anything to do
against the knowledge of the future and thus of the end of his own power except
to make the sufferer, Prometheus, disappear into the depths of the earth with a
terrible whirlwind. In view of such crude and unaesthetic terrors, in the
distortion of the myth in the tragedy, the Encyclopedist is only able to conclude
his article with an exclamation of incredulous amazement that the dramatic
presentation of such things could have pleased people: "que tout ce spectacle
devoit être beau!" [(Imagine) that this whole spectacle is supposed to be
beautiful!].

Translator's Notes
a. Descartes's "zero point" would be reason's point of departure in constructing
knowledge "from scratch," after the process of methodical doubt has cleared
away everything but the "clear and distinct ideas."
b. The name Prometheus means "forethought" or "providence."
c. This translation of "teologia civile rationate della providenza" follows E.
Auerbach's German translation, which Blumenberg uses. A more neutral
translation would be "rational theology of providence in the world of men."
d. In "An Answer to the Question: 'What Is Enlightenment?'" in Kant's Political
Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p.
57.

 Page 396

e. Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft [Religion within the
limits of reason alone] (1793).
f. Literally, ''to the things" [zu den Sachen], Edmund Husserl's watchword.
g. Adrastea was a journal that Herder edited and published from 1801 to 1803.
h. J. W. Ludwig Gleim (1719 1803), a popular author of lyrics and ballads.
i. This is discussed at length in the next chapter.
j. Gott; einige Gespräche (Gotha, 1787).
k. See translator's note a to part 4, chapter 1, for the text of Goethe's
"Prometheus" ode.

 Page 397

PART IV
AGAINST A GOD, ONLY A GOD

 Page 399

Introduction
Everything up to this point in this book has a gradient; all the lines converge on a
hidden vital point at which the work expended on myth could prove to be
something that was not fruitless. It was not fruitless if it could feed into the
totality of one life, could give it the contours of its self-comprehension, its self-
formulation, indeed its self-formationand this in a life that is open for our access,
without the merciful hiding places that we all demand for ourselves. For the
reserved manner of "subtle silence" in which, according to Nietzsche's remark,
Goethe was an expert did so little to remove him from view that not much has
been left for supposedly pitiless 'unmaskings' to do.
Other people are not lessened in value because one person consummated what is
possible for everyone. Who could ever have felt humiliated by Goethe? But why
do our thoughts still circle around this massif, when no one really knows any
longer what a steward in little Weimar can have been? When all the
circumstances of this life scarcely seem like favorable ones anymore, whether
one considers natural character or experience of the world, and when the
demythologizers have laid bare the rigidity, the ungenerosity, the officeholder's
mentality, and, finally, the egotism of this minister to a petty prince?
It is no exemplary life, the life of this theater director and collector of anything
and everything, not the life of a possible guide and escort in the discovery or
invention of the meaning of existence. But on the other hand, is there another life
that we have ever seen spread out

 Page 400

before us in such multifarious relation to reality and illusion? Another life whose
continuous formation in self-gain and self-loss, self-creation and self-
disillusionment, has become comparably intelligible for us? Nor was that in the
form, crude, or intended as crude, of a reckless exposure even approaching that
of Rousseau's Confessions, but rather as a result of the 'work' on realityin all the
shades, from bright to dark, that it can turn toward lifethat was accomplished in
it.
Part of this is also his unique way of being affected [by things], his sensitivity to
images, to the accuracy with which they mesh with life's articulations. There is
no frivolous overestimation of self that we do not find in this existence; but
neither is there any serious self-retraction that was not the result of a gain in
reality. Even if here, as from all history, we have to learn that we cannot learn
anything, we see how to go about coping with what cannot be learned, in the
midst of the illusions of learnability.
So this is not the life, not even a life, that can still elicit from us the admiration
that went with past enthusiasms for culture [Bildung]. But the unique effort
expended on this life certainly can do sothe effort that not only links up with
work on myth through appropriation and variation and through its search for
images, but that could not otherwise become perceptible for itself. At the same
time, this experience itself has no mythical qualityit lends itself, we have seen,
neither to tragedy nor to comedy. Amazingly, it is what Goethe imagines about
himself that brings about his relation to myth: his self-deification as the Sturm
und Drang creator, his surmounting of the historical catastrophe of 1789, his
elevation by and against Napoleon, and his finishing with the world task of
Faust. What toil, what illusions! And what transparency of both in their
interweaving before the eye of the onlooker!
But where does this leave reason? In the capacity still to master the antirational
with the resources of this kind of intellectual organization. Goethe writes to his
friend Zelter on March 19, 1827, regarding the death of Zelter's only son, Georg,
that he believes in the immortality of the monad that is "hardened" by its life's
activity. The world spirit directs it, he says, to new activities, for which it had to
qualify itself here. Thus "it cannot lack employment for eternity." Goethe
retracts this glimpse of his private transposition of the postulate from Kant's
philosophya (a philosophy that he had never assimilated, and only looked into
out of deference to Schiller) almost in the very moment

 Page 401

in which he thinks that he has to say this to his mourning friendretracts it in

order immediately to justify the comforting myth: "Forgive me these abstruse
expressions, but people have always lost themselves in such regions, and tried to
communicate through such manners of speaking, where reason could not reach
but they nevertheless did not want to let unreason rule." No one has ever
articulated more precisely why reason admits needs, which it arouses itself,
without being able, in its regular discipline, to satisfy them: not in order to
acquire secretly, after all, the excess that is denied to it, but in order not to let
unreason gain power over the unoccupied space.b
Goethe expressed this in the twentieth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit, which he
left behind him at his death, as the summation of what it had been possible to see
"in detail in the course of this biographical recital": the unresolved remainder of
his experience to which he gives the title of the "demonic." What matters is not
this title and the interpretive eagerness to which it has given rise; what matters is
the 'remainder.' It is sufficiently defined by negations: ''It was not divine,
because it seemed nonrational; not human, because it had no understanding; not
diabolic, because it was beneficent; not angelic, because it often betrayed a
malicious delight. . . . It was only in the impossible that it seemed to find
pleasure, while it rejected the possible with contempt." Goethe does not flirt with
this intimacy; instead he seeks to escape "from this fearful principle," and he
does this precisely not in the way that Socrates describes his intellectual
deliveranceas taking refuge "in the 'logoi' "[reasons, Ideas] but rather as taking
refuge "behind an image." Both are refugesthe one in concepts, the other behind
an imagebut Goethe is not a philosopher, just because it is behind an image that
he takes refuge.
Goethe had described the process by which he "took refuge," the process of the
search for and choice of an image, in the fifteenth book of Dichtung und
Wahrheit, the last of the books that he personally dispatched to the printer. He
had become aware of his natural gift of creativity and had wanted to "found my
whole existence on this, mentally." Then: "This idea transformed itself into an
image: I was struck by the old mythological figure of Prometheus, the
Prometheus who, separated from the gods, peopled a word from his workshop."c

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Translator's Notes
a. See translator's note i to part 2, chapter 4.
b. The German is übers Unbesetzte. Once again, the metaphor of an 'idea-space'
that is "occupied" (besetzt) and "reoccupied"the central process that was
analyzed in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
c. Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Scheibe, p. 526. In translating passages from
Dichtung und Wahrheit in the following chapters, I have made considerable use
of John Oxenford's translation (Boston, 1888; rptd. New York: Horizon Press,
1969), but the translations here are basically my own.

 Page 403

1
"Priming Powder for an Explosion"
Glaub unsereinem: dieses Ganze
ist nur für einen Gott gemacht!
Mephistopheles to Faust [Faust I, lines 1780 1781]
[Trust one like me: This whole was made only for a God!]
Goethe took the scanty oudine of the plot for his "Prometheus" ode and for his
fragment of a drama from a mythological lexicon, whereas his first contact with
the myth went back to one of the emblematic representations that show the
potter making men in his workshop. In 1830, when he admits the ode into the
final edition of his works that he supervised and assigns it the position of a third
act in the planned drama, he still relies, in his stage directions, on the same
image as in his earliest intuitive contact with the subject: "Prometheus in his
workshop." After the ode, which has now become a monologue, all that is added
now is that Minerva appears, "introducing another process of mediation." This
latest hint of a concluding reconciliation went unnoticed in the reception; it
reflects the whole history of the poem.
Benjamin Hederich's Gründliches mythologisches Lexikon [Comprehensive
mythological lexicon], published in 1724, was accessible to Goethe in the "most
painstakingly revised, considerably expanded and improved" edition done by
Johann Joachim Schwabe, which had appeared in 1770 in Leipzig. While this
work of imposing erudition was intended to serve the "better comprehension of
the fine arts and sciences not

 Page 404

only for students but also for many artists and admirers of the ancient works of
art," it did not emphasize the aesthetic importance of the figures and stories, as
opposed to the historiographical clarification and the moral treatment of myth.
Hederich's premise was that "each and every person, assuming that he does not
want to circulate among the entirely common rabble, needs to know something
of this learned gallantry." Almost a half-century later, though, Schwabe, the
reviser, already had to justify his revision of the book's style by saying that
Hederich "was sometimes in the mood to want to joke, for which the
mythological stories give plenty of opportunity. He commonly did it, however,
in a language that fell somewhat into the vulgar." In another respect the reviser
of the mythology detracts somewhat from its canonical rigor when he
emphasizeshowever much the ancients may have held fast to the characteristic
qualities of a storythe wideness of the latitude they gave themselves: "the way in
which, though, they certainly did not let themselves be bound always to persist
slavishly with one construction."
Now, is what the ancients did, in making full use of their license, once and for
all excluded in the age of learning? Here lies the possibility of a decisive impulse
that the reading of the "Prometheus" article in the Mythological Lexicon may
have given the young Sturm und Drang writer. For, while the article does end,
like all the others, by adducing allegorical elucidations of the myth, it does not
do so without the encouragement, astonishing after so much painful pedantic
precision, that is given to the reader in the very last sentence: "Everyone can
produce more such interpretations for himself." In the learned milieu of the time,
this license is simply unique. One can imagine how Goethe, reaching this
terminus, must have felt himself addressed.
To perceive this, the central point is enough that in connection with the question
of Prometheus's parentage Hederich makes no mention of the version, from late
antiquity, that makes Zeus his father. Instead, he unambiguously associates
Prometheus, as the son of Iapetus, with the Titans. To transform the Prometheus
story into a father-and-son conflict hereespecially when we must assume
Goethe's ignorance of the allegorical variant from late antiquitythe weightiest
possible infringement was required. The imprecision of the notice taken [of
Hederich's account] makes possible a reinterpretation that took on its own truth
in the pathos of Sturm und Drang. The reduced icon, showing through, allows
Goethe, by merely alluding to it, to bring

 Page 405

forward his own theme, as he writes to Röderer in 1773: "I am working up my

situation into a play, in defiance of God and men." Another letter already
contains elements of the Prometheus scene: the sculptor and his hut. "The gods
have sent me a sculptor," he writes to Kestner in mid-July 1773, and the
necessary means "to sink wells in the desert and to build a hut."
Some things that had always belonged among the core constituents of the story,
such as the deceptive sacrifice and the theft of fire, are, initially, entirely omitted
by Goethe.a Hederich had harmonized these two elements of the myth by
suggesting that Zeus, who, as the highest god, of course sees through the trick in
the deceptive sacrifice, takes away fire (which had after all already been used for
sacrifices) from Prometheus and his human beings as a punishment, "so that they
could not cook their portion of the meat." The theft of fire is not an offense
because it takes something from heaven and for the first time gives it to human
beings, but because it infringes and annuls an act of punishment by Zeus.
Hederich has his own logic; it must have seemed intolerable to him that the
highest of the gods originally and for no reason did not wish man well.
Admittedly, this version is incompatible with the feature that Hederich gives to
the demiurgic production of man, that man had been without understanding or
perception until Prometheus held the fire that he had stolen with the help of
Minerva to his breast, "which made man come alive." In that case fire would
have been stolen twice: once simply in order to bring man to life, and again in
order to preserve him in the life that his maker had forfeited as a result of the
deceptive sacrifice.
Probably this type of defiance, in the deceptive sacrifice and the theft of fire, did
not affect Goethe because his assumption of the role of Prometheus only seemed
justified by Prometheus's skillfulness: the image-maker in his workshop,
producing, as the antagonist of Zeus, his own world of men. Not the cunning
deceiver (in the sacrifice) and thief of fire, who as such is dealing at most with
side effects of his creative activity. Goethe comprehended Prometheus the fire-
bringer for the first time in 1826, when he heard Haydn's Creation oratorio.
Haydn himself, to Carpani, had connected his musical picture of the sunrise with
the production of a spark from flint and steel in the hands of the father of light.
People found this image ignoble and childish, Goethe writes in an article of
Zelter's that he revised; but to him it made "the age-old fable of Prometheus
become clear, indeed I could

 Page 406

think of no image more sublime than that of the all-powerful light in the spark."
1The point of Goethe's early reception of Prometheus lies in the icon of the
workshop, which could be related to the aesthetic genius. The fact that he could
read in Hederich that among the allegorical interpretations there was also one
that made the story an example of "the way God punishes those who, out of
pride, mount (as it were) into heaven, and try to deceive him" may perhaps have
formulated in advance the later difficulties of his identification with Prometheus.
But when Goethe thinks that he can work up his own situation with an eye on
Prometheus's pottery workshop and his ceramic production of men, the conflict
does not in fact arise as a result of the exaggerated gesture of defiance that
would have been involved in relating to the theft of fire as the central expression
of mythical disobedience. The fact that Goethe nevertheless plans on and accepts
conflict, and conflict that will result from the mere fabrication of images, has
something to do with the overcoming of his pietistic phase. What he now wants
to do, and does, appears to him as an act that runs counter to the will of his
divinity. He expressed this quite clearly: "It seems that God does not want me to
become a writer."2That is only the short formula for an opposition that he had
described two months earlier to the same correspondent: "My fiery head, my wit,
my effort and my reasonably well-founded hope to become, in time, a good
writer are now, to speak frankly, the most important obstacles to my whole
change of heart, and to true seriousness in responding more eagerly to the
beckonings of grace."3That is the conflict. In the old language of dogma, the
conflict between nature and grace. To be able to do, despite God, what he does
not want, there is only one decisive plan: to become a god himself. That
presupposes, however inexplicitly, a polytheistic premise, the premise that the
name of "god" takes an indefinite article.
The location, in Goethe's biography, of his identification with Prometheusat the
end of the conflict over whether to respond to the beckonings of grace or to
fulfill his hope of becoming a writerevidences a combination of image and
consciousness of self that, extending across both affirmations and negations, still
determined the decision to have Pandora placed at the end of his Complete
Works.b That is, both the most violent and the most reconciliatory
reinterpretation of the myth that is contained in these works.

 Page 407

Before things had reached that point, there were other means of digesting and
dealing with the material, not least of all that of forgetting it. One or two years
after it came into existence, Goethe handed the manuscript of the "Prometheus"
ode over to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, evidently without keeping a copy. But
ultimately it was not only Jacobi who possessed the text, for he must have
allowed copies of the original to be made and waived any rights over them.
Georg Forster quotes from the ode a number of times before its publication; it is
his most frequent quotation from Goethe. But the way he takes up the poem is
quite unspecific and inadequate: "I feel that Goethe is right, with his man who
relies on himself." 4The manuscript of "Prometheus" is mentioned once more to
Jacobi. He had already returned the fragment of the drama, on November 6,
1774: "Dear Goethe, here you have your 'Prometheus' back, and with it my most
sincere thanks. I can scarcely tell you that this drama gave me pleasure, because
it is impossible for me to tell you how much"5When this return took place,
Goethe could already have forgotten the ode, which had not been returned. In
any case, half a year later he names the manuscripts of Stella and Prometheus,
but his request applies only to one of them: '' . . . give me Stella back! If you
knew how I love her. . . . "6This placement of the accent suggests that Goethe
was willing to forgo the part of Prometheus [the part of the drama fragment: i.e.,
the ode] that Jacobi still had. The fragment of the drama was to surface for the
first time in 1819, from the literary remains of Goethe's onetime Sturm und
Drang comrade, Lenz.
Thus what happens a decade later with the ode is not surprising. There is nothing
to indicate that, having come into the world as privately as it could possibly have
done, both as an utterance and as something given away, it could have been
intended to serve as the "priming powder for an explosion" the effect that
Goethe was to describe it as having had, in the retrospect of Dichtung und
Wahrheit. That is one of the disproportions of intention and effect that can be
peculiar to histories of influence [Wirkungsgeschichten] and that often remain
inexplicable in them. For this one, at least an attempt at an explanation shall be
made.
In Jacobi's portfolio the ode was at most a speculative investment, by no means
an explosive material. He carried it with him on his many journeys as evidence
of intimacy with the famous man and as a curiosity with which to enliven
conversation. So it was also when

 Page 408

he visited Lessing in Wolfenbüttel in July 1780, not long before the latter's
death. There is nothing that allows us to infer that Jacobi came with the intention
of provoking Lessing, or with the expectation of a revelation. If that were the
case, he would not have waited so long, after the visit, to make a posthumous
revelation out of it.
As for Jacobi's relationship with Goethe, there was, admittedly, an old score to
be set fled there. The actions of the two of them mirror one another. In 1779,
Goethe, behind Jacobi's back, had subjected the latter's Woldemar to a ritual of
derision and execution in the park of Ettersburg. Reviling the book, he had
nailed a copy of it to an oak tree. Jacobi, behind Goethe's back, made his
"Prometheus" into the bait of his metaphysical dialogue with Lessing, from
whom he elicited what no one had ever heard from him before. There is,
however, a clear difference: Goethe wanted to make a high-spirited and
undisguised spectacle of his treatment of the book, whose mere "odor" he could
not bear, whereas Jacobi would probably not have revealed Lessing's secret,
together with what had triggered his confession, if the latter's friends, after his
death, had not set about representing him ''as an apostle of Providence, as a
martyr of pure devotion to God." 7
In spite of the mirror-image relation between the actions, all the indications are
against Jacobi's having wanted to settle his old score with Goethe. Goethe had in
the meantime done much, though not indeed everything, to disavow what
Wieland was to call a "boyish prank."8A joke perpetrated by a thirty-year-old
man who was named a privy councilor the month after the ritual inflicted on
Woldemar could not be taken as altogether boyish. Two years later, in fact, he
writes to Lavater: "I cannot tell you anything about the story of Woldemar's
crucifixionthe facts are trueit is really a stale and out-of-date piece of nonsense
that you would be wisest to ignore. . . . You know too well my rashly intoxicated
anger and my mischievous acerbity, which persecute what is half good and
especially rage against the odor of pretension."9The gossip network of the time
functioned well. Jacobi already knew of the event in September 1779, and had
reproached Goethe with it as "an insulting and disgraceful execution": "This
report has spread so widely that it finally had come to my ears as well."10The
amazing thing about this friendship is that Jacobi will dedicate the revised
Woldemar to Goethe, in 1794, with the words: "How could I have resisted you,
you mighty one!"

 Page 409

He had already been Goethe's guest in Weimar in September 1784 for more than
a week. And something remarkable emerges from this: He must not have told
Goethe about his visit to Lessing and the role played there by the manuscript of
the ode. For he had already written, on November 4, 1783, the great letter to
Mendelssohn with the detailed description of his visit to Lessing and the effect
of "Prometheus"the letter that he was to publish in 1785 with the Spinoza book.c
So when he was Goethe's guest he was already in the situation of standing in
need of proof, which soon forced him to come out with the poem. Nothing
would have been more natural than to tell Goethe of this effect of his
"Prometheus," but there cannot have been anything that Jacobi shrank from
more.
How had matters reached this point? In March 1783, Jacobi had learned from
Elise Reimarus, the daughter of the secret founder of the German
Enlightenment,d that Moses Mendelssohn intended to publish a memorial notice
on "Lessing's character." Jacobi could be certain that Mendelssohn would not
fail to appeal to Lessing as a witness on behalf of the metaphysical theism that
he advocated. It is no longer easy for us to clarify why Jacobi felt compelled to
contradict this. Did he merely want to honor the biographical truth, did he want
to deny Mendelssohn his impressive witness, or did he even want to prevent the
witness for the cause of theism (which was not a matter of indifference to him,
either) from, as it were, 'falling flat' before the eyes of the public, as a result of
revelations from his literary remains that might come from a third party? The
warning that he conveyed to Elise Reimarus, and thus to Mendelssohn as well,
contains a; clue that supports, more than anything else, the theory that Jacobi
feared that still other initiates into Lessing's true convictions could still be alive
and could reject Mendelssohn's public appeal to the deceased. If his purpose was
to protect Mendelssohn and his cause from this exposure, it will not be possible
to call his later wrath unjust. At all events, he writes to Elise Reimarus: "Perhaps
you know, and if you do not know I confide it to you here under the rose of
friendship, that in his last days Lessing was a firm Spinozist." There follows the
sentence that has to be considered in judging Jacobi's warning: "It is possible
that Lessing may have expressed these sentiments to a number of people; in this
case it would be necessary for Mendelssohn, in the memorial to him that he
wants to erect, either to avoid certain materials entirely or at least to handle them
with the greatest caution." 11Men-

 Page 410

delssohn does not accept the warning that is conveyed to him; he insists on being
told everything. This leads to Jacobi's comprehensive answer of November 4,
1783, which he was to print two years later in his Spinoza book. The information
does not satisfy Mendelssohn. He hardly hesitates before setting Jacobi down as
the victim of a joke by Lessing and, in his Morning Hours; or, Lectures on the
Existence of God,e pursuing the thoroughgoing "vindication of Lessing." This
controversy, which it is difficult to bear with, does not need to be laid out here.
What is really important is to define more precisely the mythological provoker
of a mythical self-revelation.
We do not possess the letter with which Jacobi announced his visit to Lessing
and made known to him the subjects of his curiosity. Lessing, in his answering
letter of June 13, 1780, puts such pedantry in its place, a litde: "Our
conversations would no doubt have taken place of their own accord. But it was
nevertheless good to give me an indication of what we could best take as our
point of departure." 12Still, Lessing looks forward to the visit "with great
eagerness." From the list of subjects, he mentions only that in the meantime he
has looked into the continuation of Woldemar. Jacobi will later say to
Mendelssohn, about his lost letter, that in it he expressed his need "to conjure
up" in Lessing "the spirits of several wise men whom I could not induce to
express themselves on certain subjects.''13The conjecture that Jacobi proposed to
Lessing a conversation about the seventy-third section of the Education of the
Human Race remains speculation, which seeks a point of contact for
"Spinozism" that would not require crediting Goethe's "Prometheus" with the
power to evoke it.
A not uninstructive indicator of the constellations that are involved here is
Goethe's planwhich was formed too lateto visit Lessing. Five days after the
latter's death, Goethe writes to Charlotte yon Stein that he had just been occupied
with this intention when the news of Lessing's death arrived.14For a man who
did not disregard omens, that could hardly be a matter of indifference, especially
since he had avoided the meeting [with Lessing] in Leipzig in May 1768. If one
may believe Christian Felix Weisse, it was "by a mere accident" that Goethe
escaped one of Lessing's irate critical attacks.15
When Jacobi arrives in Wolfenbüttel on July 5, 1780, there is conversation on
that very day about "peoplemoral and amoral, about atheists, deists, and
Christians." The next morning Lessing pays Jacobi a visit in his room, and since
Jacobi has not yet finished with his

 Page 411

morning's correspondence, he passes his visitor some material from his portfolio
with which to pass the time. It was not immediately the most interesting item he
had there, since in returning it Lessing asks whether there isn't something more
to read. Since Jacobi is already beginning to seal his letters, there is only time
left for a poemand he proffers Lessing Goethe's "Prometheus" ode, not without
the challenging remark: "You have caused so much annoyance [Ärgernis], now
you may be annoyed [or "scandalized'': Ärgernis nehmen] yourself for once." So
there was, on Jacobi's side, a hesitation that he can hardly have invented, and
then a tentative offer of intimacy, of the disclosure of forbidden things. When
Lessing has read the poem he says that he is not scandalized, because he has
already known that "firsthand for a long time." Jacobi misunderstands this
formulation and supposes that Lessing is already acquainted with the poem. But
he has never read it before and means "firsthand" in an entirely different sense:
"The point of view that the poem represents is my own point of view. . . . The
orthodox concepts of the divinity are no longer for me; I cannot bear them." This
is the transition to his admission of radical heterodoxy, such as is not,
admittedly, declared as dogma in Goethe's poem, but is expressed, by the poem's
attitude or intention, as a frame of mind. "This poem points in that direction too;
and I must confess that it pleases me very much." It is Jacobi who first utters the
name of Spinoza, with whom he conjectures that Lessing agrees. It is, Jacobi
thinks, "a poor salvation that we find in his name!"
The conversation is interrupted; but Lessing, who has noticed his guest's startled
reaction, returns to the subject of his own accord the following morning. Jacobi
intensifies the situation by admitting that he had in fact come to Lessing
specifically in order to get "help from him against Spinoza." So he had already
been bound to be surprised, "and I may well have turned red and paled, for I felt
my confusion. It was not fear. I admit that there was nothing I expected less than
to find, in you, a Spinozist or pantheist." Then Lessing hesitates no longer and
utters a sentence that Jacobi subsequently will make his own, in its general
sense, though admittedly reversing the direction of the conclusions to be drawn
from it: "There is no philosophy but the philosophy of Spinoza" ["Es gibt keine
andere Philosophie, als die Philosophie des Spinoza"]. This is precisely what
Jacobi will allege as an objection to German Idealism: that it is the unfolding of
the logical

 Page 412

consequences of all philosophy, and therein is necessarily and unavoidably

Spinozism.
It is in the perspective of Lessing's utterance that one must also understand the
fact that in the first edition of the Spinoza letters, Jacobi will even hold it against
Kantwho endeavored so conscientiously to avoid the logic of Spinozism that the
Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason was written "entirely in
the spirit of Spinoza." In the second edition this assertion is only verbally
withdrawn: "That the Kantian philosophy is not thereby accused of Spinozism
goes without saying for anyone who is versed in these matters." In the meantime,
of course, Jacobi had observed what could be produced with this term, which
denounced the substructure of the Enlightenment as an amalgam of atheism and
nature piety. Nevertheless, it was only in what is said explicitly, not in its
implications, that he wanted to except the Critique of Pure Reason from the
reproach of Spinozism. The fact that he had not retracted anything in regard to
Kant still emerges from a letter of 1797, in which all that he is able to say in
response to the charge that he had "in reality invented" the Idealist system in his
Spinoza is that this is justified insofar as he had "shown that the Kantian
philosophy, in order to be consistent, had to hasten to this goal." He ''did-not
mind being praised" by the advocates of this logicand would keep his peace.
The use that Jacobi was to make of the catchword Spinozism, in relation to Kant,
at first gives the impression of dealing very frivolously with a dangerous
vocable. That would make room for the skeptical suspicion that Jacobi hadas he
himself admits having done at the beginning of the conversationput into
Lessing's mouth at least the unequivocal character of the confession of
Spinozism. The core sentence of all the utterances that are ascribed to Lessing by
Jacobithat there is no other philosophy but that of Spinoza, so that all genuine
philosophy comes down to Spinozismspeaks against this. Jacobi will provide
evidence for this in his Spinoza, by drawing out the line of descent beginning
with Giordano Bruno: Pantheism is the unavoidable consequence of combining
the concept of creation with the attribute of infinity,f Once this combination has
been effected, there is no holding back. It also remains a matter of complete
indifference, then, whether the concept of creation has been converted into the
absolute egog or remains implicit in the concept of the author of an infinite
nature. In this conversation with Lessing, Jacobi not only received a sensational

 Page 413

piece of intimate information but also obtained a criterion by which to judge

philosophy as a whole, and thus already an instrument for his own challenge
addressed to Idealism, a challenge that otherwise he could not, at least, have
reduced to a catchword so effectively.
When the situation is viewed in this way, Goethe was right to speakin describing
the origin and effect of his "Prometheus," in the fifteenth book of Dichtung und
Wahrheitof its having served as the "priming powder for an explosion that
revealed and brought into discussion the most secret relations of estimable men:
relations that, unknown to those men themselves, slumber in an otherwise highly
enlightened society." And Goethe goes on to mention the most painful
consequence of this explosion for all those who were involved in it in one way
or another: ''The schism was so violent that, together with further incidents, it
caused us the loss of one of our most estimable men, Mendelssohn."h
Did Goethe, one will have to ask, demonize the scene in Wolfenbüttel when he
looked back on it much later, so as to give his "Prometheus," the ode that he had
already forgotten at the time, an epoch-making importance in relation to the end
of the Enlightenment? Surely not, if one attends to what Elise Reimarus wrote to
Jacobi as early as October 24, 1785, on receiving his Spinoza: "Whether or not I
was led by bias, I was terrified when I saw our Lessing exposed in such a way
before a world that does not understand him, cannot judge him, and does not
deserve to see him without a veil." 16What Jacobi had revealed was "an
important detail from an intimate conversation, from one of those little facetious
speeches that one permits oneself only in the presence of the confidants of one's
soul and one's mind and that, outside this narrow circle, are immediately
transformed into blasphemies." She had not, she says, been able to receive
Jacobi's work with as much pleasure as it deserved, and she would only be able
to do so if he could persuade her "that its consequences will not be as bad as my
presentiment makes them." Elise Reimarus explicitly does not exclude "the
poem" when she speaks of whatno doubt following the example of her father's
Schutzschriftishould forever remain accessible "only to Lessing's most intimate
friends or to the strongest among the people." When she imagines that the
seekers after the truth and friends of Lessing could fall, as a result of this
"contest [Wettstreit] about the truth," into a "personal dispute" [Privatstreit] in
which "only the enemies of Lessing and of the truth will

 Page 414

be victorious," she sinks into melancholy worry: "O dear Jacobi, I shudder at the
thought! Never, never let it come to that!"
Lessing's friend Elise, the trustee of the greatest inheritance of the German
Enlightenment, had not diagnosed the decline of the Enlightenment for the first
time from the consequences of Jacobi's indiscretion. She had already called out
to Lessing before his death, as she writes to the Copenhagen jurist August
Hennings a few days after it, as often as she could, her diagnosis regarding the
century's rationality: "There must continue to be darkness!" 17This expression of
terrible resignation also stands behind the letter with which she responds to
Jacobi's sending his Spinoza to her. There is no talk of external interference with
the accomplishment of reason, of the recurrence of dark powers, of Romantic
conspiraciesinstead, it is a lesson resulting from the Wolfenbüttel incident itself
that reason, in its execution, terminates in an absolutism of identity that makes
all other absolutisms indistinguishable.
To say that Goethe's "Prometheus" ode, extending across the decade in which it
was forgotten, was the connecting link between Sturm und Drang's defiance of
the gods and Romanticism's transcendental identity with God is not to establish a
historical causality. The poem does not generate something; it brings it to lightit
triggers the confession of the final balance of a life. One must look very closely
at the way Goethe describes the effect of his poem. In Dichtung und Wahrheit he
presupposes, as a fact, what underlies his coordination of the ode with the
fragment of a drama in the final authorized edition of his works, of 1830: that the
poem had been foreseen, as a monologue, in the plan of the drama. That cannot
be correct, if only for the reason that there is an identity of text, amounting to
almost four lines, between the two. In fact the reverse had occurred: The
fragment of a drama had only absorbed the ode a half-year after the latter came
into existence. But its ex post facto integration gives the early Prometheus
complex the unity of a conception that is formed all in one moment, the kind of
unity that suits Goethe's self-interpretation in his fife story. The poem can then
represent the totality of his trying on of "the old Titanic garments," whose style
is expressed in the formula according to which he had begun, "without further
reflection, to write a play.'' As the poet looks at the effect of his work, it is
important that he himself had experienced this effect as the concentrated
evidence of a single conception. The reception of myth gives itself mythical
features:

 Page 415

Genetic regroupings, in such a process, are unsuited to what, for the poet's
consciousness of himself, had possessed pure instantaneousness.
In his retrospective view, what Goethe presents as the monologue from that
"singular composition" of his self-comprehension in terms of Prometheus
became important, as a poem, "in German literature because it induced Lessing
to declare himself, regarding certain weighty matters of thought and feeling, to
Jacobi."j What aspect of the poem could have become the specific element that
"induced" this, Goethe does not say. In this regard the metaphor of the "priming
powder for an explosion" also yields, as a clue, only the fact that it must have
been, in any case, more than the mere spark that sets off the explosion, but less
than the detonating charge. The expression seems to have been chosen with
some care, in order to assert something intermediate, and not without vagueness,
between the poem's having contained the substance of the dispute over Lessing's
memory and its having merely triggered it. Why, then, the metaphorical violence
of an "explosion''? Because there was something to be uncovered.
Goethe offers, for what came to light then, the strongly worded formulation that
it had involved "the most secret relations of estimable men." Now, estimable
men may at any time have secret relations of whatever kindthe relations that this
poem "brought into discussion" had the peculiarity that they had remained
"unknown to those men themselves." But still more: The final and decisive
intensifying point, which was bound to give the event the character of an
explosion, was that those circumstances, withdrawn from consciousness,
"slumbered in an otherwise highly enlightened society." In a society, that is, in
which the process of reason had been regarded as already successful, and, what
is more, among the people who had initiated and pushed forward the process.
What Goethe touches on metaphorically in this way is his experiment,
undertaken unwillingly and with evident dread, with the failure of the
Enlightenment. In words that do not explicitly refer to the beginnings of
Romanticism, he describes the effect of the mythical poem as the emergence of a
background [Untergrund] that was unknown to the rationality of the century and
to the intentions of its most distinguished representatives, and unexpected by
them. Seen in retrospect, what he later identified as the central myth of his form
of existence is coordinated specifically and precisely with such an event.

 Page 416

So it is not unimportant that Goethe hardly hesitates to give the poem a share
even in the dispute's tragic denouement, which rumor had turned into its
consequence: "The schism was so violent that, together with further incidents, it
caused us the loss of one of our most estimable men, Mendelssohn." That
Goethe was not entirely averse to this type of exaggeration is shown by his much
later remark to Knebel, regarding Stolberg's death, on December 29, 1819, that
the latter had been bound to "suffer fatally" as a result of Voss's invective.k Of
course this also belongs in a fundamental pattern of crediting spiritual
expressions with the greatest possible effect. Death is no longer seen as
testimony to the truth, but it is still seen as testimony to the effect of intellectual
action.
What is the source of the finding that Mendelssohn's death had something to do
with the controversy about Lessing's final truth? It was the Enlightenment critic
[Aufklörer] Johann Jakob Engel who, in his foreword to the posthumous edition
of Mendelssohn's last polemic on this subject, had made the categorical
statement: "The most immediate occasion of the death that is so justly and so
universally regretted here was just what occasioned this composition." 18
Here, the process of deformation in the direction of pregnance was at work. The
report of the doctor (and student of Kant) Marcus Herz, which Engel reproduces,
contains only the finding of a very indirect and incidental causal connection to
the dispute with Jacobi: The sick man had told him that he had caught cold while
bringing his pamphlet against Jacobi to the printer, Voss. The doctor concludes
with the statement: "His death was of the kind so uncommon in nature, an
apoplexy due to weakness." So this was already, in 1786, in the hands of
everyone who was at all interested in the dispute. But what more palpable way
of grasping the still undefined 'significance' of what had come togetherin such
short span of monthsas a potential for new developments, than willingly to enter
into a coincidence of events that set before the onlooker the victim of those
developments.
This victim himself had certainly understood least of all what it was that could
take on the intensity of an "explosion." Otherwise, Mendelssohn would not have
been able so casually to venture, as a way of protecting Lessing's memory, to
deny the seriousness of the scene in Wolfenbüttel. He suggested that Jacobi had
been subjected to a "quantity of clever notions, with which our Lessing meant to
entertain

 Page 417

you, and regarding which it is difficult to say whether they are meant as teasing
or as philosophy. He had the habit, when he was in the mood, of coupling
together the most heterogeneous ideas imaginable, in order to see what kind of
offspring they would produce. . . . But most of them were, admittedly, just
unusual whims, which were nevertheless entertaining enough over a cup of
coffee." 19
It was not only Mendelssohn's apologetics that pictured Jacobi as the victim of
"teasing" by Lessing. There were other shrewd contemporaries who also, from a
greater distance, considered the scene in Wolfenbüttel to have been a "sham"
[gestellt]. Thus, between two other proven Enlightenment critics, the Göttingen
professor Abraham Gotthelf Kästner and Friedrich Nicolai: "Someone should
after all tell Mr. Jacobi in print that Lessing made a fool of him. Everyone who
knew Lessing will confirm this."20In fact, Nicolai's Allgemeine Deutsche
Bibliothek [Universal German Library, a literary periodical] discussed the event
for almost seventy pages and registered doubt regarding the logic of the
conversation reported by Jacobi, and specifically, in fact, in relation to the part
that the "Prometheus" ode was supposed to have played: "We must admit that to
us the passage from the poem to Spinozism appears so sudden that one is almost
inclined to say that Lessing created the occasion for effecting his philosophical
confession of faith.''21Another solution to the Wolfenbüttel puzzle had been
prepared, unknowingly, as early as 1783, by Friedrich Leopold Stolberg in a
satirical poem entitled "Die Dichterlinge" [The would-be poets], when he
connected Lessing's inclination to drowsiness, in his last years, to the visit of a
poetical youth, at which Lessing, awakening, feigned applause of the poem that
had just been read.22True, Stolberg did not yet know anything about
"Prometheus," but it was inevitable that Jacobi's account should make people
think of Stolberg's lines: "Zu Lessing kam ein Jüngling, las ihm vor, / Und
schäferte ihn ein . . . " [A youth came to Lessing, read aloud to him, / and put
him to sleep . . . ] . That is also connected to the challenge that had finally put
Jacobi in the situation of needing proof, and obliged him to come forth with
everything that he could produce to bolster his account.
I cannot follow the historian of the "pantheism dispute," Heinrich Scholz, when
he sees in Mendelssohn the "more practiced" interpreter of the dialogue situation
between Lessing and Jacobi. True, Mendelssohn knew Lessing's predilection for
dialectical experiment, but he entirely misjudged the possibility of his friend's
being affected by the "Prometheus" poem. The precondition of such an effect,
"taking

 Page 418

pleasure in bad verses, which is so unnatural to a Lessing," could not,

Mendelssohn says, seriously be imputed to him. Mendelssohn is fully satisfied to
dismiss Jacobi's entire report as a product of his failure to appreciate the ironical
exchange of positions. The report's lack of aesthetic credibility is supposed to
reveal its lack of intellectual credibility: "Could Lessing forget himself so much
in candidly confiding in a friend? And finally [look at] his judgment of the
'Prometheus' poem that Jacobi put in handswhich he certainly cannot have given
him on account of its excellence, but rather on account of its adventurous
contentsand which Lessing thought so good. Poor critic! How you must have
fallen, to seriously think this paltry stuff good!" 23
Here it is not unnatural to go on to ridicule the delicate way in which Jacobi had
handled Goethe's ode. He had added it to his Spinoza book on two unnumbered,
loose pages, and justified this procedure, in a footnote, with a reference to the
epidemic of atheism represented by Hume, Diderot, Holbach, and the
translations of Lucian. Only the circumstance that the poem "could hardly be
dispensed with here, as evidence," had enabled him to overcome his hesitation
about bringing it out of oblivion and putting it before the public. It was infamous
to present the poem both as deserving to be forgotten and as open to suspicion,
rather than appending it to the text "quite innocently and without further ado."
Instead there was this demonstrative caution, as though with the subject of a
conspiracy, which made Jacobi add to the book yet another insertiondesignated
as a "notice''on a special page, announcing that the poem "Prometheus" had been
printed separately "so that anyone who would rather not have it in his copy need
not have it there." And there was a further consideration that had caused him to
adopt this course: "It is not at all impossible that, in one place or another, my
book might be confiscated on account of this 'Prometheus.' I hope that in such a
place people will be satisfied merely to remove the culpable page." Now Jacobi
has grasped the true value of his "speculative investment." And he is enjoying it
to the full.
Here was an opportunity for the gentle Mendelssohn to take the offensive: "Herr
Jacobi had misgivings about having these verses printed with his other material
without taking protective measures, so he inserted an immaculate little page
which readers with tender consciences can have sewn in in place of the seductive
verses. I fancy that Lessing would have had to find the warning more pernicious
than the

 Page 419

poison. One who can lose his religion as a result of bad verses must certainly
have little to lose." So because he thinks that Lessing would have had to think
the ode bad, and for that reason (if for no other) could only have addressed it
ironically, Mendelssohn does not take into account the risk involved in his
mixing of aesthetics and philosophy of religion. If it was impossible for bad
verses to be dangerous to religion, then a mistake about their quality or about
Lessing's taste inevitably had to undermine such argumentation.
Thus, in his retort "Against Mendelssohn's Accusations," Jacobi did confirm
Lessing's "liking for the bad verses" as, though possibly regrettable from an
aesthetic point of view, incontrovertible. In the language of a witness before a
tribunal, Jacobi writes, "I declare that Lessing more than once not only
considered bad verses good but repeatedly asked for them, called them poems,l
praised the poemsand even admired them." Fearless of Mendelssohn's verdict,
Jacobi goes so far as to give Lessing's aesthetic appreciation of the ''Prometheus"
ode precedence over the Spinozism he had supposedly found in it. During their
last farewell in Halberstadt in the middle of August 1780, he says, Lessing
returned to the subject of Goethe's ode once again: " . . . at breakfast, when the
talk turned to verses that were not bad, Lessing asked me for 'Prometheus' once
again, and praised and expressed admiration forthe genuine, living spirit of
antiquity, in form and content, contained in it anew." 24
This last utterance of Lessing's with regard to "Prometheus" elucidates, in a
hitherto unnoticed way, what he could have meant, in their first meeting, by the
statement that he "had already known that firsthand for a long time." Jacobi
interprets the remark as relating to Spinoza. This misunderstanding persists, as a
premise of the conversation; but the last utterance puts it beyond doubt that
Lessing must have meant the original source in antiquity, Aeschylus's tragedy.
So what he notices or pays attention to is not the clothing of the self-
consciousness of Sturm und Drang in the "old Titanic dress" but rather the
fundamental atmosphere of ancient tragedy. When Jacobi offers the rubric of
"Spinoza," this does not, after all, lie entirely outside that primary connection for
the philosophical tradition, because what polytheism and pantheism,
Epicureanism and Spinozism, ultimately had in common had always been seen
as their denial of divine care for man. Goethe's ode also fits into this overall
category. God's lack of concern for man is the premise of the creative poet's self-
empow-

 Page 420

erment and self-validation. Thus Spinoza was one possible rubric, though not the
compelling one, for the content of the poem.
Finally, there was still another factor that could make Jacobi believe in the
appropriateness of his interpretation: He had had a comparable confessional
experience with Goethe at the time of the origin of the "Prometheus" odein the
first hour, in fact, of their friendship. Jacobi wrote to Goethe about thiscertainly
not without having to be prepared for contradictionmuch later, when he was
anticipating the third part of Dichtung und Wahrheit and had to anticipate his
own appearance there: "I hope that in this epoch you do not forget the Jabachs'
house, the castle at Bensberg, and the arbor in which you talked to me, so
memorably, about Spinoza. . . . What hours those were! What days! At midnight
you sought me out, in spite of the darkit was as though my soul were reborn.
From that time onward I could not let you go." 25Spinoza in the jasmine
arborcertainly not as a secret disclosure, but still an enthusiastic confidingthat is
Jacobi's prototype for the mise en scène of his meeting with Lessing, and at the
same time a guiding experience behind his hermeneutic imputation of
''Prometheus" to Spinoza.
Jacobi had believed that the friendship that had begun in this way must finally,
especially after the incident at Ettersburg was gotten over, be fulfilled in a
community of conviction and of thought, whereas Goethe coolly excluded this
possibility: " . . . we liked each other, without understanding one another. I no
longer comprehended the language of his philosophy. . . . We never exchanged a
friendly word about our later labors."26Jacobi may have wanted to gain by force
what was denied to him in this way. So he did something of a magical character:
He tried to repeat the early scene of intimacy with Goethe in the jasmine arbor,
just as he had already 'applied' it to the meeting with Lessing.
Varnhagen von Ense tells us that Jacobi visited Goethe in 1805 as he was
passing through Weimar, and called up and discussed many a topic in the old
atmosphere of intimacy. "But when they were left alone, Jacobi came out with
the confidential inquiry, wouldn't Goethe finally tell him now candidly, between
the two of them, what he had really meant with his Eugenie (sc. in the
Natürliche Tochter). To Goethe, as he himself later admitted, it was as though
someone had poured a bucket of cold water over him; he suddenly saw a gulf
that could never be filled between himself and Jacobi, an abyss of eternal mis-

 Page 421

understandingand besides, the desire was so foolish and ridiculous. But he pulled
himself together and, just so as to get free of his friend and of the evening
lightly, he said propitiatingly, 'Dear Jacobi, let us not go into that. It would lead
us too far for today.'" 27So we have three somewhat comparable situations, in
which Jacobi's need for intimate confessions, for personal revelations, is
unmistakable. He was a man who knew how to put his finger on sore points.
How could he have been in a position to suspect that any inquiry about Eugenie,
in The Natural Daughter, inexplicably disconcerted Goethe? Despite the fact
that he had let so many "private matters, secrets, unexpressed things,"
reverberate in this drama, and although he spoke of none of his characters as he
spoke, in this case, of his "beloved Eugenie"?28,m Must we not assume that he
kept his secret, with a prudent refusal, because he remembered how Jacobi had
dealt with Lessing?
When Goethe, in 1820, writes an autobiographical note about the estrangement
between Voss and Stolberg, who had been friends from their youth, the nature of
his own relationship to Jacobi dawns on him. Voss had blamed Stolberg for
concealing from him his true conviction, his intention of converting. Goethe,
however, thinks that it is a case of concealing something that should not have
been declared and that, when it was declared nevertheless, drove the most
sensible and steadiest men to desperation. As he was writing this down, Jacobi's
indiscretion must have become present to his mind. "Just remember the
unfortunate disclosure, by Friedrich Jacobi, of Lessing's secret disposition to
Spinozism, as a result of which Mendelssohn literally caught his death." Now
that is somewhat more literal, even, than the statement in Dichtung und
Wahrheit. Once again we see how firmly Goethe was convinced of the truth of
Lessing's Spinozistic revelation and of what Jacobi had reported about it. "How
hard it was for his friends in Berlin, who thought they were so intimately
intertwined with Lessing, to have to discover all at once that all his life he had
concealed a deep contradiction from them."29
Does the rejection of Jacobi's importunity mean that in the end Goethe saw his
"Prometheus" as having less of a role in Lessing's self-exposure than Lessing's
visitor in Wolfenbüttel. That does not harmonize with the importance that
Goethe assigned to his dealings with Prometheus. That he is supposed to have
forgotten the ode is itself an improbable construction. He had the extraordinary
faculty of being able to quote poemshis own or others'that he had once

 Page 422

read or written, even after half a century. 30The fact that he included the ode in
the editions of his works published from 1790 on is evidence of a change; with
the ex post facto blessing given to Jacobi's unauthorized action (in which,
however, his name had been kept secret), he reconciled himself to the inevitable.
When the copy of the fragment of a drama surfaced again in Lenz's literary
remains, he wrote in warning to Zelter (from whom he does not seem to expect
any recollection of Mendelssohn's end, although the composer had passed his
life in Berlin): "It is peculiar enough that that Prometheus, which I myself had
given up and forgotten, should reappear just now. The well-known monologue,
which is included among my poems, was supposed to open the third act. You
probably don't remember that the good Mendelssohn died of the effects of a
hasty publication of the same. Don't let the manuscript become too public, so
that it won't appear in print."31Thus the year 1820 brought together, once again,
the early Prometheus material and (with the VossStolberg affair) the association
with Jacobi's exposure of Lessing.
The apprehension that Goethe now connects with the publication of the youthful
work no longer has anything to do, in its content, with what had become
operative, four decades earlier, in connection with Lessing. The possible
explosions are of a different kind; only the "priming powder" remains the same.
Goethe goes on to this in his letter to Zelter: "It would come quite opportunely as
a gospel for our revolutionary youth, and the High Commissions at Berlin and
Mainz might take a punitive view of my young man's whims." The metaphor
that he had already chosen, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, for the operation of the
ode continues to suggest itself. It has apparently been developed further by more
intimate acquaintance with the myth, inasmuch as the transportation of the fire
that Prometheus stole in the hollow stalk of a giant fennel is now able to typify
something about the long concealment of the dangerous substance: "It is
remarkable, though, that this stubborn fire has already smoldered on for fifty
years under poetic ashes until finally it threatens, taking hold of truly flammable
materials, to break forth in destructive flames.''
But what is established, above all, in this late remark is the absence of any
unequivocal coordination of the mythical configuration with a specific system of
dogma. The fascination, and the risk that goes with it, consisted precisely in the
ambiguity of the configuration's interpretation and of its capacity to serve as an
answer, which seemed to

 Page 423

offer nothing and to demand everything. The catchword of Spinozism had been
no more adequate to the Prometheus story than that of the revolution for which it
could have become the "gospel" was now.
The mythical pattern demonstrates its evidentness through repetition. Repetition
lies between ritual and parody. Thus the wittiest contemporary [of the events]
could not resist reenacting Jacobi's sounding out of Lessing. Lichtenbergwho
else could it have been?staged the Wolfenbüttel scene in the form of parody. Not
by accident, he did so with his antipodewith the representative of something that
he not only found most repugnant, but that appeared to him as the extreme
antithesis of the Enlightenment: with the author of the Physiognomische
Fragmente [Fragments on physiognomy]. Johann Kaspar Lavater's questionable
activity and influence are described (from a not entirely favorable perspective)
by Karl August Böttiger, the director of the Gymnasium in Weimar and a person
to whom the venerators of Goethe do not listen with pleasure: "During the
'genius' period anyone who did not want to trample on order and decorum was
called a philistine [Spiessbürger]. Everyone was silhouetted and submitted to the
judgment of Lavater, who issued the most impudent verdicts and dismissed the
most upright people as belonging among the thieves on Golgotha. Altogether,
Lavater had a manifold influence on the 'genius' period here." 32This is the man
whose visit, contrary to all probability and discretion, Lichtenberg receives in
1786, as he describes on July 3 to the secretary for war in Hanover, Johann
Daniel Ramberg.
If the Fragments on Physiognomy embodied everything that was repugnant to
Lichtenberg, it is all the more surprising when he says of Lavater that he cannot
"describe sufficiently how good this man is." He means everything honestly, and
if he deceives, then he is "a deceived deceiver." He begs the recipient of his
letter to use the utmost discretion, because he knows that people "often make the
most infamous use'' of such things. This is, it is true, an allusion to the
consequences of the scene in Wolfenbüttel, but with reversed roles, in that here
the one who 'confesses' himself attends to the dissemination of his 'revelation.'
Lichtenberg immediately guides his conversation with Lavater to the subject of
Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Jacobi, and to Spinozism. It is a determined
provocation. To be sure, he does not, like Lessing, confess his own, present
Spinozism, but rather proclaims Spinozism as a mode of thought of times to
come, as the ultimate consequence

 Page 424

of the research into nature in which he himself is a participant. The long-term

character of the perspective is ironical; it is founded on the idea that through the
progress of physics the scope for the assumption of occult powers and spiritual
substances becomes ever narrower. "The only ghost that we still recognized was
the one that haunts our body and brings about effects that we explained,
precisely, by a ghost, just as the peasant explained the knocking in his
bedroombecause he, in the latter case, just like us in the former, did not know its
causes." The dualism of body and soul, Lichtenberg said, rests only on a false
conception of matter as an inert substance. The process of theory will overcome
that metaphysical estrangement, from the side of physical bodies, and will lead
to a substantial monism. The upshot will be that the investigation of nature,
"continued for millenniums more, will finally lead to Spinozism."
Lichtenberg's provocation slides off Lavater, just as Lessing's slid off Jacobi.
Lavater answers, completely guilelessly, that what he has just heard from
Lichtenberg "he also believes." Lichtenberg confesses to his visitor that he had
not expected him to be so unbiased. But did Lichtenberg understand his guest
correctly? Did he not, for his part, fall victim to an ambiguous assent? The
interval of millenniums that was granted for the final inescapability of
Spinozism may have made it easier for Lavater not to resist. In millenniums, one
can lightheartedly let worlds perish. The actual facts are probably more nearly
reflected in the conjecture that Lichtenberg's prophecy may have struck Lavater
as that of an entirely legitimate disaster that was in store for the Enlightenment's
dealings with science, as the result of their inner logic: that reason would relapse
into the myth it claimed to overcome.
This conjecture would accord with the sketch of Lavater that Goethe once gave
Charlotte von Stein: "He seems to me like a person who explained to me in
detail that the earth is not a precise sphere, but is pressed in at the poleswho
proved that most conclusively, and convinced me that he possessed the newest,
most detailed and most correct concept of astronomy and the construction of the
world; what would we say, then, if such a person concluded by saying, 'Finally I
must still mention the main point, which is that this world, whose shape we have
most accurately demonstrated, rests on the back of a tortoise, since otherwise it
would fall into the abyss.'" 33At the time when this character sketch was given,
Lavater's influence on the Weimar genius activity had already been broken.

 Page 425

Lichtenberg has a brief and impersonal encounter with Jacobi, too. It clarifies, in
the manner of a spotlight, the endangered situation of the Enlightenment, of
which the Spinozism dispute had been the most trenchant indicator. The parody
of the scene in Wolfenbüttel is also illuminated insofar as it, too, is characterized
by the skepticism with which Lichtenberg watches for signs of the success or
failure of reason. It seems as though in this case, as in the former one, he wants
to test the stability of the achievements of the Enlightenment.
At the beginning of 1793 an unusual comet appears. Lichtenberg writes to Jacobi
that he remembered the passage in Tacitus according to which, in the popular
view, a comet means a change of political regime. Since political events of this
type had coincided with the current comet, in any other age the validity of the
omen would have been held to have been confirmed. The comet had appeared as
the trial of the French king neared its end, and had disappeared immediately after
his decapitation: "What would people not have made of this phenomenon in
earlier times?" Lichtenberg does not even regard his own immunity to the
singular coincidences between events in the heavens and events on earth as a
matter of course. The teaching which he has received, but also the circumstance
that he was born just in Darmstadt and not in Munich or Paderborn, made him
insensitive. And as though this were the most extreme test of enlightenment, he
now names Jacobi himself as the test case. He has in fact, he says, reached the
point where he is able "to read the writings of the sage of Pempelfort with
delight." It is not only for himself but also for his age that Lichtenberg draws the
conclusion that the attention that is not paid to omens in the heavensto the comet
in the case of the French king and to a solar eclipse in the case of the English
oneconfirms the influence of philosophy: "That is indeed very fine, and a sign
that the paper assignats of the philosophers are beginning to rise in value.'' 34As
for Lessing more than a decade earlier, now for Lichtenberg too, it is precisely
what cannot be attacked and embarrassed by Jacobi that makes evidentjust like
the failure of the comet's path to leave any trace in the public consciousnessthe
success of philosophy.
It was not only in the retrospect of Dichtung und Wahrheit that Goetheto come
back to himused the Spinoza dispute in dating the disaster that befell the
Enlightenment. Months before he held in his hands Jacobi's Spinoza, with the
copy of his ode, he wrote to Jacobi,

 Page 426

at the beginning of 1785, challengingly and anxiously at the same time: "I train
myself on Spinoza, I read him and read him again, and I look forward to the day
when the battle will break out over his dead body. . . . " 35In the autumn of the
same year, then, he has to write, regarding his increased entanglement in the
affair as a result of Jacobi's reproducing another poem: "Jacobi has played a mad
trick on me. In his conversation with Lessing, of course, my 'Prometheus' crops
up, and now that he is having his doctrine of divinity printed, he includes the
other poem, 'Edel sei der Mensch!' [Let man be noble], with my name in front of
it, so that everyone can see that 'Prometheus' is by me."36
Goethe had never once questioned Jacobi's right, in the situation where he was in
need of evidence, to print "Prometheus." What he took offense at was the
questionable manner in which it was published and in which the author was
made known: "The best thing would have been if you had simply had
'Prometheus' printed, without any note and without the sheet, by which you
provoke a confiscation motivated by anxiety. . . . "37Here, Goethe probably did
not even know that Jacobi had provided for the worst case as well. He could
equip his book with altered pages 11 and 12 as a substitute, on which the risk
was described in naked words, and at the same time excluded: "This poem,
which is directed, in very strong language, against any Providence, cannot, for
good reasons, be imparted here.''38
The sequence of events that, with the reference back to Jacobi's exaggerated
precautions, lies before us concluded has the quality of myth. Everything is not
only 'done up' in terms of significance, it is experienced and seen in those terms.
The increasing confirmations, both real and only supposed, retroactively
reinforce the profiles, the contours. The most immediately striking thing is what
one has to call the causal disparities: Things that are supposed to have followed
not only one after another but one from another can only be viewed as obeying
the principium rationis insufficientis ['principle of insufficient reason'], which
holds for relationships in which rhetoric operates.39Nor can the engendering of
significance as though it were made to order be viewed in the light of the adage
about small causes and great effectsbecause the causes are, in their own way,
"great," as, for example, "Prometheus." The relation to images has its own
regulative principles. Goethe allows another person's prank to spring over into
his own mode of vision. Initially, he almost allows the if not forgotten,

 Page 427

at any rate faded, Titanism to be forced upon him again, so asas he did in other
instances with what was unavoidableto assume it as his own, to accept it as a
contrasting element in his self-comprehension. He will not be able to thrust
"Prometheus" away from himself again, although this is not the only time that he
is made uncomfortable by recognizing his initial choice and not being able to
leave it as it was. What had been meant to be a figure of triumph and self-
confirmation was not to remain that.

Translator's Notes

a. "Prometheus"
Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus,
Mit Wolkendunst
Und übe, dem Knaben gleich,
Der Disteln köpft,
An Eichen dich und Bergeshöhn;
Musst mir meine Erde
Doch lassen stehn
Und meine Hütte, die du nicht
gebaut,
Und meinen Herd,
Um dessen Glut
Du mich beneidest.
Ich kenne nichts Ärmeres
Unter der Sonn als euch, Götter!
Ihr nähret kümmerlich
Von Opfersteuern
Und Gebetshauch
Eure Majestät
Und darbtet, wären
Nicht Kinder und Bettler
Hoffnungsvolle Toren.
Da ich ein Kind war,
Nicht wusste, wo aus noch ein,
"Prometheus"
Cover your heavens, Jove,
with misty clouds
and practice, like a boy
beheading thistles,
on oaks and mountain peaks!
My earth you must leave me
still standing,
and my cottage, which you did not
build,
and my hearth
whose warmth
you envy me.
I know nothing poorer
under the sun than you gods!
Wretchedly you nourish
your majesty
on sacrificial tolls
and flimsy prayers,
and would starve if children
and beggers were not
hopeful fools.
When I was a child,
not knowing my way,
Kehrt ich mein verirrtes Auge
Zur Sonne, als wenn drüber wär
Ein Ohr, zu hören meine Klage,
Ein Herz wie meins,
Sich des Bedrängten zu erbarmen.
Wer half mir
Wider der Titanen Übermut?
Wet rettete vom Tode mich,
Von Sldaverei?
Has du nicht alles selbst vollendet,
Heilig glühend Herz?
Und glühtest jung trod gut,
(table continued on next page)
I turned my erring eyes
sunward, as if above there were
an ear to hear my lamentation,
a heart like mine
to care for the distressed.
Who helped me
against the Titans' wanton insolence?
Who rescued me from death,
from slavery?
Have you not done all this yourself,
My holy glowing heart?
And young and good, you glowed,
 Page 428

(table continued from previous page)

Betrogen, Rettungsdank betrayed, with thanks for rescue

Dem Schlafenden da droben?
Ich dich ehren? Wofür?
Hast du die Schmerzen gelindert
Je des Beladenen?
Hast du die Träinen gestillet
Je des Geängsteten?
Hat nicht reich zum Manne geschmiedet
Die allmächtige Zeit
Und das ewige Schicksal,
Meine Herm und deine?
Wähntest du etwa,
Ich sollte das Leben hassen,
In Wüsten fliehen,
Weft nicht alle
Blütenträume reiften?
Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bride,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich!
Translation by Walter Kaufmann, in Twenty German Poets (New York:
Random House, 1962), pp. 9 11.
To him who slept above.
I honor you? For what?
Have you ever eased the suffering
of the oppressed?
Have you ever stilled the tears
of the frightened?
Was I not welded to manhood
by almighty Time
and eternal Fate,
my masters and yours?
Did you fancy perchance
that I should hate life
and fly to the desert
because not all
my blossom dreams ripened?
Here I sit, forming men
in my own image,
a race to be like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to delight and to rejoice,
and to defy you,
as I do.

b. Pandora is the last text in the final volume (vol. 40) of non-posthumous
works in the complete edition that was begun in the last decade of Goethe's life:
Goethes Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand, 60 vols. (Stuttgart and
Tübingen: J. C. Cotta, 1827 1842).
c. F. H. Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinozas, in Briefen an Herrn Moses
Mendelssohn (Breslau, 1785).
d. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, author of the Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die
vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, which was published in full only in 1972 (2 vols.,
Frankfurt: Insel).
e. Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über dos Dasein Gottes (Berlin, 1785).
f. Unendlichkeit "unlimitedness." This combination is discussed, in connection
with Giordano Bruno, in the author's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), especially pp. 561 564.
g. Das absolute Ich, a phrase that is prominent in Fichte's Idealism.
h. Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Scheibe, p. 527.
i. The reference is to Reimarus's Apologie oder Schutzschrift, which was
unpublished (except for the famous fragments published as "anonymous" by
Lessing and known as the "Wolfenbüttel fragments") until 1972.
j. See note h.

 Page 429

k. See the paragraph of this chapter related to note 29, for the story of Voss and
Stolberg.
l. Ein Gedicht is also a term of (figurative) praise.
m. Some of the private associations, for Goethe, of his play Die Natürliche
Tochter (The natural daughter) are discussed in the next chapter of this book, in
the three paragraphs ending with that related to note 23.

 Page 430

2
A Conflict between Gods
There is no way to talk to a Vulcanist.
Goethe to his son, July 29, 1822

How was the Prometheus material able to develop, in Goethe's consciousness,

into a central configuration of his understanding of himself and the world? Is it
possible to grasp something of the disposition that made this myth close to him
throughout his life, a myth by which he was stirred again and again, as he was
comparably stirred only by Faust? I want to try to exhibit some aspects of what
one could also call Goethe's affinity to this myth.
One will have to believe Bettina von Arnim, even though she loved to make up
tales and was, even in her imagination, unscrupulously self-centered, when she
relates what she can hardly have made up: that Goethe's mother told her how the
six-year-old child was troubled, after the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, by the
question of how the event could be justified. His mother's statement sounds
daring, but is of great importance, when she says that the "revolutionary
agitation in connection with this earthquake appeared again in connection with
'Prometheus.'" 1
Of course, here as elsewhere, the latency of violation of [the child's] faith in the
direction of the world [Weltsinn] can only be conjectured. Nothing permits us to
assume that the mother could perhaps have inquired [about this] at the time of
the first "Prometheus" plan. But even as pure conjecture, it is, nevertheless, a
sufficiently clear per-

 Page 431

ception, if one wants to comprehend, as a determining power in relation to what

came later, the deep penetration of the "Prometheus" indignation into the
foundation of this life. Goethe himself told Riemer in 1809 that as a six-year-old
he had fallen to brooding and had not understood why God could not at least
have spared women and children, in Lisbon, as he did in the Old Testament.
One must first of all examine more closely what the boy is supposed to have
said, in order to discover the specificity of the connection that his mother
detects. He was going home with his grandfather, from a sermon, which may
have unfolded the kind of theodicy that was common after Leibniz in order to
defend the wisdom and goodness of the Creator in view of the catastrophe that
had shocked the Continent. The father made inquiries aimed at determining what
the boy had understood of the sermon. The boy may have recounted what
belonged to the familiar repertoire of the popular intermediate realm between
theology and metaphysics, but what was astonishing was the way he explained,
pursuing his own, divergent argument, that things might be much simpler, after
all, than the preacher thought. Because the God who had allowed the earthquake
to happen would certainly know that "bad fortune cannot harm the immortal
soul." That is astonishing because it takes up the problem from the point of view
of the inviolability of those affected by it, rather than leading to acquiescence in
the mysterious justice of God in action. One thinks immediately of the lines of
the "Prometheus" ode that begin with the hyperbole: "Musst mir meine Erde /
Doch lassen stehn . . . " [My earth you must leave me / still standing . . . ]. This
may be the point at which his mother recognized the prototype of the thought
contained in the poetry.
The direction is fixed by the fact that the boy, no doubt in contradiction to the
preacher, thinks little of the question of how God's justice and goodness could be
saved. What concerns him is the other question of what the God who sends or
permits the earthquake cannot do to or take from the man whom he strikes with
it. As long as God's morality may not be postulatedby virtue of the absolute
validity of practical reasontogether with his existence, as it could be according to
Kant's second Critique, all questioning must circle around the limitation of his
power. This limitation could only be seen in the conditions (disallowed by Kant's
first Critique) of the substantiality of the subject.

 Page 432

The old crown jewel of metaphysics, immortality, could also be seen as a

constant that could not be violated by any power.
What we have before us in this childhood scene is an episode from the last act of
the drama of the justifications of God, which Plato had opened with the myth of
the choice of fates by the souls and for which Augustine provided the systematic
construction when he invented man's freedom solely for the purpose of
exonerating God by making man responsible for what was bad in the world. On
this assumption the bad (malum) that befalls man is only the equivalent that
counter-balances the wickedness (malum) that he commits. To be sure, the
freedom that is discovered in this way at the same time establishes [the free
agent's] inaccessibility by physical causality. In the last analysis it renders [the
free agent] untouchable by just those bad things in the world for which it creates
[him as] the bearer of responsibility.a That is what the boy, Goethe, had arrived
at: The bad things that are integrated into wisdom and justice by theodicy do still
affect man, but they no longer affect him in his substance. This will still be the
fundamental idea that determines the conclusion of Faust, when
Mephistophelesin spite of all the legality of having won the wagerhas to let
Faust's immortal part escape him.
Whoever it may be who, in the case of the earthquake at Lisbon, may perhaps
not have meant men so well as they liked to believe, he did not reach what was
inextinguishably their own. Now one will hardly be able to assert that Goethe
allowed himself to be dissuaded from the idea of man's substantial inviolability
by Kant's Paralogisms.b As an old man he will still say that it is natural to him to
think of death in this way: "This thought does not disturb me at all, because I
have the firm conviction that our spirit is a being that is entirely indestructible by
nature. . . . " 2But this is not, after all, the only solution, and is probably also too
abstract a solution, for concern about inviolability by a too powerful will.
Augustine's institution of the concept of freedom had loaded the responsibility
for the world on guilty man so as to overcome the threat, made manifest by
Gnosticism, of the bifurcation of the ground of existence into good and evil;
everything comforting in the idea that man could be saved, by a being who was
more friendly to him, from the afflictions of the world and from entanglement in
guilt under a law that could not be complied with, was lost with the inexorability
of the idea that the quality of the world resulted entirely from man's freedom and
from his primeval lapse.

 Page 433

But in the precocious child Johann Wolfgang's theodicy, one can already
perceive the first step toward imagining man's rigid responsibility once again as
a mythical complication around man.
The six-year-old does not think strictly monotheistically when he says that God
will certainly "know" that man is immortal and that his misfortunes consequently
cannot ultimately get any hold on him. That makes the state of affairs at least
possible, as a limitation on what God can lay his hands on, in which this man
would not be a creature of the same God who could press him so hard, in the
world, as he did in Lisbon. This would be a precondition of the awakening, once
Goethe had taken even the most cursory cognizance of the myth of Prometheus,
of anamnesis of his early idea of man's indestructibility. The mythical
imagination could make into man's supporter a different god from the one who,
while he was able to produce the terrors and convulsions of nature, could not
overthrow and destroy that imagination itself. In this way the "Prometheus" ode
could follow logically from the boy's early idea, if the monotheistic rigorism of
the classical theodicy had already been, if not broken, at least weakened, there.
This construction of a bridge across a latency would, admittedly, be too fragile,
if Goethe himself had not brought out just this aspect of his affinity to the
Prometheus material in his retrospect written in 1813. It was "a beautiful
thought, and well suited to poetry, to represent men as created not by the
supreme ruler of the world but by an intermediate figure who, however, as a
descendant of the oldest dynasty, is worthy and important enough for this
role. . . . "c The appearance of Gnosticism, which is bound to arise whenever
man's origin is separated from that of the world, is avoided here not only by
means of the expression "intermediate figure" and by Goethe's abstaining from
any evaluation of the creator figures but also by means of the undefined
pluralism of the framework of dynasties and genealogy with which the sketch is
immediately surrounded. A path becomes accessible, by which Goethe, the
aesthetic polytheist, became just that by impeding or vanquishing a dualistic
metaphysician. This allows him, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, to combine that
fundamental thought, beautiful and well suited to poetry, with the generalization
" . . . as, indeed, Greek mythology in general presents an inexhaustible wealth of
divine and human symbols." At the same time that he is stressing his
involvement with the Prometheus material, in this way, Goethe declaresspeaking
almost like a system-builder (and it is not accidental

 Page 434

that this is in a letter to Jacobi)his adherence to a 'triple' theology: "For myself, I

cannot be satisfied, given the multiple tendencies of my being, with one mode of
thought; as a poet and artist I am a polytheist, but as an investigator of nature I
am a pantheist, and I am the one just as firmly as the other. If I have need of a
God for my personhood, as a moral man, then that has already been taken care
of, too." 3
After this glance at the six-year-old deformer of the theodicy that was just then
perishing together with Lisbon, another indirect document of Goethe's childhood
must be brought up, one that shows his father's Latin student at work. In
Frankfurt there is an exercise book that belonged to the boy, which contains,
together with other material, translation exercises from German into Latin,
including one dated January 1757, of which the text to be translated had
evidently been composed by the father and dictated to the group of students that
met on Sundays in different parents' houses in succession.4For the scene, a
dialogue between father and son, unmistakably takes place in the well-provided
burgher's house on the Grosser Hirschgraben.
The father is going into the wine cellar, and the son asks whether he may
accompany him. First, in the interest of a little grammatical nicety, he must say
what it is that he proposes to do there. To get a correct idea of the refilling of the
loss from evaporation from the great wine casks, the boy answers. The father,
being no different from other fathers, does not have confidence in such an
educational purpose; he suspects the presence of another purpose behind it. Then
the son has to admit that he wants to see the cornerstone (lapidem
fundamentalem) of the house and the keystone (lapidem clausularem) of the
cellar vault. We do not learn whether such a desire to get to the bottom of things
still, or first of all, meets with the father's approval. In any case when his son
hesitates, shrinking from the darkness on the cellar steps, he promisesin
agreement with his epoch and its reliance on educationspeedy light: "descende
mi fili provide et mox infra lucem invenies" [go down carefully, my son, and
soon, down below, you will find light], the son translates. And in fact it does
turn out, in this educational inversion of the allegory of the cave, that a little
light, through the cellar opening, is enough to remove the mystery from the
things in the dark.
When the cornerstone and the keystone have been found, the father invites the
son to remember the ceremony in which he himself had been allowed to lay the
cornerstone. But the high point of the dialogue

 Page 435

is the question about what he thinks, then, when he looks at the cornerstone. In
this dialogue, embellished elsewhere for the purposes of the translation exercise,
but scarcely invented, the father will have been interested in reproducing the
answer literally and bringing a little reproof to bear. If that is so, then what we
are dealing with here is an earliest original fragment, which has been neglected
in the editions of Goethe's conversations.
The son's answer, as written down by the father, reads: "I think and wish that it
may not be displaced sooner than at the end of the world." 5To the father, so
much durability is too much to demand, and with stylized discretion he restricts
it: "We will leave that up to God. . . . " We see from the continuation of the
conversation that the boy remains intent on the stability of the standing structure.
Apparently the wine cellar was only built under the house later, because the son
is surprised that they were still able to continue to live in the house during its
construction, in spite of the danger involved in excavating under and propping
up the house. Still characteristic of the economizing householder fatherwe will
soon meet him in the role of bookkeeper for his son's aesthetic expendituresis his
admonition to the next generation to make only moderate use, later on, of the old
vintages, so as to pass some of the bottles on to posterity as well.
The whole scene is almost a ceremony of initiation into bourgeois stability. That
becomes clearest of all at its conclusion: So that the son should not go away
unrewarded for his answers, the father hands him, in the dark cellar, an
unprepossessing piece of wood, which he reveals to be a piece from the mast of
the ship on which Columbus discovered the New World. The son promises to
preserve it.
It would perhaps be exaggerated hermeneutics to say that the eight-year-old's
intentness on the stability of the foundations of the house, on the linkage of its
duration with that of the world itself, as a whole, still allows us to perceive the
trauma with which, less than two years earlier, the descriptions of the earthquake
at Lisbon had affected the child. But if one examines this life and its texture
further, then the child's attitude to the cornerstone and to the ground on which it
rests becomes the characteristic figuration of a subjective attitude toward the
world that, before the word was worn out, one would confidently have called
existential. More on that follows.
When Eckermann goes walking, on a beautiful fall day in 1823, on the road
toward Erfurt, he encounters an aged man who, as they

 Page 436

converse, makes himself known as Goethe's former valet, Sutor. Eckermann asks
him for recollections of his twenty years of service. Once Goethe rang for him in
the middle of the night, Sutor says, and when he entered his chamber he had
pushed the iron bed from the other end of the room to the window and was
examining the sky while lying in the bed. Goethe asked him whether he had not
noticed anything in the sky, and when he answered in the negative, sent him for
the watchman in order to ask whether he had not seen anything. On his return he
had to tell his master, who still lay there examining the sky without moving, that
nothing had attracted the watchman's attention. Then Goethe said to him:
''Listen, we are at an important moment; either we are having an earthquake right
now, or we will have one." Then he showed Sutor by what signs he arrived at
this conclusion. Since it was very cloudy and sultry, it cannot have been a matter
of observation of the stars. We are not told what Goethe had shown his valet.
But it must have convinced him, this time as on other occasions too: He "took
his word for it, because what he predicted was always correct." The duke, too,
and other people at court on the next day had put faith in Goethe's observations.
Some weeks later, then, the news arrived that "during the same night, part of
Messina had been destroyed by an earthquake." 6What was recounted must,
then, have taken place in February 1783.
When Goethe noted laconically in his diary, on December 21, 1823, in
connection with Eckermann's account of his encounter with Sutor, "Sutor's story
[Tradition] of a phenomenon in the heavens," it is not necessary to conclude
from this that his own memory had not preserved, or even that it had never
contained, anything about the telepathic relation to the earthquake. Precisely if
his memory had been clear and significant, he would have needed only an entry
noting the date and would otherwise have kept just as visibly silent as he
characteristically did in relation to 'significant' things. He did not at all like
reference to be made to his propensities for the ominous.
Some information on how it may really have been can be gained from a letter to
Frau von Stein of the sixth of April 1783, in which he says: "Tonight I saw a
northern light in the southeast. Hopefully there has not been an earthquake again,
because it is an unusual phenomenon." This was not, at any rate, the fifth of
February, and during this night Goethe already knew of the destruction of
Messina; the word again, in connection with the earthquake (not with the phe-

 Page 437

nomenon in the heavens), points to this. Does not the conjecture follow that the
connection between earthquakes and phenomena in the heavens was first
generated during this night? If a phenomenon in the heavens had already been
observed two months earlier, Goethe would not have needed the argument that it
was unusual. But, then, Sutor was inclined, in his recollection, not to want to see
the great man (as he had become in the intervening time) cheated of his
distinction as the possessor of presentiments, a distinction that so well suited him
and his idea of the unity of nature, which encouraged one not to let one
extraordinary phenomenon be without reference to another. So Goethe himself
did not protest against the recollections that Eckermann reported from Sutorto
him, too, such things seemed very natural.
Comparably telepathic, then, is the sensibility with which, two years later, he
perceived in the necklace affair the beginning of a break in the political ground
on which the condition of France, and thus of Europe, rested. It is the year in
which he learns for the first time of the other shocks that his "Prometheus"
caused to those estimable men, of the violent "schism" [Riss, "fissure"] "in an
otherwise highly enlightened society,'' which seems to be only the pendant to the
"abyss" that had opened in the neighbor countrymetaphors that related to the
ground that supports life in a world.
Concern about the ground under one's feet was not only a matter of schisms and
abysses; as the fear of losing the ground in the process of exalting oneself to the
stars, it was already expressed in "Grenzen der Menschheit" [Human limitations
(c. 1780)], which Erich Schmidt described as a "cheerful parody of
'Prometheus,'" because Zeus has become the holy Father, the ancient of days,
who hurls beneficent lightnings over the earth and inspires childlike awe in the
hearts of his creatures. There we find what has to be entitled a further piece of
'work' on the Prometheus material: "Denn mit Göttern / Soll sich nicht messen /
Irgend ein Mensch" [For let no man measure himself against gods]. The early
Promethean attitude and the "Grenzen der Menschheit," even though the latter
comes only half a decade later, represent [mutually exclusive] alternatives: One
who wants to stand firmly on the earth cannnot touch the stars with his head. The
related image of shipwreck appears, too: The ever-rolling stream on which man
drifts lifts him, with its wave, and lets him sink. The fact that standing "Auf der
Wohlgegründeten / Dauernden Erde" [On the firm-established lasting earth] is
not secure and unmolestedthat is what

 Page 438

costs Prometheus his great gesture.d On July 25, 1779, Goethe writes in his diary
that he begs the onlooking gods not to laugh at his "striving and struggling and
pains""At most, smile, and stand by me."
Goethe's partisanship in the contest between Neptunism and Vulcanism lies on
the same fundamental axis of alarms about the reliability of the ground [we stand
on], alarms that begin with the impression made on the boy by the earthquake at
Lisbon. This controversy had issued from the Enlightenment's endeavor to free
itself from the injunctions about the beginnings of the world that were laid down
by the biblical account of the Creation, and to seek out immanent formative
powers of nature, and especially of the earth's surface. The Bible had established
solid ground for man's life by means of the command, on the second day of the
Creation, that the firmament should be divided from the waters. In contrast to
that, the solution proposed by Vulcanism, as the theory of the formative violence
coming from within, seemed almost pictorially to corroborate pure immanence.
The earth gave itself its definitive physiognomy. Even the most daring
'Enlighteners' [Aufklärer] still lacked an idea of the length of time that had to be
allowed for processes of sedimentation in order to make it possible to ascribe to
water a creative power that even merely approached that of the earth. In its
competition with the story of the Creation, Vulcanism very quickly went beyond
the bounds of its productivity as a theory. In his first book, the Mineralogical
Observations of 1790, which was suggested by Georg Forster and dedicated to
him, Alexander von Humboldt not only had to deal with a theory of the
influence of basalt on the character and governability of men but also had to
criticize in detail a Professor Witte in Rostock who wanted to explain the
Egyptian pyramids, the ruins of Baalbek and Persepolis, as well as the edifices
of the Incas, as products of lava outpourings and of natural basalt formations.
The way the Vulcanists were able to recognize a crater lake in every pond made
Humboldt hesitate to submit to their theoretical accomplishments; only his stay
on Tenerife in 1799 and his ascent of Vesuvius in 1805 opened his eyes to
volcanic phenomena. According to the account in the fifth volume of his
Kosmos, he made up his mind in favor of the volcanic origin of granite in
1825 1826. On the other side, the intimate connection between Neptunism and
Romanticism cannot be ignored; it was not only Novalis, Baader, and Theodor
Körner, with their (at least metaphorical) attraction

 Page 439

to mining and their aversion to the demiurgic function of fire, who stemmed
from Abraham Gottlob Werner's Geognosie. 7
For Goethe, this was not a question of deciding a disputed question in science.
Instead, he was choosing between two elementary metaphors for the
trustworthiness of the ground beneath our feetor, still more, of the foundation of
our life-world. On the occasion of some other earthquakes he writes to Charlotte
von Stein: "The earth continues to shake. On Candia many places have sunken,
but we, on the ancient sea bottom, intend to remain motionless like the sea
bottom."8Do we not understand better the way Goethe was stirred by granitean
emotion whose literary outcome, in the essay of January 1784, should perhaps be
connected to the planned "Roman über das Weltall" [Romance on the subject of
the universe], and regarding the pathos of which Böttiger reports that Goethe had
found, "in the organization of granite, the divine Trinity, which can only be
explained by means of a mystery."9
The "Treatise on Granite" and the Neptunism of his geology developed the
forms by means of which to deal, by contemplating the ground that has grown
up, with the decline of confidence in the world after Voltaire's mockery of
Leibniz and Pope. Finally, [at this point,] it is no longer speculation to
understand Goethe's view of Napoleon, a quarter of a century after the first
tremor of the necklace affair, in a similar manner, as the elementary experience
of a new political solid ground, however terrible the price that had had to be paid
to achieve this solidity might later appear to him to have been.
When, in 1814, he looks back on the genesis of his "Prometheus," here too the
mythical figure's aesthetic defiance is entirely transformed into a gesture of the
effort to gain an unshakable ground. In looking for "something that would
establish my independence" he found, "as the surest basis for that, my creative
talent." It was the natural gift that belonged entirely to him insofar as ''nothing
external could either favor it or hinder it." It was supposed to have been the idea
of "founding my whole existence on this, mentally," that had transformed itself,
for him, into an image: "I was struck by the old mythological figure of
Prometheus, the Prometheus who, separated from the gods, peopled a world
from his workshop."10
One who then takes a new look at the fragment and the ode becomes aware for
the first time of the way Goethe gradually locates the congruence between his
forms of life and his formula for life. The lines

 Page 440

of the ode, "Musst mir meine Erde / Doch lassen stehn . . . " [My earth you must
leave me / Still standing . . . ], stand out as an expression of the innermost
apprehension of this experience of the world. The dramatic fragment, a year
before, had expressed this even less intuitively, but also in a way that is closer to
the six-year-old's basic idea about the inviolability of the soul. It had now really
come very close to Spinoza's theorem of perseverance:
Wir alle sind ewig.
Meines Anfangs erinnr ich mich nicht,
Zu enden hab ich keinen Beruf
Und seh das Ende nicht.
So bin ich ewig denn ich bin.

[We all are eternal.

I do not remember my beginning;
I have no calling to come to an end,
nor do I see the end.
Thus I am eternal because I am.]

Goethe had read Spinoza for the first time in the spring of 1773. Unexpectedly,
in relation to the history of its influence, the ode, inasmuch as it proceeds less
argumentatively and more metaphorically, is already at a greater distance from
the initial impression made [on Goethe] by Spinoza. 11
The way in which we take the ground on which we stand for granted as part of
our life-world is something that we realize only as a result of its being
endangeredas a result of its negation. When Faust, at the beginning of Part II,
surfacing from the gloom of the Gretchen tragedy, awakens to new life in a
"pleasant neighborhood," "bedded on a flowery sward," he is not only amazed
that he is still, and once again, there, but above all that the ground under his feet
still sustains, and still sustains him. That which is celebrated in the mythical
doctrine of the elements in Pandora as resistance to demiurgic exploitation by
the smiths, "Erde sie steht so fest!" [The earth stands so firm!], is for Faust the
experience of a trustworthiness that overwhelms him in this catastrophe: "Du,
Erde, warst auch diese Nacht beständig" [You, earth, were steadfast during this
night, too.] The fact that it could have been different makes the barely endured
danger into an elemental suspicion, which, however, is retracted as unjust.
But with Pandora and the introductory scene of Faust Part II we are reaching far
ahead, so as to trace out the transition of the telepathic

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earthquake experiences into metaphors of the trustworthiness of the ground.

Already in the first half of the eighties the evidence accumulates that the solidity
of the ground on which he and the preconditions of his existence rest is no
longer something that he takes for granted as part of his 'life-world.'
In 1781the year in which he first mentions the plan for a "novel [or "romance":
Roman] about the universe," a project that is already 'romantic' in that an object
that is at most suited for didactic poems is now recognized as capable of
'romance'Goethe warns Lavater of the "secret arts" of Cagliostro, who had made
a great impression on Lavater, who was always inclined to credulity. Goethe has
"signs, not to say information, of a great mass of lies that skulks in the
darkness." The image with which he tries to influence the unsuspecting Lavater
affirms the easy confusion of what is actually subterranean with what is
supposedly superterrestrial [i.e., supernatural]. ''Believe me, our moral and
political world is undermined by subterranean passages, cellars, and sewersas
great cities usually arethe connection and the circumstances of the inhabitants of
which no one probably thinks about and reflects on; except that to one who has
some knowledge of them, it is much more comprehensible when in one place, on
one occasion, the ground collapses, and in another fumes rise up from a chasm,
and in a third, strange voices are heard." 12Here we learn what a "life-shaping
feeling" ["Lebensgefühl"] is and how it is able to manifest itself in metaphor.
More than three years laterit is the year of the "Treatise on Granite"Goethe
alludes to the political situation and the diminutiveness of the Grand Duchy, in
writing to the duke (who is just then traveling in Switzerland) about the progress
of activity at home, and the possible futility of all of that, in case the larger
framework should be shaken: "Meanwhile we continue with our own antlike
activities, as though there were no such thing as earthquakes."13The nature of
Goethe's basic frame of mind in these years, his sensitivity to the instability of
the ground, his aversion to any approach to chasms, is reflected again a year
before the political earthquake in a letter of Karl Philipp Moritz, author of Anton
Reiser and of the later Götterlehre [Theory of the gods], from Rome on August
9, 1788: "I hear your warning voice when I come upon chasms, and quickly
draw my foot back. . . . "14

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Are there grounds for saying that Goethe ever became aware of the way in which
his telepathic participation in the shakings of the ground made him receptive for
his actual experience of the course of history as the downfall of a world? It is
hardly surprising, any longer, that in his reluctant and contradictory drama
written for the celebration of the vanquishing of NapoleonDes Epimenides
Erwachen [Epimenides's awakening]there are immediately two earthquakes,
which symbolize the two great downfalls in his historical experience. This
doubling of his consciousness of the insecurity of the ground on which
everything stands only becomes conceivable after both his confrontation with
Napoleon (in which he stood his ground) and the collapse of this reliable
formation as well. The symmetry, in the drama, with the downfall of the admired
[Napoleon] consists precisely in the fact that the restoration of happier
circumstances depends on the same principle as the collapse of the security of
former times: on the undermining of the ground. The allegorical figure of Hope
expresses this in the second act:
Im Tiefsten hohl, das Erdreich untergraben . . .
Doch wird der Boden gleich zusammenstürzen
Und jenes Reich des Übermuts verkürzen.
[Undermine the earthly kindgom with cavities at the deepest level. . . .
But the ground will presently collapse
And cut short that empire of arrogance.] 15

In the drama, what had once been only a chasm and a threat becomes the only
prospect of a free future. Here Goethe pronounces one of those apocalyptic
theses that may sound comforting after a successful process of consolidation, but
which, as instructions on how to reach still other futures, make up the fatalistic
content of utopian eschatologies: "The world sees itself destroyedand feels
better."
Part of the symmetry here is the fact that Goethe had already applied the image
of the awakening of Epimenides to himself once before.e It had been
immediately after his return from Italy and while he was feeling alienated from
the reality of Weimar, at a point in time, that is, in which Moritz still thought he
heard the voice warning him away from chasms: " . . . and what I experience
now is just what Epimenides experienced after his awakening."16
This is also the time referred to in what he writes in the Daily and Annual
Notebooks for 1789, where he says that he had hardly had time

 Page 443

to settle himself again in the circumstances and affairs of Weimar "when the
French Revolution unfolded and attracted to itself the attention of the whole
world." But already four years before the landslide, he goes on, the necklace
story had made an "unspeakable impression" on him. Cagliostro's influence,
against which Goethe had warned Lavater, extends directly into the affair, the
imposture, in which it has never been fully clarified who was the manipulator
and who was the dupe. Goethe's reaction to the distant event, by which the
shadow of a dubious affair fell irrevocably on the queen, seems entirely out of
proportion to the event's importance; it is telepathic, as in the case of the
earthquake at Messina. "In the immoral abyss of the city, the court, and the state
that presented itself here, there appeared to me, like specters, the most frightful
consequences, of whose appearance I could not rid myself for a long time. . . . "
Even to Goethe, the strength of his assertion may have made the trustworthiness
of his memory seem doubtful. But there were witnesses who dared to express
themselves about the strangeness of his behavior at that time only now, four
years later, because they had considered it a delicate matter in a different sense.
It had been so far from normal "that friends with whom I had been staying in the
country when the first news of this matter reached us admitted to me only later,
when the Revolution had long since broken out, that to them at the time I had
seemed as though mad." 17
One can no longer blame this behavior on the crazy doings of the genius period.
A life that was made highly artificial by its hermetic isolationin a way that was
made possible only by the "thinness of life in Weimar"18depended entirely on
internal consistency, which he maintained by means of a pedantic regimen of
caring for himself. Goethe reacts exceedingly strongly to the feeling of
impotence with respect to external events. His conception of existence is
directed at the individual's autonomous power to 'make' his life authentically.
His alliances with powerful people, including that with the duke of Weimar, are
always based on not allowing them to become superior powers to himself,
however necessary they are in order to neutralize other factors. There is method
in this. He expressed that himself once, in regard to his relationship with
Schiller, in the sentence (which is fundamental for his self-assertion): "Every
man, with his limitations, has to gradually construct a method for himself,
merely in order to live."19

 Page 444

The term method has to have laid aside its modern and Cartesian intention of
objectivity in order entirely to enter the service of the subjectivity that forms
itself immanently. What had constituted its meaning for theoryits
communicability, without any remainder, from individual to individual and from
generation to generationis negated here. Method is precisely what the fathers
always fail in and what grows out of opposition to them. For Riemer, Goethe
explains this as follows: "Method is what belongs to the subject, since the object
is, after all, familiar. Method cannot be handed down. An individual for whom
the same method is a need must find it for himself. Actually only poets and
artists have method, since what matters to them is to come to terms with
something and to set it in front of themselves." 20His behavior in the days of the
necklace affair is a symptom of [his having] a presentiment of the failure of the
"method" of his first decade in Weimar. It is the autumn during which Goethe
finds his "Prometheus" ode again in Jacobi's Spinoza.
To this sensibility a new epoch announces itself in which it will no longer be
possible to defend and to put into effect one's own life plan. Only when what is
alien in aspect adverts back to what is proper to himwhen Napoleon adverts to
Wertherdoes a new phase begin. From the point of view of the first violent
shaking of his world, one can understand that Goethe began to come to terms
with reality again only when he not only experienced, in his own personal life,
the fateful effects of the heir and executor of the upheaval of which he had a
presentiment then but also saw him in person before him as one who staged and
demonstrated his own "method" and sought to integrate the author of Werther
into it. And Goethe has to write the drama to celebrate the defeat of this patron
of his insatiable needs for security! That drama itself became an expression of
his recovery of his security in the "method" with which he had tried, a quarter of
a century earlier, to overcome, by theatrical means, his first glimpse into the
abyss of the necklace affair. Nothing was more characteristic than Goethe's
initial intention of turning the Cagliostro and necklace affair material into a
comic opera, which the Zurich composer Kayser was to set to music.
It then became one of his weak stage plays, the Gross-Cophta. Almost nothing
of the initial bewilderment can be observed any longer, with the exception of one
single passage in which the original agitation is expressed with the original
words: "What have I heard, and into what

 Page 445

an abyss of treachery and baseness have I looked!" 21These are the words of the
knight, Greville, who had overheard the instigation to the great coup of the girl
who participates in Cagliostro's clairvoyance fraud. I think we see the late
metaphor of the "priming powder for an explosion," which is directed at the
other great shock of the year 1785, in its imaginative context when we combine
it with the image world of the earthquakes, abysses, underminings, and
shipwrecks that relate to this point in time.
In regard to the year 1793, Goethe wrote down an observation that refers to his
brother-in-law Schlosser's doubt about whether in the contemporary world as a
whole, and especially in the German world, there were still problems that could
be dealt with by a scientific society. He, Goethe, had continued to believe in this
firmly. "And thus, for myself at least, I still held fast to these studies, as though
to a beam in a shipwreck; because for two years now I had experienced directly
and personally the fearful collapse of all established conditions."22In this respect
the days that he spends in France, during the campaign, appear to him
retrospectively as "symbols of the world history of the time." People would be
lenient with him, the active, productive spirit, "if the overthrow of everything in
existence terrified him, without his having the slightest idea of what should
result from this that would be better, or indeed merely different." At the end of
1793 he sees his Bürgergeneral [Citizen-general] produced, on his own stage,
successfully. But here the mastering of reality through theater nevertheless
becomes suspect: " . . . the play was repeated, but the originals of these amusing
apparitions were so frightful that even their phantoms had to be alarming."
When Goethe completes Die natürliche Tochter [The natural daughter] in March
1802, it is not only the prudence that achieves political survival through
concealment that he abandons. In contrast to the 'current events' drama of the
plays about the Revolution, this is the mature articulation of a personal
experience of the unsteadiness of the ground, of the ominous reference of natural
to political instability, and of the interchangeability of their threats, as images.
Eugenie, the 'natural daughter' and, as such, a victim of dynastic intrigue, first
comprehends herself as a political figure when the monk pictures the exile to
which she is condemned as a chance both to save herself and to help the
miserable inhabitants of the distant islands, and intends by means of the great
rhetoric of the liability of everything present,

 Page 446

nearby and native, to collapse to make this exile appear to deserve her consent.
Here the terrifying picture of the destruction of Lisbon returns. As they look at
the proud harbor city from which Eugenie is supposed to leave her country
forever, he puts before her eyes the nocturnal vision of this destruction: The loss
by which she is threatened as a result of an expulsion that has been decreed by
human beings only affects what can be annihilated at any moment by nature.
What seems unshakable, as though established and ordered for eternity, is
undermined, in its foundations, by its invalidity. Only in a nocturnal
presentiment is it possible to perceive how the ground is already unsteady and
how what appears splendid in the daytime is capable of crumbling into rubble.
The preaching monk is confident of the power of his rhetorical images to
impress. He does not even consider it necessary to apply them specifically to the
situation of the prince's daughter who seeks his advice. He lets the doom speak
for itself and, thinking that he has already prevailed over her, only urges her to
hasten her departure. But the equivalence of the imagesof the fearsomeness of
nature, on the one hand, and political fate, on the otherinsidiously asserts itself.
The rhetoric is reversible: One thing can become a metaphor for the other.
Eugenie has gathered, for herself, a different conclusion: that the political
structure out of which and by which she is supposed to be expelled is also liable
to collapse. In the monk's vision of the earthquake she has before her something
that does not let her hesitate a moment before refusing the (unexpectedly useful)
advice to depart. What until then had appeared impossible and intolerableto
withdraw into the protection of a bourgeois marriage, which she has been
offered, and to put her confidence in the threatened state of what threatens heris
now the conclusion she draws. It is not a decision in favor of a political
underground, but rather of a nonpolitical interim.
Eugenie sets up, associatively, the same relation between tellurian and political
conditions that Goethe had experienced in his own case between Lisbon and
Messina, on the one hand, and the necklace affair and the Revolution, on the
other. For Eugenie, too, memories are suddenly present, memories of
admonishing and threatening references to the instability of political
circumstances. What comes to her from her own early times matches, almost to a
hair, what the monk has just presented to her as the nightmare of the threatening
collapse of her world, so as to ease her departure for another one:

 Page 447
Diesera Reiche droht
Ein jäher Umsturz. Die zum grossen Leben
Gefugten Elemente wollen sich
Nicht wechselseitig mehr mit Liebeskraft
Zu stets erneuter Einigkeit umfangen.

[A sudden downfall threatens this kingdom. The elements that are

fitted together into a great life no longer want to embrace one another
with the power of love so as to produce continually renewed unity.] 23

When Eugenie withdraws into the narrow world of the bourgeois household, she
finds a new set of metaphors for the permanence of the ground, which is no
longer the dubious ground on which the state is constructed but rather the
natural, undisturbed [der gewachsene] ground of the homeland, which offers
itself as a basis on which to survive in a latent state:
Nun bist du, Boden meines Vaterlandes,
Mir erst ein Heiligtum, nun fühl ich erst
Den dringenden Beruf, reich anzuklammern.

[Now for the first time you are a sanctuary for me, ground of my
fatherland; now for the first time I feel an urgent calling to fasten
myself (to you).]

When Goethe wrote this he did not yet know that when everything solid was
reeling he could encounter still another form of stabilizing power, unexpectedly
and contrary to the outcome of the Natürliche Tochter: political power itself in
the form of the Corsican emperor. For Ludwig Börne, who sees this as
contemptible, Goethe will be the "fool for stability." And as for his early
turnings, he himself described, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, how in the short
phase in which he drew near to Pietism faith had appeared to him as "a great
feeling of security in regard to both the present and the future . . . founded on
confidence in an immense, supremely powerful, and inscrutable being," the offer
of which he was unable to avail himself only because the dogmatic content both
in the conversations between Lavater and the pious ladies and in Basedow's
wrangling repelled him.24
Across half a century, the terrifying image of Lisbon breaks through again in the
Natürliche Tochter. But the gesture of self-assertion has changed. The boy's
metaphysical trump with the guarantee of im-

 Page 448

mortality no longer takes the trick any more than the defiance of the aesthetic
son of the gods, "Musst mir meine Erde / Doch lassen stehn" [My earth you must
leave me / Still standing]. Now everything culminates in the posture that the poet
expresses as the "urgent calling to fasten myself [to something]." The strength
necessary for survival changes into the capacity for resignation, for shortening
the front that is exposed to collision with reality. When Napoleon's downfall
brings the second earthquake, which could provide new room for surviving self-
assertion, it is too late; the projection of the Prometheus idea onto the emperor
makes it impossible to derive self-gain from his catastrophe. Instead, it
completes [Goethe's] resignation. Even the demon against whom the poet was
able to hold his own had not been a match for God, for fate, in the place of
which he had wanted to put politicsindeed, himself, as politics.
The double earthquake in Epimenides is the last answer to the boy's theodicy
question that remains in an image: That which destroys is already secretly the
creative. The temple priest who sleeps through the downfall is no longer the
creative Titan himself, but only the onlooker of higher powers, which do not
allow the finality of a ruin to be dictated for them. Epimenides is an onlooker
like the poet. In 1806 he had written to Zelter in Jena that in the bad days, which
he had come through without great harm, it had been no trouble for him to take
an interest in public business; "in that way I could abide in my cell and ponder
my innermost concerns." 25
Zelter, ten years younger than himself, is the first other person who has
something of Prometheus in himwho is deemed worthy to take it up, once
Goethe had rid himself of it as something unmanageable and was now inclined
to honor it in other people: "There is really something Promethean in your way
of existing, which I can only gaze at in astonishment and admire. While you bear
coolly and with composure what can hardly be born, and make plans for future
satisfying and creative activity, I have behaved like one who has already
departed across the Cocytus and has had at least a sip of the waters of
Lethe."26Far back lies the diary entry in which Goethe designated with the
Titanic role even what he had to suffer under the "terrible climate": "Suffered
like Prometheus."27What he had in view was no longer the sculptor-god but
instead, at least for a moment, the sufferer on the crag of the Caucasus. The same
god partook of both the former and the latter greatness.

 Page 449

An occasion to take a position with respect to the frivolous use of the predicate
"a god" presents itself at the beginning of 1808. According to Riemer's report,
Goethe had heard that people called him a godlike man. His response is
intentionally paradoxical: "Ich habe den Teufel vom Güttlichen!" [Roughly: "To
the devil with godlikeness!"]. Is that an abdication? Is he no longer able to be a
god, or does he no longer want to be one? The reason that Goethe gives,
according to Riemer, points toward the experience of powerlessness, but also
toward vexation with the role of an Olympian. It is no help to him, he says, when
people call him that but still do what they like, even deceive him. People only
use that term for someone who lets them have their own way. The supposed god,
he says, is the dupe: What he yields from his absoluteness, the others take in
order to be absolute too. The god creates the inducement for others to want to be
gods too, so as to oppose him. It is a role that is made futile by itself. 28
One cannot imagine this piece of dialectic being played between Goethe and
Riemer without their remembering the saying that they had found and made a
fixed one, between them, the year before, on the day of the inspection of the
battlefield of Jena. Goethe's abdication of the attribute of godlikeness on this
February 1, 1808, clearly stands in the context of a crisis that developed around
the mythical diagram of the difficulty of being a god. The early pathos of the
aesthetic Titan had been based on the implication that a god could be a match for
a god, as Prometheus was for Zeus. In contrast to that, the "extraordinary saying"
will become the ultimate formula of resignation as soon as one reads it in the
contrary-to-fact mood of melancholy: Only a god could have been a match for a
god.
Goethe probably hardly went that far, in 1808, in applying the saying to himself.
He protests against being called a godlike man because people did this only to
provide an occasion for testing their own self-will. One will not have to imagine
the horizon of this experience as too extensive. The little world of the theater
often sufficed Goethe as a representative sample of the great world. In
September 1807 the theater in Weimar had been opened again with the "Vorspiel
auf dem Theater" [Prologue on the stage] that had been added to Faust. One can
read this prologue, which originated after 1800, as a piece of the poet's definitive
de-Prometheanization, pulled this way and that between the demands of the
world, of himself, and of his material.
 Wet sichert den Olymp? vereinet Götter?

 Page 450
Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter oftenbart!

[Who safeguards Olympus and unites the gods?

The power of man, revealed in the poet!]

That is only ironical pathos now, on the losing side in the force field of the
prologue, which is ruled by the 'realism' of the practitioners:
Was träumet Ihr auf Eurer Dichterhöhe?
Was macht ein voiles Hans Euch froh?
Beseht die Gönner in der Nähe!
Halb sind sie kalt, halb sind sie roh.

[What are you dreaming in lofty poet-land? What gives a crowded

house delight? Observe the patrons near at hand! Half are cold; half
are not too bright.]

In the language of Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, the unshakability of the seat of
the gods was the contrasting image to the instability of the earth; now it is
employed ironically in order to reduce to absurdity the self-praise of the poet,
who certifies that human power, as displayed in poets, safeguards Olympus and
unites the gods. Only the Clownf knows the fitting answer to this: "So braucht
sie denn, die schönen Kräfte . . . " [Well use them, then, these marvelous
powers . . . ].
Goethe's protest against the "godlike man," in 1808, refers back to the setting of
Sturm und Drang, in which such terms as gods, gigantic spirits, demons, and
devils had been just as cheap as they were unspecific and mutually
interchangeable. In the wild intensifications of this language every means was
quickly used up, and divinity did not need to be taken more seriously than
demonhood. Stolberg reports in June 1776, from Weimar, that Goethe spoke of
those who do not bow down before the Christian truths as "gigantic spirits": "If
he exuberates in it further, this obstinate defiance will make his heart cold, too."
29Stolberg, who, with his brother, had witnessed Goethe's arrival in Weimar on
November 26, 1775, and who was facing a decision whether to move there
himself as a chamberlain, expressed agreement, in December 1776, with the
severe warnings that Klopstock had expressed to Goethe regarding his doings in
Weimar. The correspondence went from hand to hand. Klopstock feared that
Goethe would influence the duke toward wildness, with his all too 'geniuslike'
mode of life, by which he thought the opportunity for an alliance between
princes and men of learning was put at risk. Goethe's answer had been rude, and

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Klopstock's final word a termination of their friendship. 30Stolberg then writes

to him that Goethe deserves to lose his friendship. All of this has to do with the
exaggeration of his consciousness of himself and with his self-definition of a
role that Stolberg describes as follows: ''He is stubborn in the highest degree, and
his inflexibility, which he would gladly assert, if it were possible, against God,
has already made me tremble for him often. God, what a mixture, with the head
of a Titan against his God, and then giddy with the favor of a duke."31All the
linguistic elements of the Promethean self-conception and self-presentation
become evident to the observer of Goethe's first appearance in Weimar. And not
only to himfor a small world, this is the arena of an event from which Klopstock
is not the only one to expect great things: the final patronage of the spirit by
power.
Charlotte von Stein hesitates as to how she should describe the impression made
by the new figure in the world of Weimar. Still, the letter in which she does that
is, for the first time, written in German, by her own admission under the
influence of this same Goethe. The fact that he has been able to accomplish that
causes her to remark, uneasily, " . . . what else do you suppose he will do to
me?" So she has difficulties with the language, and when she writes that she is
getting along "wonderfully" ["wunderbar"] with Goethe, one can read it also (or
instead) as "strangely" ["wunderlich"]. The more a person can grasp, the darker
and more shocking the whole becomes for that person and the more likely he is
to lose the path of composure. This is approximately what she writes, when one
translates her German into German German. And further: All of this reminds her
of the fall of the angels, because "the angels who fell were certainly more
intelligent than the others . . . . "32The confusing ambiguity that she cannot
comprehend morally even impels her to say that she now calls him "my saint,
and besides he has become invisible to medisappeared, some days agoand lives
in the earth, five miles from here, in mines."
Goethe sees himself no differently when he has passed one of his tests of his
fortune, an assault on what, if it was not impossible, had certainly appeared
impossible: the ascent of the Brocken in the winter. Stylizing his audacity, he
writes (only in August 1778) to Merck that the responsible forester had been
beside himself with amazement "because, living for many years at its foot, he
had always thought it impossible." To Charlotte he writes immediately and from
the spot: "It is after all impossible to say with one's lips what has happened to

 Page 452

me. . . . God deals with me as with his old saints, and I don't know why it
happens to me." He has gained the desired "sign of attachment" for the "more
than motherly guidance of my wishes," has made his existence ''symbolic" in one
more respect, has been on the summit"although for eight days now everyone has
assured me that it is impossible." There is a touch of blasphemy in this going to
the summit, in the old tradition of what happens on mountains, because up there
he had "offered the dearest thanks to my God on the devil's altar." A year later
Goethe still celebrates the date and asks Charlotte to do so with him: "A year ago
at this hour I was on the Brocken and asked the spirit of heaven for much that
has now been fulfilled." 33
What he reports to Frau von Stein two years later still about his roamings with
the duke is no longer a test of his fortune or the exaltation of a sign, but it is
nevertheless clothed in the secularized language of equating oneself to God:
" . . . we climbed, without being either devils or Sons of God, on high
mountains, and to the pinnacle of the temple, there to gaze on the kingdoms of
the world and their toil and the danger of plunging down all at once."34When,
then, in the subsequent text of the letter an association with the biblical
Transfiguration is added to the association with the Temptation, this is enough to
put the excess of blasphemousness into the ironical category of the merely
linguistic grazing of limits.
In the language of the timeor better, of the agitated people of the
timeconfrontation with what they had overcome, even if it was only what they
thought they had overcome, was sought after. In that connection the difference
between the tempter and those who are tempted is not so important, and to say of
a particular human figure that it was a god, was godlike, was a saint, or that it
was a devil, demonic, a fallen angel, is an insignificant distinction. By
destroying their seriousness, the Enlightenment set these terms free for
aesthetics, even if it tried, too, to leave unimpaired, and to carry along with it,
their daring quality. Gleim, who later became the proverbially "old Gleim,"
reports from a visit in Weimar at the end of June 1777 what he apprehended at
an evening gathering whose hostess was Duchess Amalie. People read aloud
from the newest Cöttingen Musen-Almanach [Muses' almanac]; Goethe, too,
whom Gleim at first did not recognize, participated. Here, Gleim undergoes an
experience of evidence: "But suddenly it was as though the Satan of high spirits
took the reader by the scruff of the neck, and I thought I saw the wild huntsman

 Page 453

before me in bodily form. He read poems that were not in the Almanac at all, he
changed into every possible tone and manner. . . . 'That is either Goethe or the
devil!' I cried to Wieland, who sat opposite me at the table. 'Both,' the latter
replied. . . . " 35At almost the same time, in his poem "An Psyche" [To Psychel,
Wieland had granted Goethe all the attributes of a creative god:
Er schafft,
Mit wahrer, möchtiger Schöpferkraft
Erschafft er Menschen; sie atmen, sie streben!
In ihren innersten Fasern ist Leben!

[He produceswith true, potent creative power he produces men;

they breathe, they strive! In their innermost fibers is life!]36

When devil and god blend with one another in this way, the "fixed idea" of this
life figure should not be forgotten: Functionally, Prometheus is identical with
Lucifer. Both are bringers of light in disobedience to the ruling god.
The arrogance without which the attitude of distance in the later reversion to this
figure would not be intelligible is of the 'test-of-fortune' type: All provocations
directed 'upward' serve to make sure of what remains inviolable. The earth, the
hut, the hearththese were the ode's key words for the incontestable possessions
that the ode's Prometheus wanted both to hold up before Zeus and to know were
withheld from his power. Fire is obvious; earth can be understood in terms of the
earthquake trauma. Something must still be said regarding the hut. We know
approximately how Goethe will have seen it, because as early as November 1772
Prometheus's name appears at the very end of his first, anonymously published
pamphlet, Von deutscher Baukunst [On German architecture]. The master
builder of the Strasbourg cathedral, Erwin of Steinbach, is not only compared to
the Titanhe surpasses him by conducting the happiness of the gods down to the
earth, by mediating, with beauty, between gods and men. It is an aesthetic
Prometheus, but not yet, on that account, a rebellious onemore nearly
reconciling.
The relation between this pamphlet and the ode, which is written two years later,
follows from the fact that in Prometheus's hut the prototype of the Gothic
cathedral is presented. The eulogy of Erwin of Steinbach is a polemic against the
French Jesuit Logier's treatise, Essai sur l'architecture [Essay on architecture],
of 1753 1755, which, in

 Page 454

the German translation of 1768, Versuch über den Baukunst, was in Goethe's
father's library. Logier defends classicism with the argument that it exhibits the
original natural characterthat the classical form of the pedimented hall supported
by pillars can be derived from the simplest form of construction, from the leafy
hut made of four corner posts and a gable roof of branches placed on top of
them.
Where culture can be criticized or legitimated by reference to the original state,
such constructions are not contemptible. No more, then, is the polemic against
them, as conducted by Goethe. What is original, he says, is the tentlike hut that
is composed of crossed poles in front and behind, with a ridgepole connecting
them. This, he says, is the original form of the Gothic pointed arch and vault that
are perfected in Strasbourg.
This dispute, of whose means of argument Goethe himself speaks
contemptuously as "protoplastic fairy tales," would be less interesting if it did
not allow us to infer the kind of imagination that will lead Goethe to have
Prometheus point to his hut, in the ode. It does so because the hut's inviolability
consists in the original simplicity of its organic shape [natürliche Wuchsform].
Being fully conversant with its pattern makes it possible, after every burst of bad
weather, to renew one's, shelter in a moment, not to speak at all of its
insensitivity to earthquakes. It is the same as with fire, whose theft and
possession means simply being able to ignite it. Alliance with the elements, with
elementary form, makes one invulnerable. If one thinks of the domestication of
comets and of lightning, which the century of the Enlightenment saw as the signs
of its success, then the setback that was involved in becoming conscious of the
ungovernability of the uncertainty that was most inimical to man, the uncertainty
of the ground, also becomes evident. The occurrence in Lisbon had, in the last
analysis, favored Rousseau, who also stands behind the archetype, here, of the
simple hut and its indestructibility. Thus Prometheus consolidates reason's
defiance on the lowest level, the level of survival. This was the immortality that
the boy's thoughts had turned to after the sermon about Lisbon, only now
conceived entirely in terms of earthly materiality.
Of course, between Prometheus's original hut and the Gothic cathedral a bridge
was necessary, insofar as the hut was only a work of the bitterest necessity,
whereas the cathedral was a work of the highest flight of invention, and the new
consciousness of aesthetic

 Page 455

originality would hardly want to admit the derivation of the one from the other.
But the singer of Erwin of Steinbach's praises sees in the strict dissociation of the
necessary from the beautiful the danger that art will be devalued to a mere
ornament of life, which will have to lose the status as beyond question that
Goethe expresses with the metaphor of God's tree. "They want to make you
believe that the fine arts arose from the inclination that we are supposed to have
to beautify the things around us. That is not true!" The genius, who is productive
nature itself, does not decorate the things that had already long been in use;
instead he produces, at the same time as the means, the form as well: With the
first hut he already produces the arch and the vault. He does not oppose a
different world to the world of fear and care; instead, from what fear and care
have produced perforce, he takes the material that he subjects to further shaping.
"Art fashions for a long time before it is beautiful, and yet it is then true, great
art, indeed often truer and greater than beautiful art itself. For man has a shaping
nature that immediately manifests itself in action when his existence is secured.
As soon as he has nothing to worry about and to fear, the demigod, active in his
repose, reaches about for material into which to breathe his spirit. . . . " 37If
Goethe had already known the Prometheus myth more accurately when he wrote
this, it would have become evident to him at this point that with the means of
self-preservation, Prometheus had given man the freedom in which to develop
further a world of forms that had been a product of mere necessity, that is, to
develop the hut into a cathedral. But the fundamental idea of the ode, despite its
new attitude of defiance, will still be the pointing to his hut and hearth.
Prometheus, the potter who makes man, in the last verse of the ode is only the
logical consequence of the Prometheus who has become certain of his
inviolability, with his earth, hut, and hearth, in the first verse.
Now that we have excavated the final stratum in which the earliest appearance of
Prometheus in Goethe's works can be grasped, it is not surprising that even
before the fleeting connection of the Titan with Erwin of Steinbach,
accomplished only in the last line, a different association had appeared: with
Shakespeare. For if the idea of organic naturalness [Naturwüchsigkeit] could be
played off against classicism in the archetypal instance of the Gothic cathedral,
Shakespeare was the corresponding literary case. What Goetheattempting to
integrate the arrogance of creativity into the evidence of what is naturalsays

 Page 456

about the impression made by the Gothic cathedral holds in exactly the same
way for Shakespeare. Further, he had the "same fate as the master builder who
piled up mountains into the clouds," the fate of being forgotten among men. And
Goethe immediately continues this idea with the legitimating equation of the
human product and the product of growth: "To few was it given to beget a Babel
idea in their soul, entire, great, and necessarily beautiful down to the smallest
part, like trees of god."
In the address, "Zum Schäkespears Tag" [For Shakespeare's day], that Goethe
had given after his return from Strasbourg and his application for admission to
the bar in Frankfurt, in honor of Shakespeare's name day, on October 14, 1771,
Shakespeare's naturalness was contrasted to the classicism of tragedy, with its
'unities,' in the same way that, a year later, the Steinbach eulogy confronted the
classicist ideal of the columned hall with the principle of the Gothic. The type of
perception, proceeding by means of contrast, is the same. Into this presentation
of contrast there falls, for the first time, the name of Prometheus.
Common to Shakespeare and Erwin of Steinbach is the fact that the work of art
is not produced according to a rule that is prior to it, but rather, in being
produced, it makes the rule evident, even if in fact there happens to be no other
work of its kind. Shakespeare, Goethe says, had gone back to the principle of
creation in order to make his people appear entirely as nature. It is not a matter
of course that Prometheus should make an appearance just here. Because the
myth leaves open the relation between the creations of his workshop and the
prior givens and prescriptions of an already existing nature, Goethe, in the ode,
intensifying the blasphemy by the post-Olympian reference, will make
Prometheus produce men in his own image: "a race to be like me. . . . " The
ancient myth presupposes an incapacity of the ceramic creatures for life: a
discord between the way they are equipped and the preconditions set by a nature
that they do not belong to. The Shakespeare of the name-day addresswho, like
Erwin of Steinbach later on, is an aesthetic competitor of Prometheusalso has to
surpass Prometheus's performance, which Goethe had before him, in an image
modeled on those handed down from antiquity, as composed of diminutive little
men, in the Titanic potter's worship: "He vied with Prometheus, copying his
men, in every feature, only on a colossal scale: That is why we fail to recognize
them as our

 Page 457

brothers; and then he animates them all with the breath of his spirit, he speaks in
each of them, and we recognize their kinship to us." 38
So this Prometheus is not in the difficult position of being unable to inspire his
terra-cotta creatures with life without the help of the daughter of Zeus; here
already, he operates with the breath of his own spirit, in the manner of the
biblical molder of man. The reference to Prometheus, as a figure of
nonobligatory originality, reinforces the act of recklessness that is accomplished
by naming Shakespeare, contrary to the taste of the time, a time that Goethe sees
as having lost the capacity even merely of judging from the point of view of and
in accordance with naturebecause "from youth onward we feel everything
constricted and affected, in ourselves, and see it so in others." Shakespeare is the
answer to the Rococo, the fulfillment of the cry for nature, of which his people
are made. For the corrupt taste of the present time needs nothing less than
"almost a new Creation," in order to liberate itself from its eclipse. There is a
need for a new Prometheus.
It is not only the day of the creation of man by Prometheus, which can be
repeated aesthetically, that is mythical. The experience of access to such
originality is also mythical. The poet who was to contribute more than any other
to allowing the Enlightenment to miscarry and making possible the greatest
accomplishment of Romanticismwhich was the translation of his worksgis
perceived in a way that is predefined by the metaphor of light. The first pages of
Shakespeare affected him, Goethe says in celebration, like the renewed eyesight
of one who was born blind: "I knew, I felt most vividly that my existence had
been expanded by an infinity; everything was new to me, unfamiliar, and the
light, which I was not used to, made my eyes hurt." Shakespeare is the
Prometheus who champions nature in dramatic poetry against classical
correctness, of which Goethe says here that the French model instances are
"parodies of themselves." What he does not notice is the possibility of seeing
this opposition as prefigured in Prometheus's opposition to Zeus. The
Prometheus of the Shakespeare address, just like the Prometheus of the eulogy
of Erwin of Steinbach, is not yet a figure of the conflict of gods, but only of the
possibility of one demiurge surpassing another, aesthetically.
Goethe's little ritual was the investiture of Shakespeare for a new aesthetic self-
understanding, the discovery of a virulence that had scarcely announced itself
when Voltaire smuggled Shakespeare's plays,

 Page 458

as contraband, onto the Continent on his return from England in 1728, without
suspecting how definitively they would finish off his own reputation as a
dramatic poet. It is noteworthy in regard to the German stage, and to Goethe's
own relation to his youthful self-comprehension, that he forgot this piece, too, of
his early productions connected with the name "Prometheus." In his memoirs he
makes no mention not only of the text but of the celebration as well. He did not
include the address in his editions of his works; in fact he no longer even
possessed it. For the Goethe who was so open to the ominous, there would no
doubt have been matter for serious reflection in the fact that the Shakespeare
address was preserved for posterity (though not similarly exposed to public
scrutiny) by the same Jacobi who had preserved and brought to light the
"Prometheus" ode. Ernst Beutler conjectures that Goethe had given Jacobi a
copy of the address, in his own handwriting, in 1774, no doubt at least partly
because Herder had published his Shakespeare essay in the journal Von
deutscher Art und Kunst [On German manners and art] in 1773. The address was
printed for the first time in 1854.
That the celebration of Shakespeare's name day really was a ritual, and was not
first invented by Goethe to go with the text, we know from his father's account
book. Here, there is an entry for food and musicians for the Dies onomasticus
Schakspear [Shakespeare's name day]. The father's library also contained the
first volume of Wieland's translation of Shakespeare of 1762, with an insert that
was a handwritten extract from the Mercure de France of December 1769,
describing the first English Shakespeare celebration in Stratford in this same
year. With this celebration Shakespeare had been posthumously elevated to the
status of honorary citizen of Stratford.
The entry for the name-day ritual in the father's bookkeeping brings us up short.
For the son who was just then applying for entrance to the bar may, with this
address, have strengthened his father's doubts about whether the expenditure for
banquet and music might not have encouraged the wrong tendency. A spotlight
falls on the antagonism that will be reflected in the conflict of gods in the
Prometheus texts. Because for the author of the dramatic fragment and the ode,
Prometheus is also, and not least, a sonthe son of Zeus.
Since Hesiod's Theogony, and with the authority of the mythologist Diodorus
Siculus, who became predominant in the tradition, the Titan, Iapetus, had been
Prometheus's father. But a variant existed in which

 Page 459

Zeus was his father. Zeus was credited, in any case, with a large number of
lapses, so that one more, with the daughter of Oceanus, mattered little. There are
good allegorical reasons for this genealogy, which have to do with the name
"Prometheus."h A Prometheus story involving 'forethought' was only acceptable,
when allegory was systematized, if it became an appendix to Zeus's 'providence,'
and thus also his offspring. Goethe did not yet know anything about this,
because this version in particular was not included in Hederich's lexicon.
Although at the end of the article the "interpretation from another quarter" is
passed on, that some people understood Prometheus allegorically as the divine
Providence ''by which the first men and everything were created," no
genealogical displacement is noted as being involved in this. In order to grasp
his conflict through the [Prometheus] configuration, all that Goethe needed was
the license of ambiguity.
At most, what he would have been able to look up was the singular version in
Bayle's Dictionnaire, where Bayle declared the best tradition to be the one
according to which Prometheus was the product of a lapse on the part of Hera,
with the giant Eurymedon, and Zeus had only used the theft of fire as an
occasion to rid himself of the bastard who was a disgrace for that reason.
Possibly the older Goethe could have found charms in such a constellation.
It would be an exaggeration to want to find enmity in Goethe's relationship to his
father. But even as aesthetic self-proclamations tend to be counterpositionsart
against art (potentially), god against godso also Goethe's resolution to be a poet
is formed in opposition to the realism, the life plan, the sober pedantry, and (in
spite of the entry for the Shakespeare day) in opposition to the account book of
his father. Above all, this: His father did not accept him as an awakening genius,
an artist-god, a demiurge-Titan. This became evident in his resistance to the
enticement of his son to go to the court at Weimar.
When the contact with the heir to the prince's position had come about, in
Frankfurt, the father's mistrust of all contact with the world of [princes'] courts
came to light. As a Frankfurter, he always had in his hand the trump card of the
memory of what had, after all, happened in this town to Voltaire during his flight
from the king of Prussia. In no way could drawing near to "the great ones"
please Goethe's father, "because, in accordance with his Imperialisti convictions,
he had always kept his distance from the 'great ones.'"

 Page 460

Now, for the way the father overtakes the son, in the dimension of his lifetime,
there is incomparable 'pregnance' in the way in which he makes use of popular
aphoristic wisdom to support his rooted aversion to courtly affairs. An instance
is the (not incidentally, mythological) dictum that one who keeps his distance
from Jupiter also stays out of reach of his lightning bolts: "Procul a Jove procul a
fulmine." Alongside this, Goethe also informs us of the method he used to
defend himself against his father; it is precisely the method of the free variation
of such aphorisms, extending as far as their parody and inversiona method that
will be an indispensable presupposition for our hypothesis that he invented the
"extraordinary saying."
The procedure he used in defending himself against his father, before his
departure for Weimar, must have seemed important enough to Goethe even as he
grew olderimportant both in relation to his self-discovery and no doubt also as a
process that would be fruitful in the futurethat in the fifteenth book of Dichtung
und Wahrheit he shows us, by a collection of examples, how, in each case, he
demonstrated the reversibility of the meaning of these sayings. Thus the
perspective of a view of the world 'from below' was confronted with its opposite
pole "when, imagining something great for ourselves, we also chose to take the
part of the great." The ways of reading the "extraordinary saying" [i.e., part IV,
chapter 4] will show how close it is, not only in style but also in its aspect as a
recommendation of resignation, to his father's unforgotten warning. When the
historian Heinrich Luden visits him on December 13, 1813, in order to explain to
him the plan for a Teutscher Journal [German journal] directed against
Napoleon, Goethe adjures him almost with his father's admonitions "to let the
world take its course and not to meddle with the quarrels of kings, in which after
all your voice and mine will never be listened to.'' 39
On the occasion of Wieland's review of Götz, after the ill feeling caused by
Götter, Helen und Widand,j Goethe indirectly brought out the way in which his
father's sayings stood in his way. According to Johanna Fahlmer's account, he
shows her the pages of the Merkur; that, he says, was what annoyed him so
about Wieland and provoked him to give vent to his feelings against him:
"Because the tone. . . . Yes, that's it! That's it! That is exactly how my father
speaks. . . . My father's tone! That is just what enraged me."40His father's tone:
On the very day of his departure from Frankfurt, October 30, 1775, Goethe

 Page 461

notes down, when his recollection could not be sharper, what his father had
conveyed to him as his last word, "as a parting warning for the future"namely,
the apocalyptic threat, associated with 'immediate expectation,' from the Gospel
according to Matthew: "Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on
the Sabbath day." Not without malice, the just-escaped Goethe adds that this was
said while his father "was still in bed.'' 41
But it is not only the tone. His father's doubts about 'genius' and about
intercourse with the great had stood in the way of his living the aesthetic life to
the full. And there father and God become fused as the embodiment of the single
resistance with which he is already dealing when he detaches himself from his
Pietistic phase with the consciousness that this is an act that goes against the will
of a divinity who will not allow him to come to himself. To quote once more
what he had written to Langer, his friend from his studies in Leipzig, in January
1769: "It seems that God does not want me to become a writer." The fact that he
had asserted himself against that God made him able to identify himself with
Prometheus and to work up his situation as a drama "in defiance of God and
men." This is where the formula belongs with which, in the Prometheus
fragment, the son rejects his father's emissary and his will:
Ich will nicht . . . Ihr Wille! Gegen meinen!
Eins gegen eins!
Mich dünckt es hebt sich.

[I do not want . . . your will! Against mine!

One against one!
It seems to me that it cancels out.]

That is, after all, already the principle in accordance with which the
"extraordinary saying" is constructedthe first sign of its inexorable emergence.
The tone of the father-God belongs to the language in which pregiven life forms
and concepts of existence are offereda finished world into which to enter and
take one's place, just as the world of the nature god Zeus is a completed world,
and if one molds additional creatures to add to it, that has to be rebellion. The
demiurge, Prometheus, can only see the world as a desert, as materia bruta
[brute matter], as the scene of a single colossal exertion, by which to make a
world, for the first time, from what is almost nothing. So Goethe

feels, as he works up the defiance of his situation: "What it costs to sink wells in the desert
and to build a hut. . . . " 42
But the demiurge in the desert, in the realm of the un-pre-given, with his hut and his spring, is
an illusion, not a possible metaphor for Goethe's actual course. The latter is determined by
what his father had refused, by the proximity of the great, by the screened-off realm of the
court, by the artificiality of the sphere constituted by Weimar. Consequently, in his late
recollection the Promethean attitude does stand immediately alongside the alliance with
Weimar, as a transition from one world to another one. Only the other world was disposed to
furnish and to tolerate the degree of unreality that was necessary in order to be Prometheus
without defiance, to be an author without the conflict of the gods. In Goethe's encounter with
the demonic man, finally, the negation of his father's bourgeois wisdomthat one should keep
one's distance from Jupiter and his lightningis completed.
But then, in Rome, Goethe normalized his relationship to Jupiter. At the Pyramid of Cestius
he begged for patiencethe Titan carried out a subtle and suspended sort of capitulation.
Dulde mich, Jupiter, hier, und Hermes führe mich später An Cestius' Mal vorbei, leise zum Orkus hinab.

[Put up with me here, Jupiter, and later let Hermes lead me quietly down, past Cestius' pyramid, to the underworld.]

This is the conclusion, in the seventh "Roman Elegy," of the supplicating conversation with
Jupiter Xenius. From this point of view Titanic defiance shows itself as an error proper to the
northern world, in which Jupiter does not present himself in his abundance and in whichsince
he appears as a god who is too poor in his self-expenditurehe challenges the aesthetic will to
opposition. But here, where no wells need to be sunk in the desert, there is nothing left for the
Titan's defiance to do, and it is transformed into contemplation's ease of mind. Everything is
already present as the other's nature; the world is not "colorless, shapeless,"l not a world to
which a "discontented spirit" would have to oppose something of its own. And this hospitable
Jupiter is explicitly the ''father" who calls back, as though he is still dealing with Prometheus's
presumption: "Dichter! wohin versteigest du dich?" [Poet! where do you think you are
climbing?].m In February 1788, during the Roman carnival, Goethe sketched the Pyramid of

 Page 463

Cestius and expressed the wish to be buried there. For his son, the wish was to
be fulfilled.
The appeal to Jupiter Xenius, at the Pyramid of Cestius, is a recantation of
Goethe's original Prometheus conception. But it is not his final word on it. From
the perspective of this point in his life, one can understand what the recasting of
the myth in his Pandora will mean. It will be one of the reversals that Goethe
was so fond of since the time of his battle of proverbs with his father:
Prometheus is a Titan but a father nevertheless, Prometheus in the role of a
father, Prometheus without an opposite pole to defy. Thus the work of the
coincidentia oppositorum [coincidence of opposites] is carried out on the myth
itself. Only because Prometheus is the father of Philerus does he remain a figure
of hope for things to come, although he belongs to a dull demiurgic prior world
of caves and fire. The figure is withdrawn from the possibility of identification
with the poet. It represents conditions and circumstances that, in their relation to
elementary needs, are prior to any aesthetic freedom. Prometheus is no longer
the inventor of the original hut, in the form of which the Gothic cathedral was
prefigured; his sphere is shifted into the hollow places of the earth, where the
demiurges who serve him forge the tools of the history whose course had come
so close to Goethe since his invocation of Jupiter at the Pyramid of Cestius. Its
closest approach was impending for him.

Translator's Notes
a. In the original, these two sentences lack the concrete references to "the free
agent" that I have inserted in square brackets. By their construction, which is
hardly acceptable in English, they emphasize the obscurity of just what this
locus of complete responsibility, outside the causal web of nature, is.
b. The "Paralogisms of Pure Reason," in the Critique of Pure Reason A 341 405,
B 399 432, are a critique of the idea of the subject as a (possibly permanent)
substance.
c. This and the following quote are from Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Scheibe,
vol. 1, p. 527.
d. These prose translations of "Grenzen der Menschheit" are from David Luke,
Goethe (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964) pp. 59 61. The paraphrases of the
poem, in this paragraph, are also based on Luke's translation.
e. Epimenides was a Cretan who was said to have slept for fifty-seven years.
f. The Clown is the third character in the "Prologue on the Stage," together with
the Director and the Poet.

 Page 464

g. The great German translations of Shakespeare, by August Wilhelm Schlegel

and Ludwig Tieck, were made initially between 1797 and 1810 and published
between 1825 and 1833.
h. Prometheus means "forethought."
i. Reichsbürgerlich refers to the feeling of allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire,
as opposed to the local principalities.
j. Götz von Berlichingen (1773), Goethe's famous early play. "Götter, Helden
und Wieland" [Gods, heroes and Wieland] (1773) was a satire on Wieland's role
as transmitter of Greek literature and myth.
k. Translations by Luke, Goethe, p. 98 (first translation is slightly revised).
l. Ibid., p. 97.
m. Ibid., p. 98.

 Page 465

3
Prometheus Becomes Napoleon, Napoleon Prometheus
Schlecht! So nimmt man keinen Kaiser gefangen. . . .
Goethe at a rehearsal of Calderón's Zenobia, 1815
[Terrible! That's not the way you take an emperor prisoner. . . . ]
Nietzsche, in 1885, wrote down a penetrating observation on the subject of
Goethe's relationship to Napoleon. It is in the context of the question, "What did
Goethe really think about the Germans?" 1As about many things around him,
Nietzsche says, he never spoke clearly on this subject. "His life long he was a
master of subtle silence." With a mental leap to a higher level of generality,
Nietzsche tries to penetrate this concealment. He would like to know what it was
that was able to excite Goethe at all. Neither the wars of liberation [against
Napoleon] nor the French Revolution did so"the event on whose account he
rethought his Faust, indeed the whole problem of man, was the appearance of
Napoleon."
Did Nietzsche exaggerate here? Perhaps because it was important to him to
demonstrate his conception of the superman, to make him recognizable by the
effect [or "action": Wirkung] that he would have produced precisely where it
could be raised to a higher power, where action [Wirkung] called forth action in
return?
I don't think so. There is an obscurity about the way Goethe related to Napoleon
that cannot be clarified by seeing the emperor, at their meeting in Erfurt,
acknowledge himself a reader of Werther and confer his order on the poet. This
could only be described as "a really insignificant mark of honor" from a man
who "throughout his life had

 Page 466

authors come to him at breakfast." 2The fact that Goethe wore his Legion of
Honor even after the emperor was overthrown was not only the obstinacy of old
age, which set itself against the patriotic delirium, but also an elementary gesture
of self-preservation.
Nietzsche speaks of Goethe's rethinking of man in view of Napoleon. For him,
that is only one of the many great sayings that he uttered and on which he was
shattered. For Goethe, as the one who survived it intact, this rethinking was a
trauma of identity. The continuity of the relation to Napoleon extends further
than anything else in Goethe's life, with the exception of that of the two figures,
Prometheus and Faust, a continuity that for its part includes the complex
involving Napoleon. It is on the level of these motifs that the defense of his own
identity liesan identity that is always the identity of a life concept and outline. Its
defense is accomplished by the roundabout means of mythicization. The more
terrible the figure of Napoleon proves to be in historical retrospect, the more
ingenious the auxiliary concept of the "demonic" becomes, which harmonizes
the evidence of the great moment of the meeting in Erfurt with the senselessness
typified by the Egyptian adventure.
When Goethe in 1829 gets an opportunity to read the Mémoires sur Napoléon of
the emperor's secretary Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne, he says of the book that it
has given him "the most remarkable illumination," because although it was
written perfectly soberly and without enthusiasm, one nevertheless sees thereby
"what a magnificent character the truth has, when someone dares to say it."3
The book still occupies Goethe the next day. It makes all the nimbus and every
illusion about Napoleon of the writers of history and poets disappear "in the face
of the dreadful reality." But for Goethe the figure remains separate from the
effect of his actions: " . . . the hero does not become smaller, on the contrary, he
grows in truth." But the declarations about Napoleon become more severe. When
the conversation comes to the author of a long and worthless epic, Eckermann
expresses his astonishment that people take such pains and have recourse even to
artificial means, all "to make a bit of a name for themselves." What is the
response of one who also took pains for that purpose? Almost condescendingly
he sets Eckermann straight and diverts the conversation to Napoleon: "Dear
child . . . a name is not a small matter. After all, Napoleon smashed almost half
the world in pieces to make a great name for himself!"
In the course of his reading of this book Goethe speaks with Eckermann, on
April 7, about the campaign in Egypt. The "dreadful reality" of which he had
spoken on the previous occasion has now

 Page 467

become "the Facta [actions] in their naked, exalted truth." Every conjectured
expediency in the Oriental enterprise has proved to be a cover containing
nothing but caprice: "One sees that he undertook this campaign merely in order
to fill up an epoch when there was nothing he could do in France to make
himself master." Napoleon handled the world in the same way that the virtuoso
and composer Hummel handled his grand piano. But in all of that he had
something that Goethe evidently thinks is not a matter of course: "Napoleon was
especially great in that he was at all times the same. Before a battle, during a
battle, after a victory, after a defeat, he always had a firm footing and was
always clear and resolute as to what was to be done. He was always in his
element and a match for every moment and every circumstance, just as for
Hummel in the end it is all one whether he plays an adagio or an allegro,
whether in the bass or in the treble." The book, he says, refutes a whole series of
legends about Napoleon's behavior in Egypt. For example, about his descent into
the pyramids. But he really had visited the plague victims, in order to show by
his example that the plague could be conquered if one could conquer one's fear
of it.
And now, at this point, where he seems to have reached the greatest possible
distance from the adventurer and his dreadfulness, Goethe does something that
he does again and again directly, but even more frequently indirectly: He seeks
to compare himself to Napoleon. When a putrid fever was prevalent he himself
had been inescapably exposed to infection, "in which case, merely by a resolute
will, I warded off the sickness." The subsequent generalization serves to suspend
the point of view, which goes back and forth between Napoleon and Goethe. "It
is unbelievable what the moral will can do in such cases! It, as it were,
permeates the body and puts it in an active state that repulses all harmful
influences. . . . Napoleon knew that well, and he knew that he did not risk
anything in giving his army an impressive example."
Although he occasionally goes to great lengths to compare himself to Napoleon,
still he hesitates, linguistically, to equate himself to him. The "moral will" that
he attests to for himself is at the same time a way of avoiding the neighborhood
of the "demonic," the presence of which, in his own case, he denies. There is an
intermediate field of attributes of extraordinariness and productiveness that can
be shared. Included among these, astonishingly, is even "illumination"
[Erleuchtung].
In the spring of 1828, Eckermann is unwell and sleepless, and is also undecided
whether to remedy the complaint, to get [medical]

 Page 468

advice. Goethe mocks him on that account. Here keywords are used that almost
automatically lead to Napoleon:fate and demon. In regard to Eckermann's
disinclination to take care of himself, Goethe modifies a statement that he has
from the mouth of Napoleon, who was referring to politics: "Man's darkenings
and illuminations determine his fate!" And then follows a subjunctive, leading to
the other key word. "It might be necessary for the demon to have us, daily, in
leading strings and tell us and drive us to whatever is to be done." Eckermann's
weakness leads Goethe to Napoleon's strength: Napoleon was "always
illuminated, always clear and resolute," so that he could immediately put into
effect what he recognized as necessary. One could say of him that he was "in a
state of continuous illumination"taken altogether, ''a fellow whose example we
admittedly can't imitate!" Eckermann supposes, against this, that with advancing
age Napoleon had certainly lost his illumination. To this Goethe agrees; he, too,
had not written his love songs and his Werther a second time, because that
"divine illumination through which extraordinary things come into existence is
something that we will always find allied with youth and productiveness. . . . "
Now Eckermann responds with a key word that Goethe picks upgenius. Where it
is present, the productions come in quick succession: "Because what is genius
but the productive power by which deeds are generated that can show
themselves before God and nature and for just that reason have consequences
and endure." Nothing about the 'quality' of the deeds and their consequences;
only their intensity matters. In this Napoleon, we are told, after the privations
and sleepless nights, the frightful exertions and excitements of his life, there
should not have been a single sound part left when he was forty. Napoleon was
forty when he met Goethe in Erfurt and Weimar.
Once again, on this March 11, 1828, the conversation comes to Napoleon when
they are discussing Byron. In middle age, we are told, the fate of such men, who
were the favorites of fortune in their youth, often takes an unfavorable turning.
The demon is not only a driving force, he is also a traitor. Whenever Goethe
turns to the demonic he gains the advantage of being able to extricate himself
again from comparisons with himself. Then it is easier to speak harsh words:
"The man must be destroyed again!"when he has fulfilled his mission. The
demons trip him up again and again, until finally he succumbs. "So it went with
Napoleon and with many others."
There is no hint that Goethe could have been aware that he also spoke of himself
when he said that for those who have been abandoned by their demon, it was
then probably time for them to depart "so

 Page 469

that something would still be left for other people to do also in this world, which
is meant to endure for a long time." It was only to become manifest after his
death how many people had waited for it and with how much urgency. At this
moment, on March 11, 1828, Goethe's only (unexpressed) concern is with the
self-confirmation in the fact that he had stood opposite Napoleon at the zenith of
the latter's fortunes and had held his own against his gaze, when he was still
entirely under the impetus of his demon.
The primal scene of all of Goethe's self-comparisons with Napoleon is the
meeting in Erfurt at the beginning of October 1808more precisely, the moment
in which he had withstood the eyes of the victorious conqueror. What it meant to
have been exposed to that and to have endured it is something he only gradually
became conscious of. It may not be possible to enter into this experience in an
age that demands at most that one encounter the gazenot directed specifically at
oneselfof the great ones of the age on the television screen. But Napoleon had
already been, since the battle of Jena, exactly two years earlier, the man who had
unexpectedly endangered Goethe's life and had altered it by threatening with
annihilation the state of which he was a ministerthat is, had made the firmness of
the ground on which he stood uncertain and had make the distant recollection of
the earthquake of Lisbon into a close and urgent metaphor.
The tottering of his self-created world had immediately moved Goethe to the
most improbable thing, previously, that could have been expected of him: to
marry the mother of his son, to give irrevocability to his human relationships.
After this and in view of the battlefield of Jena he had expressed, for the first
time, the idea that was to put an articulated end to his conception of himself as
Prometheus: that only a god could oppose a god. To have held his own against
the emperor's gaze was a test of this. It is not insignificant, in this man,
thataccording to the account of the reliable witness Soret, who had come to the
court of Weimar from Geneva as a tutor to the prince, and became a privy
councilor thereas late as two years before his death he blushed when he was
spoken to regarding his meeting with Napoleon, and turned away the question of
notes of that conversation. 4He wrote nothing about contemporary events, he
said, that touched on interests that still existed; he avoided everything that could
occasion painful conflicts: " . . . laissons ce soin à nos successeurs et vivons en
paix" [let us leave those cares to those who come after us, and live in peace].
His frequent mineralogical companion when he was taking the cure in
Marienbad, the town councilor and magistrate in Eger, Joseph

 Page 470

Sebastian Grüner can scarcely understand what Goethe's heightened feeling

relates to when Grüner reads aloud to him, in August 1822, in the favored
conversational context of the doctrine of color and Napoleon, his own translation
of Manzoni's ode on the death of the emperor: "He was as though transfigured,
and was wholly stirred; fire flashed from his eyes. . . . " 5That is something that
needs to be understood.
What had happened in Erfurt that Goethe refused to (if one prefers not to say
"affected not to") record, that he kept as the memory of a singular experience
that could not be shared, that perhaps could not even be communicated? A letter
to Silvie von Ziegesaar shows that he had told at least her about his conversation
with Napoleon in Erfurt immediately afterward. But it had been Christianea who
had pressed the wavering Goethe to go over to Erfurt, where the emperor
intended to assemble the princes around himself. On October 4, two days after
the first meeting with Napoleon, and still writing from Erfurt, he thanks
Christiane "for having urged me to come here," but regarding the event he only
remarks laconically that the emperor ''conversed with me for a long time in the
most gracious manner."6The outline of an account of how he stood before and
withstood Napoleon, which was written down in 1824 at the instigation of
Chancellor von Müller, left no impression anywhere in his autobiographical
writings.
On October 1, 1808, Goethe sees Napoleon for the first time at the levee. This is
immediately joined, for him, with his own life story, because the setting of the
event is familiar to him: "the long-familiar premises, with new
personnel."7When he is sent for, the next morning, to meet the emperor, the
memory takes the form of stage directions for a play: "The crowd withdrew. . . .
I am called into the emperor's private room. At the same moment Daru is
announced, and is immediately admitted. As a result, I hesitate. I am again
called. I enter. The emperor sits at a large round table eating breakfast. . . . The
emperor beckons to me to come forward. I remain standing before him at a
proper distance." There follows the exchange of looks that decides everything:
"After he had attentively looked at me, he said: 'Vous êtes un homme' [You are a
man]. I bow. . . . " And so forth. The whole is not descriptive; it is the stage
directions for a liturgy of initiation.
Goethe emphasizes that in this conversation he gave the most necessary answers,
and in the most natural manner. This emphasis on naturalhess corresponds to the
fact that the emperor objects, in regard to a passage in Werther, that it is not in
accordance with nature, just

 Page 471

as he "had felt very deeply the deviation of the French theater from nature and
truth." When Daru mentions to Napoleon that Goethe has translated Voltaire's
Mahomet, the emperor explains in detail how he finds it out of place in the play
that "the world conqueror gives such an unfavorable description of himself."
That is written out in such a way that hardly any doubt can be left as to why
Napoleon disapproves of world conquerors being put in the wrong in this way.
Moreover, Goethe remarks to Boisserée on August 8, 1815, that Napoleon's
objection was ''as accurate as could be wished." Above all, he can now explain
how Napoleon was able to correct Voltaire so cogently, from his comprehension
of the founder of Islam. Only the equivalence between the comprehender and the
comprehended can explain such assurance: "After all, he, who was another
Mohammed, had to understand the subject well."
Now despite all of Goethe's bowing low before Napoleon we must nevertheless
look more closely at the way he evades the reproach founded on that single lack
of conformity to nature in Werther. He answers "with a pleased smile" that he
has to admit that "some lack of truth could be detected in this passage," but that
perhaps the poet could be forgiven for making use of an artificeand, furthermore,
of an artifice that was not so easy to discover"in order to produce certain effects
that he could not have achieved by simple natural means." The poet lays claim,
in his field, to what his partner in the conversation has long since, and always,
claimed, in a different field. In that field it is something that seems to have no
need of justification, and indeed is capable of none. In Napoleon he is
confronted by the maker of a history without any possible theodicyjust as the
Sturm und Drang poet had needed no other justification than that contained in
his work. Napoleon understands immediately that a comparison is being
constructed. He concludes his critique of French classical tragedy with the words
that such plays about destiny had belonged to a darker agewhat did one want
with destiny now? Now, when after all one was just in the process of taking over
its management oneself. That is contained in the emperor's saying (so inadequate
in relation to Goethe) that politics is destinya saying whose intended purport is
after all precisely that dassicism's aesthetic 'fate' is replaced by the daims of the
Imperial will.
As a result of an indiscretion committed by Goethe's son, August, we know still
another detail of the conversation. He tells Chancellor yon Müller, in his father's
presence, that his father had been required to promise the emperor that he would
write a "death of Caesar"in fact a better one than Voltaire's La Mort de César.
8This drama of

 Page 472

1732 had been judiciously chosen for a performance at the gathering of the
princes. Here Napoleon proposed to Goethe a subject that he himself, as a youth,
had wanted to treat, and he could not know that the person to whom he was
speaking had similarly dreamed the youthful dream of a drama about Caesar.
Did Goethe, as his sows utterance allows us to assume, in fact promise what he
was required to promise? August's indiscretion contains a hidden malice. The
shadow of his father's conjunction with Napoleon lay over his life, too, after he
had been refused permission to take part in the liberation struggle and thus in the
ascending movement of the spirit of the age. As a result, Fichte's entry in his
album"The nation expects great things from you, the only son of the only [i.e.,
peerless] man of our age"had become a burden to him. As Charlotte von Stein
had remarked in 1813, August was "the only young man of rank who had
remained at home here." So his demonstrative exhibition of his being initiated
into his father's memories of Napoleon was also a hopeless resistance to his
enforced participation in Goethe's isolation in his later years from the emotions
of his contemporaries.
So the conversation in Erfurt was, on both sides, about work. It was as if the
emperor wanted to show the poet right away how such things were done on his
side when he turned away and discussed with Daru, his general intendant for
Prussia, the question of the exaction of contributions. Goethe, having become a
witness of how destiny is made with politics, almost unwillingly withdraws a
little from this type of work and stations himself in an alcove. In this same
alcove, thirty years earlier, he now realizes, he experienced gay and melancholy
hours.
It is the identity of his own life that this onlooker at the making of history seeks
to rescue. What he perceives distracts him into the protective corner of memory.
He repeatedly emphasizes, while writing down what he observed in the activity
around the emperor, that he could not forbear "to think of the past." He devotes a
larger part of his notes to such thoughtsto the old carpets, to the portraits that
have been taken downthan to everything having to do with this present. It is the
emperor who breaks through this recollection, by rising and going toward
Goethe, so as "by a sort of maneuver" to separate him from the other participants
in what is going on. This becomes the moment of the great 'setting-apart.' The
situation achieves its equilibrium through the reversal of the motion by which
Goethe, on entering, had approached the breakfasting emperor. Now Napoleon
turns his back to the others and speaks only to Goetheand only in

 Page 473

order to ask him whether he is married and has children. Napoleon could not
know that it was only as a result of his violent intervention that this question
could no longer create any awkwardness for the person it was addressed to. If it
is true that Napoleon invited him to come to Paris, this is at any rate part of what
he himself conceals from us about the conversation. Important enough, but
perhaps diverting us from more important things, is the information, in the notes,
that on October 14 Napoleon conferred the Order of the Legion of Honor upon
him. He tells only Silvie, on October 15in addition to the fact that he had been
honored with the Legionthat he had been "urgently invited" to go to Paris, but
that now, after the death of his mother, he had to put things in order in
Frankfurt"these are all beckonings and enticements that attract me toward the
southwest, while I have usually been in the habit of seeking my happiness only
in the southeast."
Our contemporary behavior researchers know what it means to hold one's own
against a stranger's gaze. For Goethe's contemporaries it was an almost mythical
moment. Heine writes, describing Goethe's eyes, that they were "tranquil, like
those of a god. It is, in fact, a mark of gods in general that their gaze is firm and
their eyes do not jerk uncertainly this way and that." 9And, not by accident,
Heine puts Goethe and Napoleon on the same level in precisely this respect:
"Napoleon's eyes also had the characteristic just mentioned. That is why I am
convinced that he was a god." In the case of Goethe, Heine knew what he was
talking about, because he had not held his own when he stood before Jupiter:
"Truly, when I visited him in Weimar and stood in front of him, I involuntarily
glanced to one side to see whether I would not see the eagle next to him with the
lightning bolts in his beak. I was on the point of speaking to him in Greek. . . . ''
Napoleon's divine gaze was present to Goethe to an advanced age. On January
17, 1827a day, as Eckermann emphasizes, on which Goethe was in a good
moodthis mood is not disturbed even when, in a circle containing his son, his
daughter-in-law, and Chancellor yon Müller, the conversation comes to the
period of occupation. Müller refers to a letter of the French ambassador to the
court of Weimar at the time, in which mention was also made of Goethe. The
letter, he says, called Weimar fortunate, "where genius could have such an
intimate relationship with the highest power." That is a cue for the subject of
Napoleon. Nevertheless, detours are still needed in order to reach it. There is talk
of purchases by Frau von Goethe that had not met with August's consent. The
old Goethe knows a pertinent story about Napoleon: "One must not accustom the
beautiful ladies

 Page 474

to altogether too much . . . because it is easy for them to go beyond all limits.
When Napoleon was on Elba he still received bills from milliners that he was
supposed to pay." 10In earlier times, too, Goethe says, Napoleon did not easily
yield to feminine wishes. A dealer in fashions gave him to understand, on the
occasion of a presentation, that he did too little for his wife in this regard.
Napoleon did not respond to this piece of enterprising impudence with a single
word, "but he gave him such a look that the man immediately packed up his
things and was never seen again." In response to his daughterin-law's question
whether this had still been in the period when Napoleon was consul, Goethe
answers, not without reference to himself, that the story was probably about
Napoleon the emperor, "because otherwise his gaze would probably not have
been so terrible." So the ''demonic" is not after all so completely inherent in the
man as such. Goethe's cheerfulness remains undisturbed by this indirect
reminder of the eye against which he had held his own: "But I have to laugh
when I think of the man whose limbs were frozen by that gaze, and who
probably already saw himself beheaded or shot."
On December 15, 1812, Goethe notes in his diary that the French diplomat von
Wolbock had notified Weimar of the emperor's intention to pass through it, "as
well as his having inquired after me." From then on the diary contains the
emperor's current whereabouts each day, just as though these were data of the
course of his own life. He valued being remembered by the defeated emperor no
less than having exchanged looks with the victor of Jena. Goethe's deep interest
in Napoleon's fate, right to its end, even survives his growing horror of the
Corsican's deeds. On August 13, 1813, he encounters the emperor in Dresden
where he is inspecting fortifications. In 1815 the episode of the "hundred days"
is reflected in his diary. On April 30, 1817, we read: "At night, Napoleon's
confession." On January 14, 1822, again specifying the time of day: "Alone at
night. Translated Manzoni's ode on Napoleon." On August 15, 1828, there is the
combination (not untypical, for Goethe) of the Christian calendar of salvation
with the mythical one: "Day of the Assumption [of Mary], Napoleon's birthday."
The emperor's decline and end on Saint Helena played an extended part in his
reading. He reads Hudson Lowe's Mémorial de Saint-Hélène and other works on
Napoleon's defeat and confinement. For Goethe, the rocky island in the south
Atlantic is the site of the conclusion of the fate of a Prometheus to whom, in
Erfurt, he had delegated his early aesthetic self-interpretation and presumption.
This delegationb underlies both his loyalty to the Corsican's fate and the contrast
he sets up between himself and the other's demonic quality.

 Page 475

Before the battle at Leipzig Goethe had made a bet that Napoleon would defeat
the allies. When, after Napoleon's defeat, officers of the allies sought him out
and the Count Colloredo was quartered at his house, he came to meet them
wearing the cross of a Knight of the Legion of Honor.
Nowhere does Goethe's affinity for omens become more evident than in his
relationship to Napoleon. When the latter escaped from Elba there occurred,
according to the account given by Sulpiz Boisserée, the story of a ring carrying
the head of Serapis, for which Goethe had long been on the lookout, without
being able to obtain it. At that time a friend came to him with the words: "Guess
what extraordinary thing has happened." Goethe, ironically, entering into this
'sensational' demand, answers: "The Last Judgment." The visitorwhat else could
he doanswers in the negative. The next possibility of something extraordinary
that occurs to Goethe is this: "Napoleon has escaped." This is followed, suitably,
by the point of Boisserée's account: "The next day the ring arrived." 11What
accumulates around Goethe's relationship to Napoleon hasindependently of the
reliability of the facts, because invented or exaggerated material would prove
this just as wellthe dignity of 'significance.'
An additional omen was the fall of the picture of Napoleon, which Joseph
Sebastian Grüner, again, transmitscertainly reliablyfollowing Goethe's own
narration. That is embedded in the story of another omen. During an excursion to
Franzensbad, Grüner shows Goethe the sculpted representation of the emperor
and his second wife on the Louise Spring there. Grüner remarks what an
impression of "cleverness" the little man makes, alongside Marie-Louise. Goethe
responds, "He was indeed extraordinarily . . . clever, if he had only remained
within bounds, as he does here."12
The magistrate tells the story of the construction of the enclosure of the spring.
Experts had been brought in from Prague, whose accomplishment, however, was
only such that shortly after their departure the construction collapsed. At that
point the local carpenter was called upon to make a less expensive setting, with
no waste of time; the result was that the mineral spring that was named for
Napoleon became separated from the Louise Spring, And this augury had been
fulfilled in reality.
Here Goethe breaks in. (How should he not have experienced omens in relation
to Napoleon?) "After the battle of Leipzig his picture fell from its nail in my
room, for no known reason; what do you make of that?" In dark and
superstitious ages, Grüner responds, people would have considered this a sign
from heaven announcing the birth

 Page 476

or death of a great man. Suddenly the productivity of the Franzensbad spring in

omens strikes him as too modest. He reaches back to the catchword bounds. It is
characteristic of Goethe that he does not permit other people to usurp his
authority to reprimand the great. Consequently we must first give Grüner's actual
words: "When I look at the mineral spring here next to the Louise Spring, I
imagine Napoleon separated from his son on the island of Saint Helena, how
inwardly confined his life is there, without any possibility of overstepping
bounds. Only a great spirit could remain steadfast in such a situation.
Nevertheless, his confinement was meant to make him harmless; millions of
people were sacrificed on account of him." Goethe also thinks of mankind and
its welfare, but he evades the proffered verdict on Napoleon, preferring to stay
on the subject of the spring and to credit it with an effect on mankind: "Let us
generate good effects for mankind from this mineral spring or, as you call it,
Napoleon Spring." The account concludes laconically that they then drove back
to Eger.
The high point of 'significance' lies in a coincidence that makes Napoleon
intercede posthumously and by an obscure path for the thing that, for Goethe
himself, was undoubtedly central in his life's work: his theory of color.c Here the
ominous aspect grows out of the demonic, which has the power to make
heterogeneous things cooperate in producing unexpected significance. The fact
that Napoleon had read Werther, had "always taken [the book] with him" and
still had it with him on Saint Helenaas Goethe knows as of 1829 and tells his
Russian translator, Roschalinis not felt as an ominous 'significance.' As a judge
of literature, there is nothing demonic about the emperor. But the way in which
Napoleon, although or precisely because he was no longer among the living,
stood up for the theory of colorthat could affect Goethe deeply.
In the autumn of this year of 1830, in which Goethe worked on the end of Faust
II and began work on the fourth part of Dichtung und Wahrheit, which was to
contain the "extraordinary saying," and while he contemplated Napoleon's death
on Saint Helena, and received the news of the death of his only son in Rome,
something strange happened. On his return journey from Italy, where he had left
August von Goethe in Genoa, Eckermann saw in Strasbourg, in the display
window of a barber, a small bust of Napoleon, made of opalescing glass, which
seemed to him to present all the phenomena of the theory of color, depending on
whether one viewed it against the obscurity of the room lying behind it or in the
reverse direction, from the room toward the light of the street. Eckermann sees
immediately that Goethe would

 Page 477

be fascinated by this figure. "In my eyes this glass image had an inestimable
value. . . . " 13He acquires it and sends it to Weimar.
Still on his journey and still before the news of the death of the young Goethe
has reached him, Eckermann receives Goethe's letter thanking him for the
remarkable present from his travels. Goethe acknowledges to his Eckermann that
"on seeing the remarkable, color transmitting bust" he had been impressed and
overcome "by the magnificent Urphänomen ['primal appearance': a term of
Goethe's coinage], which stands out here in all of its manifestations." The fact
that in the accident of this discovery, in the capacity to perceive such a thing, the
"demonic" could have had a hand is at least hinted at in the choice of an
expression that cannot have been an idiom at this time: "If your demon brings
you to Weimar again, you shall see that image stand in the fierce, clear sun. . . . "
Unhesitatingly, Goethe lays claim to Napoleon on the side of his theory of color:
''Here one truly sees the hero victorious on behalf of the theory of color too. My
most sincere thanks for this unexpected strengthening of the theory that I value
so much." What a hunger for other things than demonstrations.
After everything that Goethe had ever experienced and invented between himself
and Napoleon, this incidental knickknack episode had to be incomparably
important for him. He had after all already set upspeaking to Eckermann on May
2, 1824the most daring and, in the horizon of his self-conception and experience
of history, the highest-pitched possible parallel: "Napoleon inherited the French
Revolution . . . and it fell to me to correct the error of the Newtonian doctrine."
He uses the name of the "demon," as he so often does other things, in, as it were,
a displaced location: for the other person's fate, when he had just related it to
himself. Somewhat later, on March 2, 1831, he confirms that the "demonic"
appears not only in and in respect to persons but also, even quite especially, in
events, "and particularly in all those events that we are unable to unravel by
means of the intellect and reason." That is still not an attempted definition of the
demonic, but it is a description of the resistance that characterizes it. with regard
to his own nature, Goethe denies that it contains a demonic element; but he "has
to submit" to it: Napoleon, on the other hand, had had a demonic nature, in fact
"in the highest degree, so that there is hardly another to compare to him. . . . The
Greeks counted demonic natures of that kind among the demigods." Here it
occurs to Eckermann to ask whether Mephistopheles did not have demonic
qualities too. It is noteworthy that Goethe rejects this immediately, and gives
reasons: "No . . . Mephistopheles is much too negative a

 Page 478

creature; the demonic, on the other hand, manifests itself in an energy that is
thoroughly positive." 14
How seriously, with how much weight, and above all how precisely should one
take an expression like that of the "demonic" in Goethe, especially in its
application to Napoleon? Initially, I think, the talk of the demonic is only a
renunciation of the frivolity with which Sturm und Drang youth had conferred
the attribute of "godlikeness" on people. In connection with Napoleon, it still has
a treacherous attractiveness for Goethe's tongue. In a conversation with
Chancellor von Müller on March 23, 1830, this connection is established in a
domesticated form appropriate to old age. The subject, once again, is Goethe's
conversation with Napoleon. Müller presses Goethe's power of recollection with
the remark that it is after all terrible to have to tell oneself that the event is
already twenty-two years in the past. Goethe parries this by saying that one must
not even say such things to oneself, ''or it would be enough to drive one crazy."
Napoleon is not drawn into the almost modest comparison of himself to God that
Goethe adds; but if the talk had not been of him, one could hardly imagine the
same association of ideas: "To God, a thousand years are like a day; why then
shouldn't we, too, disregard such things, like little gods?" It is an inversion of
Müller's gesture of humility in the face of the inexorability of time; one who has
such an event behind him is no longer affected by the enumeration of years.
Here there is no longer any more, either, of what Jean Paul had mocked when, in
a letter to Christian Otto written on June 18, 1796, he describes his visit to
Goethe: the house that startles him with its Italian taste, the pantheon of pictures
and statues, the gripping coldness of the "fear" that oppresses his heart. Finally
Goethe's appearance: " . . . At last the god comes toward me, cold, monosyllabic,
speaking in a uniform tone of voice."
Only at the very endafter the endwill Eckermann take up the tone of apotheosis
one more time. The conclusion of the second part of the Conversations is among
the finest specimens of German prose. The morning after Goethe's death
Eckermann has Goethe's servant Friedrich open the room in which the corpse
lies. The mixture of temerity and reverence in these lines culiminates in
Eckermann's having the shroud, by which the naked body lies covered, thrown
back. It is a moment of epiphany: "Friedrich unwrapped the cloth, and I was
astonished at the godlike splendor of these limbs. . . . A perfect man lay before
me in great beauty, and the rapture that I felt at this made me forget for some
moments that the immortal spirit had left such an envelope. I laid my hand on his
heartthere was a deep stillness

 Page 479

everywhereand I turned aside in order to give free rein to my suppressed tears."

That is no longer Goethe, that is Eckermann, but nevertheless it is Eckermann
faced with the dead Goethe.
If the attribute of the "demonic," in Goethe, is an index of the fact that frivolity
in dealing with the other attribute, that of "godlikeness," has disappeared, then
the reason for that is above all to be seen in Goethe's deeper intimacy with
Spinozism. In its absorption by pantheism, the godlike has become literally
"indifferent" [gleichgültig "equally valid," ''interchangeable"], as a distinction
belonging to absolutely everything. The godlike could no longer be the
exceptional; the demonic became this. Everything that surpasses what is usual in
human affairs, everything that possesses the quality of being 'unattainable,' is
assigned to the status of the demonic. The demonic is not the antidivine, which
in pantheism is in any case still more precisely "utopian" than in
monotheismbecause it has "no place."d Where it nevertheless seems to appear, in
language, a polytheistic background will always be found, which one can
understand as a sort of 'pantheism with divided roles.' It is the aesthetic license
of a metaphysics that, taken by itself, justifies only nature's aesthetics and makes
man's superfluous, because no scope is left for it.
Goethe saw very clearly that in art the metaphysical pantheist must practice his
'doubled truth' of polytheism. But morally, too, there is no room in pantheism for
the outsize dimensions of either good or evil; nothing can be either for or against
the god, because nothing is capable of existing outside him or it. Here we begin
to see what the category of the demonic, as an intermediate realm that is not
unambiguously definable, will mean for the "extraordinary saying" in which the
fourth part of Dichtung und Wahrheit culminates. Against a god, everything that
is itself a god has powersomething that it makes sense to speak of only if there is
not only one god.
True, Goethe denies that Mephistopheles, too, should be seen as a demon. But
the wager between God and Mephistopheles could not exist if the deadly
seriousness of dualism or the exclusiveness of monotheism were present
between them. Thus the background of Faust is transformed into at least an 'as if'
polytheism. Its trials of strength are in earnest, but they are not definitive; rather,
they are episodic. In this ultimately neither metaphysical nor moral, but more
nearly aesthetic intermediate realm, Goethe installed Napoleon. In his translation
of Manzoni's ode, "Der 5. Mai" [The fifth of May], Napoleon is entitled,
imitatively, the Schreckensmann [terrible man]; but for Goethe he could never
represent the purely evil will and could never have

 Page 480

produced the mere failure of calamity. The demonic is a category that is foreign
with respect to the moral realm.
In connection with a conversation with Eckermann about Faust, which had left
him "for a while in silent reflection," Goethe explicitly lays claim, in order to
substantiate his notion of the demonic, to an old man's view of things. He is not
able, he says, to resist the thought that "the demons, in order to tease and make
fools of mankind, sometimes bring forward individual figures who are so
attractive that everyone strives to match them and so great that no one reaches
their level." 15As examples Goethe names Raphael, Mozart, and Shakespeare.
Then in turn, with Shakespeare (whom, in his early 'genius' phase, he had put on
a par with Prometheus) he now comparesnot uninstructively in regard to the
aesthetic valence of the category of the demonicNapoleon. He is, it is true,
described only as "beyond our reach,'' and not also as "attractive." Eckermann
pursues to its conclusion the thought that, here as always, is already laid out for
him to follow Goethe in thinking, that "with Goethe, too, the demons may have
had some such thing in mind, since he too is a figure who is too attractive for us
not to strive to match, and too great for us to reach."
The connection goes by way of Faust. [It is evident] in a conversation with
Sulpiz Boisserée on August 3, 1815, a conversation that revolves around
Spinoza, the theory of color, and especially the completion of Faust, about the
end of which Goethe does not want to say anything yet, although he describes it
as complete, "very good and magnificently successful." The transition of ideas
that forces itself upon him conforms, with the greatest possible precision, to
Nietzsche's thesis that the appearance of Napoleon had caused Goethe to rethink
Faust and the whole problem of "man." "In the beginning Faust makes terms
with the devil from which everything follows directly. [Pause.] Faust brings me
to what I think, and have thought, about Napoleon. The man who has and
exercises power over himself achieves the most difficult and greatest things."16
An even higher estimate is contained in the remark that connects the attribute of
the demonic in the same manner with both Christ and Napoleon. The criterion is
power over the elements, in other words, over nature. Regarding Christ, he says:
"The magical influence that emanates from his person, so that healthy people
attach themselves to him and the sick feel healedhis power even over the
elements, so that the fury of storms and of ocean waves is stilled before him

 Page 481

all of this, although in a predominantly divine nature, seems demonic in

character." Immediately juxtaposed to this sentence there follows this, on the
Corsican: "So, in Napoleon, the demonic was active to an extent that it may not
have been, in modern times, in any other person." 17Goethe himself had been
able to experience a power over nature that could be traced back to Napoleon's.
Zelter reports that on May 3, 1816, Goethe had been sick in bed and it had
seemed to him "almost impossible" to take part in a great ceremony at court.
Then ''happily a saying of Napoleon's" had come to his mind: "l'Empereur ne
connoît autre maladie que la mort" [The emperor knows no sickness but death].
Thereupon he told the doctor that if he was not dead, he would be at his post
punctually. "It seems that the doctor and nature took this tyrannical saying to
heart, because on Sunday at the correct time I was in my place. . . . " Now one
will still ask what great ceremony all of this related to. It was the homage of the
estates to Carl August, who, as a result of Napoleon's downfall, had been raised
to the rank of grand duke; a homage on the occasion of receiving his promise of
a constitution, a promise he was to be the first of the German princes to carry
out, in that same month. Through demonic induction, Napoleon had helped the
(also promoted) "Minister of State" Goethe to participate even in the celebration
of the final triumph over him.
The qualification made in the conversation with Eckermann, that the demonic
had been active in Napoleon to an extent that it had not been in any other person
"in modern times," had still been absent when Goethe wrote to Knebel on
January 8, 1807, that one would have had to foresee that "the highest
manifestation that was possible in history" would come, as this one did, from
France. "One denies the extraordinary [beality] as long as one can." But there
does seem to be such a thing as a depletion of the potency of original powers.
Before Goethe now, in 1831, comes to speak of Christ and Napoleon, he says by
way of introduction: "It seems as though the demonic was more powerful in
earlier times and as if it does not find such opportunity to manifest itself in a
prosaic century. There are important traces of it in the Old and New Testaments,
and even in Christ features appear that one would be inclined to put in that
category." One will remember this when Sigmund Freud, in his letter to Thomas
Mann of June 14, 1936operating on a higher level of ironycompares Napoleon to
Joseph in Egypt.

 Page 482

A mark of the demonic figure is not only that it commands the elements itself,
but that it is able to induce this capacity [in others]. On a walk with Ekermann,
Goethe comes to speak of the news of the death of Eugène Napoleon de
Beauharnais, the duke of Leuchtenberg. He had been, Goethe says, one of the
great characters, who are becoming ever rarer. As late as the summer before,
Goethe had met him in Marienbad. There he had learned of his plan to connect
the Rhine and the Danube by means of a canal. "A gigantic undertaking, when
one considers the resistance of the topography. But to one who served under
Napoleon and, with him, shook the world, nothing seems impossible." 18Here,
too, the schema is retained according to which the resistance of circumstances,
of matter, of the elements, still constitutes the greatness of a man and of his
action if he is someone who is in the realm of influence of a demonic nature.
It is also measured by the vacuum that it leaves behind it. For Goethe it almost
goes without saying that Napoleon brought about an agitation that calls for
figures like himself, but in fact only favors those of a lower rank. The heir of the
Revolution, who seemed to have dosed the abyss into which Goethe had first
looked at the time of the necklace affair, left behind him a new abyss when he
was gone. In the year of the revolt against Napoleon, it becomes clear to Goethe
that only hatred had united the Germans, as he writes to Knebel on November
24, 1813: "I only want to see what these people will set about when he has been
banished across the Rhine." He sees it up to the very last. When reports of the
continuing disturbances arrive from Paris on March 21, 1831, he traces the
"young people's folly of wanting to share in influencing the highest affairs of the
state" back to the example of Napoleon. He has excited an egoism in the youth
of his country that will not let them rest ''until a great despot arises among them
again, in whom they can see, on the highest level, what they want to be
themselves."19
Nevertheless, as always in such remarks by Goethe, the demonic man is in the
right. For the world, for the others, the disadvantage remains that the needs
awakened by him cannot be satisfied again by his like. "The unfortunate thing is
that a man like Napoleon will not be born again right away, and I am almost
afraid that it will cost additional hundreds of thousands of lives before the world
gets some peace again."

 Page 483

Goethe himself is always the point of referenceeither openly or covertlywhen he

speaks of Napoleon. Because among the latter's consequences there is also the
fact that now the 'active man' [der tätige Mann] can only prepare many a good
thing for the future in seclusion, while the exercise of literary influence is not to
be expected for years. Amazingly, Goethe's attitudes, taken together, include no
bitterness toward him who had made himself into something that the world
lacked. Because, as though the balance of greatness, on the one side, against
victims, on the other, had not been set up by this "terrible man" himself, he now
appears as what the world, again, lacks, in order finally to be able to equalize
this balance.
With his decision to prepare, in seclusion, a future that would scarcely be
accessible to him, himself, Goethe is on the threshold of the last year of his life.
One wonders whether, at the moment of this conversation, he remembered the
words Napoleon had spoken to Chancellor von Müller on April 26, 1815: "Do
you Germans know, too, what a revolution is? You don't know, but I know!" It
contains Goethe's historical legitimation for Napoleon. For Goethe, Napoleon
was determinednot, indeed, in his greatness, but in his roleby his inheritance of
the Revolution. It was, again, Nietzsche's clairvoyance for subterranean
resemblances of an extreme character that saw Goethe's relation to Napoleon
centered entirely on the pole of the French Revolution, or, more specifically, on
its Rousseauian aspect. Goethe, for Nietzsche, is entirely averse to the eighteenth
century and to its Revolution: "I see only one man who experienced it as it must
be experienced, with nauseaGoethe." 20This yields a common formula for
Napoleon and Goethe, based on the type of ''return to nature"in spite of
Rousseau and in opposition to Rousseauthat they carry out: Goethe was a
European event as "a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by
a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissancea kind of
self-overcoming on the part of that century," as Napoleon, too, was "a piece of
'return to nature.'"21
All talk of the "demonic" cannot confuse Nietzsche in his insight that Goethe
had such a lasting involvement with Napoleon precisely because he was himself
"a convinced realist." Wherever it appears, realism is always a concept based on
contrast to the unrealities of an epochand just this, that he stands "in the middle
of an age with an unreal outlook," that he defines or suffers its end, constitutes
the

 Page 484

"realism" in Goethe's relation to Napoleon: "He had no greater experience than

that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon."e
In their view of this phenomenon, Goethe the historian and Goethe the
demonologist were not always in complete accord with one another. The
demonic is also a category opposed to history, to the extent that history implies
the possibility of 'making' historya category opposed to history in just the same
way that the tragic is. Goethe sees the latter, too, in Napoleonin his downfall.
In March 1882, shortly before his death, Goethe speaks with Eckermann about
"the Greeks' tragic idea of fate." It is, he says, no longer in conformity with the
contemporary mode of thought. He does not even shrink from comparing this to
fashion: A tragedy, he says, is a costume that has long since gone out of fashion.
What has taken the place of the tragic in characterizing human existence in one
of its extreme possibilities? Certainly not something that could have been
defined by the religious ideas of the time; these are no doubt mentioned only
because they exclude an idea of existencethe ancient onethat was not founded on
the principle of freedom, but instead had permitted the determination [of a
person's fate] by delusion and the fateful incurring of guilt. Napoleon appears as
exemplary in relation to this change. Goethe's last utterance about his demonic
partner in his [process off self-constitution is sobering, especially in its
foreignness to aesthetic matters. It anticipates what was first to become fully
manifest as a result of Goethe's death, because he had himself delayed it so long:
the politicizing of literature, in the contemporary form of "Young Germany."
For Napoleon had not only declared, but had also for the first time made it
possible for people across the Continent to experience the fact that life
destiniesand precisely not only dynastic or soldierly onesare determined by
political acts. In the moment of this last conversation Goethe remembers what
Napoleon had said to him in the alcove of the castle at Erfurt and what, in spite
of his experiences after Jena, he could hardly have accepted at the time. Now it
is the limiting formula for all aesthetic endeavors: "We modems are now more
inclined to say, with Napoleon: Politics is destiny." 22
For the substance of literature, he says, that means nothing, because this
proposition cannot be understood, in the manner of the "most recent writers," as
meaning that, as a result, politics, too, is already poetry, or a suitable subject for
it. As a subject it is always spoiled by

 Page 485

the partisan attitude that the poet has to adopt if he wants to have a political
effect. His materials have nothing to do with the obligations and restrictions that
characterize political affairs. The poet is "like the eagle who soars above
countries, and to whom it is all one whether the hare on whom he swoops down
is running in Prussia or in Saxony." The poet, not the emperor, is the eagle.
On Manfredini's commemorative medal for the battle at Jena, which Goethe had
described in his diary on the occasion of his inspection of the battlefield, while
the emperor's portrait had been on the front, Jupiter and his eagle had been
represented on the back. 23There Napoleon was not yet Prometheus, Jupiter was
not yet his enemy, the eagle was not yet the torment that ate at his liver.
In the meantime Goethe knows that a generation has grown up in whose eyes his
activity "is considered worthless, just because I have disdained to involve myself
in political divisions." To satisfy these people, of the type represented by
Uhland, he would have had to "become a member of a Jacobin club and preach
murder and bloodshed."24Goethe would not have forgotten the resonance of the
saying about politics as destiny even if he had not had a chance to become
aware, in the divergence of his life from those of his contemporaries, how much
Napoleon had carried his point against him in the remainder of his lifetime. It is
his problemand his antithetical position: "The people always want me to take
sides too; very well, I am on my own side."25That was the overall outcome
already of his refusal to respond to the demands of the young generation in the
rebellion against Napoleonor to the expectations of his friend, the duke.
When goethe visits the house of his friends, the Körners, in Dresden at the end
of April 1813, he has, according to the memoirs of Ernst Moritz Arndt, "neither
hope nor pleasure in the new developments"; instead, he rebukes both the son, a
Lützow fusilierf and singer of the liberation struggle, and the father, "as though
enraged." "'Go ahead and rattle your chains, the man is too great for you, you
will not break them.'"26When Napoleon, by then already fallen, was violently
criticized in his presence, Goethe, according to an account of Varnhagen's,
initially held his tongue but then, ''with an austere calmness," said: "Leave my
emperor in peace!"27Was it on account of his nature that Goethe refused the
engagement of the patriots, or did his bond with Napoleon prevent him from
entering into their enthusiasm? Heine sees in him the "great genius for rejecting
its own age" that "is its

 Page 486

own final purpose." That is why "an age of enthusiasm and of deeds . . . could
not use him." 28
But Goethe not only refused to participate in the patriotic rebellion against
Napoleon, he had also refused his services to Napoleon himself, as soon as it
was a matter of moreor should one say less?than the exchange of looks. Here,
there is the invitation to come to Paris and write a drama about Caesar.
According to the memoirs of the Chancellor Friedrich yon Müller, that was a
proposition of the highest order, of the most marked distinction, but also having
the clearest relation to the emperor's pretension and consciousness of himself:
"Tragedy should be the school of kings and of peoples, which is the highest
thing the poet can achieve. You, for example, should write the death of Caesar in
a manner fully worthy of the subject, more magnificently than Voltaire. That
could become the finest task of your life. One would have to show the world
how Caesar would have blessed them, how everything would have turned out
entirely differently, if people had given him time to carry out his high-minded
plans. Come to Paris, I positively demand it. There is a wider view of the world
there! There you will find an abundance of material for your literary
creations."29Napoleon's invitation occupied Goethe, according to the
chancellor's testimony, "very actively for a long time after that." He made no
''great statement" on the subject, any more than he did about the whole audience
[with Napoleon]. He allowed the offer to be frustrated by incidental
"inconveniences." To allow himself to be made a political instrument was not
within his definition of himself. When Napoleon asked him to dedicate an
account of their meeting in Erfurt to the Czar Alexander, he evaded the request:
He had never done that sort of thing, he said, so as not to have to regret it later.
Napoleon insists that the great writers of the age of Louis XIV acted differently.
If we may trust Talleyrand's account, which is the only one that reproduces this
part of the conversation, Goethe answered fearlessly: "C'est vrai, Sire, mais
Votre Majesté n'assurerait pas qu'ils ne s'en sont jamais repentis" [That is true,
Sire, but Your Majesty would not affirm that they never regretted it].30A great
answer. It is this double refusal that legitimates Goethe in later refusing to join
the emperor's opponents and the triumph over him.
Napoleon utters the saying about politics as destiny in the condext of his remarks
about classical French tragedy, not only in order to dismiss the category of the
tragic but also to reoccupy its 'position'

 Page 487

in the historical system with the category of the political. This saying has been
repeated to the point of producing boredom. It soon sounded like a call to
everyone to participate in taking the place of what had formerly been fateto put it
briefly: to make history. But Napoleon could not have meant it this way in
talking to Goethe; it only becomes possible to mean it this way when the place
of this single subject of history has become vacant. When he said it, Napoleon
had before him a man of whom he knew that "destiny" had only stricken him,
without having been made by him or even merely having been something that he
could have made. Goethe, for his part, accepted the 'reoccupation' of the position
of tragedy only much later, only with his resignation at the very end. Ultimately,
it had been Napoleon who, by the aftereffects of his actions, had forced everyone
to adopt the saying that he had meant entirely differently, that is, as referring to
the passive affectedness of those who are subordinate. When Goethe, in the last
conversation that has been handed down to us, from March 1832, endorses
Napoleon's saying, he interrupts his discussion of this (to him) unbearable and
yet unavoidable topic: "But not another word on this wretched subject, so that I
don't make myself irrational by combating the irrational."
Politics as destinythat meant originally, and for Goethe always meant (in view of
Napoleon), politics acting like destiny. Even the interruption of his literary
influence at the end appeared to him only as the pressure of a higher power, not
the power of something higher. Nevertheless one has to say that Goethe
understood, with a unique affinity, the indifference of the powerful person to the
consequences of his making of history. To the onlooker this affinity lies in the
shared distance of both the aesthetic and the political vis-à-vis their own
contemporaries, and this in the perspective of the great disregard for the petty
sphere of the human that seems to derive from the consciousness of the
contingency of being contemporaries. To make history, to subjugate it [to
oneself] as something that can be made, can also be based on an attitude of
uninvolvement [Gleichgültigkeit].
Thus, with Chancellor von Müller, on March 6, 1828, Goethe comes to speak of
the conqueror of Napoleon. It is absurd, he says, to reproach Wellington for his
striving for power; one should rather be glad that he had finally received the
position that was appropriate for him. It was surely legitimate, now, for one who
had conquered India and Napoleon to rule over a paltry island. And then, by two
intermediate

 Page 488

steps, Goethe comes back to himself: "He who possesses the highest power is
right. One must bow down before him respectfully. I have not lived so long in
order to concern myself about world history, which is the most absurd thing
there is; whether this or that person dies, this people or that one perishes, is all
the same to me; I would be a fool to concern myself about it." 31To compare
oneself to the conqueror of Napoleonas his conqueror oneself, if only a
conqueror in the exchange of lookssurpasses the sequence of self-comparisons
with the emperor. The terrible fascination of an indifference [Gleichgültigkeit]
that the poet is only able to simulate aesthetically, but which he once credited
himself with, as a doer of mental deeds, in his comparison of himself with
Prometheus, has found its formula.
We could consider ourselves fortunate if the Weimar schoolmaster Johann
Daniel Falk were more reliable, because then we would have a report of Goethe's
utterances about Napoleon from a time in the immediate vicinity of the meeting
in Erfurt. On October 14, 1808, which is the date Falk gives for his conversation
with Goethe, the czar had arrived in Weimar. What Falk reports is informative
on account of the aesthetic parallel: " . . . Goethe suggested that Napoleon
directed the world according to pretty much the same principles by which he
directed the theater. He found it quite normal that Napoleon has a ranter like
Palm or a pretender like d'Enghien shot in the head, so as once and for all to
deter the publicwhich cannot wait out the time, but interferes troublesomely
everywhere with the genius's creationsby a striking example." Napoleon
becomes a metaphor for the way in which Goethe, as theater director, was
accustomed to dealing with his audience. Falk immediately lets his account go
over into direct speech: "He is contending with the circumstances, with a spoiled
century, in the midst of a spoiled people. Let us count him fortunate, him and
Europe, that he himself, with his grand colossal world, plans, is not
spoiled."32The man who had wanted to draw Goethe into the world of the
French theater emerges, for himalways only on the condition that we can trust
Falk's accountas an outstanding representative of this theater-world. He takes
"everything completely seriously, even the French theater, which, with its
Roman characters and its great maxims, necessarily attracts him like a sort of
regents' school, and has to attract a spirit like his. . . . Napoleon sits just as
attentively before Caesar as if he were presiding over a criminal trial." This can
hardly have been invented, since it is consistent

 Page 489

with the reliable report that there had been conversation between Napoleon and
Goethe about Voltaire's César and the possibility of a new drama about Caesar.
The destiny that politics was henceforth supposed to be was, in its original
model instance, a theatrical authority.
Was the 'primal scene,' the meeting in Erfurt, also a theatrical scene? That is a
question that one does not easily get free of, as is always the case when what is
at issue is the difference between reality and the stages of its disappearance, or
its negations. Was Saint Helena the first reality? For Nietzsche, I may remind the
reader, Goethe was "a convinced realist," and it was to that convinced realist that
Napoleon, at their encounter, was supposed to have presented himself as "that
ens realissimum." That personalizes his want of reality, as Nietzsche, in his
search for repetitions of the Renaissance type, would naturally do; but the
personalization was after all, no doubt, only necessary and convincing for
Goethe because it was under this name and proceeding from this will that reality
had suddenly caught up with him. What is real is always only what is not, or is
no longer, unreal. If I wanted to express this in a different language from my
own, I would have to say that the reality principle is always effective only to the
extent that the pleasure principle has already successfully installed its world of
wish fulfillment. That was uniquely the case with Goethe; the Promethean's own
special world had set up its idols without any resistance in the hermetically
protected sphere of Weimar. How else could his glimpse into the abyss of the
necklace affair have been able to induce such dreadful presentiments?
The indication that points most clearly, in this context, to the theme of "realism"
is the dating of his marriage to Christiane to the day of the battle at Jena and the
plundering of Weimar. This day had made Goethe experience, and experience in
the person of Christiane, what "realism" meant when one's life and personal
world were at stake. She defended the helpless Olympian, with a fortification
made of things from the kitchen and the cellar, against the mad-for-plunder, out-
of-control soldiers. The Duchess Luise was to demonstrate the same thing, on
another plane, the next day, by courageously standing up to the conqueror. By
doing so she also, incidentally, saved the office and the livelihood of Goethe, the
minister of state. 33
Goethe came to terms with these realities only reluctantly. Christiane's name is
missing from his diary on October 14, where, after "Burning, plundering, terrible
night," we read, in a forced impersonal

 Page 490

construction, "Preservation of our house through steadfastness and good luck."

Whose? Who had the one and who had the other? And on the following day the
extent of his responsibility is again characterized quite clearly, although the new
fixed point is, at first, only indistinctly recognizable: "At court on account of the
kaiser's arrival. Went home. Occupied with securing the house and the family."
The actual date of the marriage ceremony in the palace church is October 19. In
the diary we find only the single word: "Trauung" [marriage ceremony]. It is
evident that two years later, when Christiane succeeded in pushing Goethe to
travel to Erfurt and thus to meet Napoleon, she only completed what had begun
on the day of [the battle of] Jena. She embodied the reality to which Goethe
hadso much as a matter of courserefused to give himself. Reality turns out to be
that which, in an aesthetically conceived life of exclusively internal consistencya
self-created life with Promethean pretensionsbreaks in, as something foreign,
from outside. The presence of Christiane in his life was also a reality, which,
while he had of course brought it about, he had not himself 'created,' one that he
would have had to take upon himself and that he was not prepared to take upon
himself even against the influence of his mother. He accepted her at the moment
"when he saw that the self-created world in which he dreamed and wrote his
poetry was not the real world at all.'' 34
Napoleon's instantaneous and conclusive appearance [momentane Evidenz], as a
reality that put in the shade every prior aesthetic reality, dates from Jena, not
from Erfurt. From this point of view, Erfurt is already a piece of reestablishment
of identity: The new ens realissimum turned out to be one that had read Werther
seven times and that wanted to prevail on its author to write a new work. The
refoundation of this identity is already a retraction of the crudest 'realism.' The
saying that was coined in view of the battlefield of Jena, that only a god could
withstand a godwhich had been nothing but a way of expressing futility, since
there was no god to be found who could be summoned up against this godnow
becomes the image of a limiting case that is already approached by one who is
able to hold his own against the gaze of the omnipotent one.
Up until Napoleon's intrusion, Weimar had been, for Goethe, the epoch of the
identification of aesthetic fiction with the form of his life. Access to power,
through his influence on Carl August, had enabled him to set up a world
according to his design and his will, a world

 Page 491

in which, amazingly enough, his rules of the game were accepted, as they were
in the theater. No one has ever been able to tailor so much to his own measure
the external reality in which he has to live. The accounts of those who
approached this sphere from outside or entered it give an impression of
uncomprehension, consternation, an eerie feeling.
Karl Ludwig von Knebel, who had arranged Goethe's first encounter with Prince
Carl August of Weimar and had thus become a founding figure of the Weimar
world, gives an account, in a sketch for an autobiography, of Goethe's arrival in
Weimar in 1775: "He still wore the 'Werther' get-up, and many followed his
example in their clothing. He still had some of the spirit and the manners of his
novel in himself, and this was attractive. Especially to the young duke, who
thought he could thereby achieve spiritual kinship to his young hero. Many
eccentricities went on at the same time that I don't want to describe, but which
did not give us the best reputation in the outside world. Even so, Goethe's
imagination was able to give them a shimmer of genius." 35
In his Briefe eines reisenden Franzosen über Deutschland an seinen Bruder zu
Paris [Letters of a traveling Frenchman about Germany, to his brother in Paris],
which appeared anonymously in 1784, a certain Kaspar Riesbeck reports on
Goethe's appearance in Weimar: "In every area he advocatesas a matter of
principlewhat is unadorned, natural, conspicuous, daring, and fantastic. He is
just as much an enemy of the civil police as he is of the rules of aesthetics. His
philosophy borders pretty closely on Rousseau's. . . . When the feeling of his
genius awoke in him, he went about with a brimless hat and unshaven, wore a
quite peculiar and conspicuous costume, and wandered through woods,
hedgerows, mountain, and valley on a path that was entirely his own; his gaze,
his gait, his language, his staff, and everything declared an extraordinary
man."36
And the indiscreet archaeologist Karl August Böttiger writes about this phase:
"Goethe the genius could not capture his 'world spirit' (a vogue word of the time)
in a narrow 'sweat hole' (vulgarly, a town). Bertuch had to relinquish his garden
next to the park to him, and there he set up his genius's housekeeping. A certain
community of property created a resemblance between the geniuses and the
Quakers and Heilandsbrüdern [Moravian Brothers]. . . . During the 'genius'
period

 Page 492

anyone who did not want to trample on order and decorum was called a
philistine." 37
To be sure, the storm and stress had worn itself out since then, especially since
the travels in Switzerland and to Italy. Böttiger noticed that, toothat Goethe
returned from a journey altered each time, "entirely metamorphosed"; but that
was simply in accordance with the fact that he departed on such a journey
precisely because the consistency of his artificial world could no longer be
maintained unbroken: "In general, whenever things began to get doubtful in a
period, Goethe always escaped by means of a journey. . . . " But in those days,
just as today, travels did not confront one with realitycertainly not with one's
own realitybut are rather a device by which to find what will permit one to
recover the damaged coherence. This time a journey was not sufficient to enable
Goethe to master the crisis of his self-created world, although he had the idea in
mindin a lachrymose state in which Heinrich Voss the younger, the teacher of
his son, August, described him as being in the days after Jena. To Voss, Goethe
had been "an object of the most heartfelt sympathy in those sad days": ''I have
seen him shed tears. Who, he cried, will relieve me of house and court, so that I
can go far away?"38He thoughtif one cannot call it traveling this timeof right.
That allows us to infer what Christiane accomplished: to put him face to face
with reality. The fact that Goethe had not been able to marry her was also part of
his deficiency in realism, which characterizes his relationship to women in
general. A married genius, a Prometheus with a family, that would in truth have
been an impediment in this Weimar world, which seemed to be prepared to
accept any illusion.
Goethe considers himself the great experience of every woman with whom he
came in contact. That is why it was so important to him that at least one of these
women, Lili Schönemann, confirmed for him in their later years that he had
actually been this. Her son, Wilhelm von Türckheim, visited him on the very day
of the battle of Jena. Otherwise, Goethe had permitted himself every imaginable
illusion. When, in May 1774, the Kestners' first child arrives, he is the godfather
and considers it entirely a matter of course that Werther's Lotte must want the
child to be called Wolfgang. He writes this to the father, too, completely without
embarrassment, even saying that he wants the child to have his name "because
he is mine."39He seems not to have taken cognizance of the fact that the child
did not receive his

 Page 493

name; nor of the fact that none of the subsequent Kestner children was named
Wolfgang. The episode stands here as an indicator of the fact that the confusion
of tactlessness with freedom rests on a deficiency in his relation to reality.
The relationship with Frau von Stein was carried on, on Goethe's side, in a
completely imaginary manner. She reclaimed and destroyed all the letters that
she had addressed to Goethe. We possess his romance with her in the form of his
letters. Thus he made literature, for himself, of his relations with women, but
wherever the reality did not want to harmonize with the coherence of the story,
he did not allow it to impinge on him. Thatwe need to realize hereis how
powerful the closure of his world was against what was not anticipated, not
neutralized by aesthetic means, in it.
Goethe's weakness vis-à-vis reality did not escape even admiring women. It
manifested itself as a susceptibility to being disturbed precisely by the
elementary realities. Henriette yon Knebel, the sister of Goethe's friend, made
the remarkably clear-sighted observation that in this Weimar, "where life springs
from pulsing veins and action and productivity rise to the highest efforts," one
was not permitted to speak of dead people or of death. She generalizes this, in
regard to Goethe, into the statement (which sums up this aspect [of our subject]):
"But in the so-called enjoyment of his full life, nothing is permitted to disturb
him." 40One can confidently take that as a definition of the level from which the
imminently impending experiences, the great interruption and agitation caused
by Napoleon, the days of Jena and Erfurt, depart.
Only this consideration allows us to approach, once more, the question what the
'content' of that conversation on October 2, 1808, may really have been, if it
obliged Goethe to exercise so much restraint in revealing details. Goethe acts ac
discreetly as if he were the guardian of a mystery. But was he really? Was there
in fact more there to relate than what his associates had already extorted from
him? My thesis is that, seen from the point of view of its 'content,' this
conversation had no importance. Or, to put it differently, that any content had to
be unimportant in comparison to the sheer fact of this confrontation and of
Goethe's holding his own in the face of the 'disturbance' that culminated in it.
Goethe himself once admitted that his memory left him in the lurch. The context
in which he does this is significant. Napoleon made him

 Page 494

laugh, he tells Boisserée, in fact so much that he felt he had to apologize for itbut
he is "no longer able to say what it actually had to do with." 41We seldom hear
of a Goethe who laughs, just as, in other cases as well, it is fitting for gods not to
laugh. But that he should no longer have been able to remember the cause of his
slip, only seven years later, is only credible if it was so insignificant that it would
have had to embarrass him. And what he wraps in the cloak of 'significance,'
which stimulates so much curiosity, will have been the same.
Chancellor von Müller reports that on June 9, 1814, Goethe was angry at what
had been related after Napoleon's first departure into confinement on Elba; the
French general, Koller, will have told the truth about that just as little as he,
Goethe, had told it about his interview with Napoleon. He had never "told it
candidly." But why not? Nothing is less convincing than what Goethe adds on
that subject: " . . . so as not to promote endless gossip."42
What Goethe avoided when he kept silent was what we would call
demythologizing. One who demythologizes runs the risk of having nothing left
when he is done. Or of having only that formal limit-value that Bultmann,
working on the New Testament, called the kerygma, which is absorbed, sooner
than anywhere else, in the propositionwhich says everything and nothingthat "I
am the one" [Ich bin es]. If one applies that, without blasphemous exaggeration,
to Goethe's confrontation with Napoleon, then one is immediately struck by the
symmetry that arises on both sides of the front. For Napoleon, too, had a
momentary experience of evidence, when he said of Goethe, after the latter's
exit, laconically but unsurpassably: "Voilà un homme!" [There is a man!].43On
Goethe's side, the most convincing statements are those that are able or that
attempt still to communicate the 'indivisible' [punktuelle] impression [that
Napoleon made on him]. Eckermann transmitted Goethe's most concise and
forceful formulation with regard to Napoleon, which itself concludes with a
claim to exhaustiveness in its treatment of its subject: "He was something [Er
war etwas], and one saw by looking at him that he was, that was all."44
How did this remark come about? Eckermann tells Goethe that on the previous
day he had seen the duke of Wellington arrive at the inn in Weimar, on his way
to Petersburg. Goethe asks for an account of what he saw, and Eckermann
provides it in a manner that is full of admiration, and with the unmistakable aim
of finding the adequate formula for the unrepeatable singularity of what Schiller
had once

 Page 495

called, in a letter to Goethe, the "total impression." He says, "And one only
needs to look at him once, never to forget him, he produces such an impression."
The way Goethe reacts to this shows immediately that he has to deplete the
power of the other's experience in order to prevent the uniqueness of his own
experience from being diminished. It sounds almost derogatory: "So you have
seen one more hero . . . and that always signifies something." There were rows
of heroes of this rank, even if in Weimar they were only seen in transit. This act
of leveling off unfailingly leads to Napoleon, whom Eckermann has to regret
never having seen. "'Of course,' Goethe said, 'that was also worth taking the
trouble. That compendium of the world!' 'He must have looked like something?'
I asked. 'He was something [Er war es],' Goethe answered, 'and one saw by
looking at him that he was; that was all.'"
This "that was all" still holds even now, almost two decades later, for the
promise that Goethe had already given Riemer on October 4, 1808: "About the
Erfurt events. His meeting the emperor. That he would write down what he
discussed with him. He, as it were, dotted the 'i' for him." No, there was nothing
more to say beyond this "He was something."
Only this shrinking of the momentary evidence to its atomon eidos [indivisible
form] gives it empirical incontestability. No defeat, no absurdity, no disclosure
of the real terrors that had been inflicted on the peoples could extract Goethe
from this constellation, which he had entered when he regained his identity.
After Napoleon's fall he maintains a loyalty whose price was alienation from his
contemporaries, who were breathing sighs of relief at their release.
Napoleon saw in Goethe the author of Werther, the prospective creator of an
imperial theater; Goethe approaches Napoleon's downfall from the point of view
of the theater, summoning up his old art of unreality as a means of self-defense.
In the Tag- und Jahreshefte [Daily and annual notebooks, later published as
Annalen, Annals] for 1815, he describes in detail events in his theater in
Weimar, which had just, "at this epoch, reached the highest point attainable by
it." The distance and the impersonality of the language make it easy for him to
"go out from the restricted boards of the stage to the great arena of the world,"
making a transition to Napoleon's last coup, seen as a theatrical effect:
"Napoleon's return terrified the world; we had to live through a hundred days
that were pregnant with destiny. . . . The battle of

 Page 496

Waterloo, which was reported in Wiesbaden, to great terror, as being lost, was
then announced, to surprisedindeed dizzyingjoy, as having been won." 45
The word we, which implicates himself, is withdrawn at the end. But above all,
the emperor who, in Erfurt, had anticipated a Death of Caesar by Goethe, a more
noble one than Voltaire's, has himself, as the adventurer of the Hundred Days,
become a theatrical figure, at least in metaphor. Boisserée already had the
suspicion that the audience in the governor's palace at Erfurt had been a great
theatrical production intended by Napoleon to impress the author of Werther, but
that the latter had either not noticed or not wanted to notice the artificiality of the
display.46
Saint Helena is the reduction to the hard core of reality. The picture of the
humiliated and finally dying emperor is, for Goethe, the terrible application of
the saying about politics as destiny to its author. Only in this connection does it
become clear that his continual relating of himself to Napoleon had not only
been self-exaltation. When, in November 1823, he is taken ill with a severe
convulsive cough that forces him to pass days and nights in his armchair,
Eckermann asks him one morning how he feels: "'Not quite as poorly as
Napoleon on his island,' was the groaning answer."47
At the beginning of the year 1830 the mortal illness of the grand duke's mother
causes him to remember her courageous confrontation of Napoleon after the
battle of Jena. Goethe falls silent for a while when he calls to mind this scene, a
scene that had rescued the continuity of his existence together with the
continuance of the state on which it depended. But his sympathetic recollection
concerns the man on the rocky island. The terrors of Jena and thereafter seem to
fade, in view of the humiliations of the prisoner, which can be exhibited in an
external circumstance. Goethe mentions the emperor's worn dark-green uniform,
which, for lack of appropriate cloth on the island, could not be replaced and
finally, at Napoleon's request, had to be reversed. "What do you say to that? Is it
not a perfectly tragic feature?" So the tragic quality did still exist after all, and in
fact not as the antithesis of politics but as its consequence. As though to confirm
that theory of tragedy, Goethe is prepared to feel pity: "Is it not moving to see
the master of kings at last reduced to such a point that he has to wear a uniform
that has been reversed?" But this time Goethe does not overlook the "terrible
man": "And yet, when one considers that

 Page 497

such an end struck a man who had trodden on the life and happiness of millions,
then the fate that befell him is after all still very mild; it is a nemesis that cannot
avoid still being a little considerate, in fiew of the greatness of the hero." 48
The reflection concludes with a 'moral' that cannot, after all, make up its mind to
make the moral realm into a standard against which to measure Napoleon:
"Napoleon gives us an example of how dangerous it is to elevate oneself into the
absolute and to sacrifice everything to the carrying out of an idea." Dangerous,
here, is a vague term, the least definite one that could have been found.
Whatever danger of downfall may always have been close to it, to make the
demonic phenomenon or allow it to be made into a moral one is something that
Goethe does not permit himself or others. That will be what he meant when he
responded, already, to the news of Napoleon's abdicationby which, to the
surprise of those who were present, he was "somewhat unpleasantly affected"
by saying that he had not esteemed or loved Napoleon so much as he had
regarded him "as a remarkable natural phenomenon." The "natural" quality here
is not so much a justification as a withdrawal from moral characterization.
Goethe once praised Victor Hugo's poem "Les deux îles,'' where lightning struck
the hero from thunderclouds below him. That, he said, was the way it happened
in the mountains.49
In this regard Goethe had reached far ahead of his experience when, still before
the defeat at Jena, in an action that he himself saw as singular, he had opposed
the moralization of the phenomenon of Napoleon. This earliest expression of an
opinion regarding the approaching danger of a colossus needs to be recounted.
Goethe was in Jena in order to unpack a shipment of rocks from Karlsbad just
when the Prussian Colonel yon Massenbach wanted to have a manifesto against
Napoleon printed. The printer and others were afraid of the wrath of the
approaching conqueror and tried to persuade the grand duke's minister to
intervene. The publication was "nothing less than a moral manifesto against
Napoleon," Goethe remembers, which one could easily have translated into an
expression of the "vexation of a deceived lover at his unfaithful mistress," but
which, as such, was "just as ridiculous as it was dangerous." As only a document
of the disappointment of great expectations could be: Napoleon had not
performed what one had expected of him, "when one fancied it necessary to
impute moral and human objectives to this extraordinary man."50

 Page 498

A document, then, not so much of political opposition as of miscalculation in

regard to the true nature of this phenomenon. Goethe is able to prevent the
proclamation from being published; one single time he transgresses, as he
himself says, the law that he had given himself "not to meddle in public
disputes." Thus the demonic proclaims itself by compelling him to decree a state
of emergency permitting exceptions to his own rule of life. The farewell to
Prometheus becomes serious. Goethe's personal aesthetic world can no longer be
kept free from the inroads of the reality that is alien to it.
Finally he found in the figure on the rocky island the confirmation of the fact
that the role of Prometheus had been definitively taken from him and brought by
another, beyond its aesthetic quality, to an end. We have Riemer's precious notes
from March 8, 1826, in which the convergence of the two great lines under the
names "Prometheus" and "Napoleon" is attested. "Why does he do penance?"
Goethe asks, looking back at Saint Helena, and goes on: "What did he bring
men, like Prometheus?" The answer is not unambiguous, but begins, with
evident deliberation, with an ''also," to wit: "Also light: a moral enlightenment."
The forced heir of the Revolution has moved back into the century he came out
of
Goethe, too, seems here to think the thought, which was current at the time, of
the cunning of reasong in history when he makes the demonic man who cannot
be evaluated morally into the enlighteneragainst his will and without his
knowing itof the peoples. He did not 'teach,' but he 'showed': "He showed the
people what they can do. . . . " He revealed the inadequacy of the rulers whom he
defeated, and made it "an object of each person's consideration and interest" to
deal with "man's status as a citizen, his freedom and what affects it: its possible
loss, its preservation, its assertion." If Goethe the Hegelian existed, he would
have to be hidden behind this memorandum of Riemer's. Napoleon the suffering
Prometheus and also Prometheus the bringer of light, with the finest effect of
any conceivable enlightenment, which Goethe ascribes to him with the formula:
"He made each person attentive to himself." 51
This convergence is as far from being accidental as can be imagined. Because as
early as Pandora the figure of the ruler-by-force had adapted itself to the zone of
the Prometheus myth. For the year 1807, in the Daily and Annual Notebooks, he
notes as "the most important undertaking" what he had contributed to a 'muses'
almanac' founded in

 Page 499

Vienna, a journal that according to Goethe's statement should be called Pandora

but actually carried the title Prometheus, and which does contain a dramatic
fragment [by Goethe], Pandora's Return, in 1808. Goethe takes this opportunity
to acknowledge that "the mythological point where Prometheus appears has
always been present in my mind and has become an animated fixed idea."
52This was evidently the main reason not to refuse his participation in an
undertaking with this title, although he had not even been able to retain [the
manuscript of] the "Prometheus" that had been so close to him.
Goethe's sliph is not incidental, because something became possible for him,
under the name of Pandora, that Prometheus's name did not allow: a
transformation, just as violent as it was beneficent, of the original mythical sense
of the gift of the gods, which he no longer allows to cause mischief. Because
their gifts are entirely withdrawn from the criterion of external beneficence.
What had so far held his Weimar world together also had to be able to give
durability to the wider reality in its disturbance. At the beginning of the year
1807 Goethe said the Weimar librarian Karl Ludwig Fernow, whom he had met
in Rome where Fernow was giving lectures on Kant, that now "Germany has
only one great and sacred objectto hold together in the spirit, so as, in the
universal ruin, to preserve most jealously the still uninjured palladium of our
literature, at least. . . . "53
Prometheus can only return by being bound into a configuration that, in view of
external impotence, does not allow aesthetic self-mastery to appear as a sheer
illusion, but rather as the beneficial opportunity to renounce precisely the
illusions of the dependence of happiness or unhappiness on external
circumstances. The name of Prometheus now designates only one aspect of a
reality whose ambivalence, either mastered or to be mastered, can most easily be
characterized, with the catchword of these years, as "balance."
This had already become apparent when, in his great birthday poem for his duke,
"Ilmenau," in 1783, Goethe had once again included the Prometheus figure, with
a changed pretension. In a conversation with Eckermann on October 23, 1828,
he himself interpreted this poem and said that it contained, "as an episode, an
epoch that in 1783, when I wrote it, already lay many years behind us, so that I
could sketch myself, in it, as a historical figure, and carry on a conversation with
myself as I was in earlier years."

 Page 500

The visionary appearance of his own self in the nocturnal forest landscape brings
about a combination of distance with uninterrupted identity. It expresses the
"grave thoughts" that brought with themselves nothing less than "attacks of
regret for various kinds of mischief that my writings had caused." He chows the
duke what emergence from the sturm und Drang period really meant to his
friend: above all, the loss of the concept of aesthetic-creative immediacy, which
admitted no hiatus between will and work, work and effect, pretension and
reality. This becomes the new problem of Prometheus, which gives the figure a
tendency to converge with that of Napoleon, with the "natural phenomenon" that
makes history, that is not able to keep its effects identical with its actions, its
making with what it makes.
The independence that the effect gains, vis-à-vis the work, is expressed for the
first time, in "Ilmenau," through Prometheus, and probably could not be said in
any other way except by appealing to this name. It is no longer the conflict with
Zeus, the forcible insistence on his own world, as against the already existing
one, that is brought out in Prometheus, but rather the elemental difference
expressed in the verses:
"Und was du tust, sagt erst der andre Tag . . . "

[And what you accomplish, only the following day reveals . . .]

We see a new element in the old myth, that of the unconsciousness in the
production of man that prevents Prometheus, in his workshop, from knowing
what kind of a future and history he is preparing therebecause he has
unavoidably to abandon his creatures to themselves. It is the paradox that history
is made, but is not something that one can make.
That is the great disappointment, that the origin, intention, and ingredients do not
decide the fate of what one produces:
Liess nicht Prometheus selbst die reine Himmelsglut
Auf frischen Ton vergötternd niederfliessen?
Und konnt er mehr als irdisch Blut
Durch die belebten Adern giessen?

[Did not Prometheus himself make the pure fire of heaven flow down
into fresh clay, making it divine? And could he pour more than earthly
blood through the quickened veins?]

 Page 501

The poet is still Prometheus, but Prometheus the helplessly chained demiurge,
far from his creatures, for whom even heaven's fire is not able to ensure the
success of the provision that their creator makes for them:
Ich brachte reines Feuer vom Altar;
Was ich entzündet, ist nicht reine Flamme.
Der Sturm vermehrt die Glut und die Gefahr,
Ich schwanke nicht, indem ich reich verdamme.

[I brought pure fire from the altar; what I kindled is not pure flame.
The storm increases the heat and the danger; I do not hesitate as I
condemn myself.]

Only when one puts "Ilmenau" before it does it become comprehensible that the
reanimation of the Sturm und Drang myth of Prometheus in Pandora could not
take place apart from the Napoleon experience. In the operalike primeval
scenery of the play, Prometheus, confronted with the other Titan, Epimetheus, is
no longer the potter who makes man and brings him light, but the despiser of his
own gift to men. The gesture of defiant independence with respect to Zeus and
the nature that belongs to him has been transformed into the tyranny of a harsh
drudgery imposed on smiths, herdsmen, and warriors by this Titan's brutal
authority. His tools and weapons dominate the field. On the side of Epimetheus
are the meditative, reflective, and pleasure-seeking people, as well as the
suffering ones. But Pandora, whom Prometheus had scorned, they have not been
able to keep with them either. Both Titans are now old, and the story of their
distant youth has become mytha story that is also the poet's past and, as is still
the case with every past, cannot be left to itself in forgetfulness. One has to
'work' on it, if it is to continue to be adaptable to life as it goes on.
In the process, Pandora becomes the great reoccupation of the primeval 'layout
of positions' that the Prometheus dramatic fragment and ode had set up. The
migration of the earliest form of culture, the original hut, for which Goethe had
once decided between the classical columned hall and the Gothic arch as the
original pattern, is significant. Now on Prometheus's side there is only the cave,
either natural or artificially excavatedwhile the hut belongs on Epimetheus's
side. Its description sounds like a formula of reconciliation for that old argument.

 Page 502

It is "a serious wooden structure of the oldest style and construction, with
columns made from the trunks of trees." The consequence of this reoccupation is
that Prometheus's demiurgic realm can no longer be identified with the
beginning of culture. The Prometheus world, this combination of caves and
work, has become a crude and coarse underworld, for which the possession of
fire and the working of iron that it makes possible are only the preconditions of
naked deeds of violence and of the harshest drudgery.
One theme of the "Prometheus" ode continues in the new configuration too: the
immovability of the earth. But its solidity is now reliability and resistance at the
same time. Thus the song of the smiths at their forges 'celebrates' it:
Erde, sie steht so fest!
Wie sie sich quälen lasst!
Wie man sie scharrt und plackt!
Wie man sie ritzt und hackt!

[The earth stands so firm!

How it lets itself be tortured!
How we scrape and flatten it!
How we scratch and hack it!]

The ancient principle of terra inviolata [inviolability of the earth] shines

through, in view of the enormity of the powers that are required in order to
extract the means for making tools and weapons from what is inviolable. The
smiths' verse ends with the unique lines:
Und wo nicht Blumen blühen,
Schilt man sie aus.

[And where flowers do not bloom,

We bawl them out.]

There is no longer a triumph of the demiurge. He is not the author and protector
of men, but their taskmaster. The song of the smiths ends with an allusion to the
theft of fire; but now it only signals subjection: to do the work quickly and stir
the fire because he who brought it rightly demands that it be used.
This constellation compellingly demands the next and most important
reoccupation: The father is no longer Zeus, against whom the man-making potter
rebels, but Prometheus himself, against whom there is no longer any defiance,
but to whom all power submits:

 Page 503
Sieht's doch der Vater an,
Der es geraubt.
Der es entzündete,
Sich es verbündete. . . .

[After all, the father is watching,

He who stole it.
He who kindled it
and bound it to himself. . . . ]

Prometheus did not bring fire to men as a favor, but bound it to himself as a
means by which to exercise his power over themhe took command of the
prerequisite of their survival. Even if the smiths call Prometheus the father, the
position of the son is now filled differently: by Philerus, who, in the plan of the
work (which was not carried out), represents, together with the daughter of
Epimetheus and Pandora, 54the next generation, which no longer faces the
primeval dilemma of defiance or submission. Enthusiasm for the sons' defiance
has disappeared.
But they too begin with violence. Epimetheus has to rescue Epimeleia from
Philerus's clutches. He has a different paternal role from that of Zeus in the early
ode. He has to resist the foreign force that Prometheus cannot restrain in his own
son, although he threatens him with the chains with which Zeus had had him
fettered on the Caucasus:
Denn wo sich Gesetz,
Wo Vaterwille sich Gewalt schuf, taugst du nicht.

[For where law and paternal will have provided themselves with force,
you are no match for them.]

What once appeared as Zeus's exercise of arbitrary power against the creative
race of Prometheus and his men has now become the taming coercion of
legitimate power, which alone is able to arrest the original savagery of new
species. Now Prometheus asserts for himself, without reflection, what he had
once proudly and defiantly disregarded. When Philerus begs him to loosen his
grip, and promises that his presence will be respected, Prometheus demands a
more comprehensive submission, one that continues in his absence as well: "A
good son honors his father's absence."
On the other side of the stage there is no need to extort by force what
Prometheus the son, in the Sturm und Drang period, had contested

 Page 504

above all and in every case, when Epimeleia says to Epimetheus after he has
rescued her from the hands of Philerus: "Oh, you father! After all, a father is
always a god!" When Epimeleia and Philerus us are supposed to be thought of,
at the end of the play, as being united as the ancestors of future generations, their
mode of life will be based on (in the first case) the confirmation and (in the other
case) the successful application of paternal power. The principle on which myth
is constructed, the repetition of prototypical patterns as the ritual of
reoccupation, determines the way Goethe reaches back to his youthful theme of
the conflict of gods.
The cave is a demiurgic space. Insofar as it is a way of screening off everything
natural and everything organic, it is the space both of shadows and imagesas in
Plato's mythand of the manufactured world of technical products, in the widest
sense. Endless industry is the requirement in the caves belonging to Prometheus,
who now sees that something entirely different and unexpected has arisen from
the preservation of the human race that he brought about: something radically
one-sided that goes beyond all the requirements of self-preservation. Even the
rocks, which are knocked down by means of levers in order, through the process
of smelting, to multiply everyone's strength a hundredfold as tools, are not
allowed to resist being compelled to be useful Prometheus praises his smiths,
after their chorus, for having preferred to everything else the one element that
belongs to their underworld. Such "partiality" befits the active person:
Drum freut es mich, dass, andrer Elemente Weft
Verkennend, ihr das Feuer über alles preist.

[Therefore I am glad that, not appreciating the value of other elements,

you praise fire above everything.]

Vulcanismi has assumed the form of the reorganization, pushed forward by

human hands, of stuff that accumulated in the Neptunist mannerstuff that taken
by itself, without the influence of light, air, and water, represents only naked
sterility. 55The renunciation of the light of day, the turning of one's gaze into the
caves, to anvil and fire, is a way of warding off all distraction, an unrelenting
hard life of demiurgic concentration.
Remember that Goethe wanted to write an allegory of doing without, to describe
a world in which, after Pandora's disappearance and before her return, the divine
is not present. The origin of fire in heaven has

 Page 505

been forgotten, and a new realism in the assessment of man defines the scene.
Gifts from a higher source, the mere lights of the Enlightenment, are nothing to
this race of troglodytes. From the caves come the means employed in exercising
power; the scarcely tamed fire of the forges becomes the power to destroy huts.
It is the world in which Napoleon had become possible and would soon meet
Goethe. In Pandora, the Titan is drawn as a Napoleonic figure. Long before
Napoleon will become Prometheus, Prometheus would have become Napoleon.
True, he does not call to arms, but his decision is contained in what one of the
herdsmen objects to the smiths:
Doch nah und fern
Lässt man sich ein,
Und wer kein Krieger ist,
Soll auch kein Hirte sein.

[But near and far, people meddle, and he who is not a warrior should
not be a herdsman either.]

Prometheus is guided by this appeal in instantly converting the smiths'

production:
Nur zu Waffen legt mir's an,
Das andere lassend, was der sinnig Ackernde,
Was sonst der Fischer yon euch fordern möchte heut.
Nur Waffen schafft!

[Make weapons your only object, for me, abandoning other things
whatever the thoughtful tiller of the soil or fisherman may want from
you today. Make only weapons!]

The reason for thiswhich sounds strange coming from the mouth of the potter
who, having made man, was barely able to keep his creatures aliveis the tightly
packed overpopulation of the earth. Thus, with an explicit reference to the fact
that this is the creator speaking to his creatures, they are challenged to struggle
for existence, to gain preponderant power (some of them) over others:
Drum fasst euch Wacker, eines Vaters Kinder ihr!
Wer falle? stehe? kann ihm wenig Sorge sein. . . .
Nun ziehn sie aus, und alle Welt verdrängen sie.
Gesegnet sei des wilden Abschieds Augenblick!

 Page 506
[So make yourselves brave, you children of one father! He cannot be
much concerned about who falls and who remains standing. . . . Now
they are taking the field, and they are ousting everyone. Blessed be
the moment of the fierce departure!]

Goethe's reinterpretation of Pandorathe most violent of his recastings of mythsis

guided by the fundamental idea that everything that happens in her absence and
with the transient license resulting from her hiddenness becomes an episode. The
recasting tends toward the pattern of a 'philosophy of history.' The extremes of
man's potential are revealed in reality only as a result of loss of power by the
superhuman agency that alone could force them together. In this interim the
Titans, Prometheus and Epimetheus, are not equally capable of becoming aware
of the way they are confined by their role in an episode. It is only the
contemplative partner who perceives what they are deprived of. This is not a
perception that is universal among mankind. It is only for that reason that the
increase of power can remain dynamic, dazzled by its progress. Prometheus's
children and servants, the smiths, warriors, and herdsmenthe demiurgic, martial,
and driving fundamental types of the vita activa [active life]depend, it is true, on
Pandora's return, but they do not know this, they cannot acknowledge der Liebe
Glück, Pandorens Wiederkehr [the happiness of love, Pandora's return]. The
"demonic" is still entirely in force as the industriousness that prevents one from
recognizing any limits. Pandora's remaining away conditions this world and is
conditioned by it. Her return would be sheer surprise, that is, a mythical and not
a historical event. The proceedings that men go through with themselves cannot
give her a point of entry. The rubric over her return is: "Gabe senkt sich,
ungeahnet vormals" [The gift descends, unsuspected in advance].
Could Goethe demonstrate this conversio [conversion], or does everything, in
the leap into myth, remain just the business of the gods? The conclusion of the
first part, which alone was completedbut also what we know about the second
partleaves that an open question. Contrary, however, to everything that is left
undecided, is the single dramatic event of the play: the self-judgment of Philerus,
who, having injured his betrothed, Pandora's daughter, in a rage, hurls himself
into the sea. Philerus's fall and his rescue are framed by the peculiar doubled
allegory of the appearance of the false and the true dawn.

 Page 507

While Prometheus is seeking to console his brother, who is inconsolable on

account of Pandora, and directs his attention to what he supposes is the dawn, he
suddenly realizes what is really happening there: There is a fire in the woods and
in the homes of men. It is the same fire that the Titan brought to them, and that
he knew in its strength only from the smiths' forges.
This is the moment in which the thoughtful Epimetheus, in his soul's suffering,
fails, while Prometheus is able to bring his violent troops quickly to the center of
the fire. Before they wage war in distant lands, they are still to be helpful to their
neighbors near at hand. The song of the warriors celebrates the Prometheids'
indifference between destruction and protection, between a looting expedition
and an expedition of assistance. But in what is so much a matter of indifference
to his followers, Prometheus recognizes something new. It is not only the desired
Dienst der Hochgewalt [service of great power] but also something appropriate
to his mythical character: "Und brüderlich bringt würdge Hilfe mein Geschlecht"
[And my race, in brotherly fashion, provides worthy help]. After the mere
illusion of dawn, Eos [Dawn] may now really break, in order, with her first
glance over land and sea, to perceive Philerus's fate and report it to his father.
The father wants to restore the self-condemned son to life by the demiurge's
quick artifice. Eos prevents him from doing this, because it is only by the will of
the gods that a metamorphosis of an unsuccessful life into a new one can
succeed. When Eos keeps Prometheus from exercising his unsanctioned will, a
break with the Prometheids' Titanic past becomes possible and the union with
Epimeleia, to establish a post-Titanic mankind, is ushered in. In comparison to
the apotheosis of Philerus, it was only an incidental twist that Prometheus sent
his violent followers to his brother's aid; but the episode prevents Eos's keeping
him from reviving his son from forcing upon him the same quietism that is the
permanent condition of his brother's waiting for Pandora.
This ambiguity is also evident in the conclusion, where Eos sends the father of
men away. On the one hand, this is a changed Prometheus, who expresses a loss
of pleasure in the demiurgic enterprise and an inclination toward his brother
Epimetheus's mode of existence.
Neues freut mich nicht, und ausgestaltet
Ist genugsam dies Geschlecht zur Erde.

[New things do not delight me, and this race is adequately equipped
on earth.]

 Page 508

The realism of palpable usefulness, which had emerged from the smiths' caves,
has suddenly changed into melancholy over the losses that every day has
undergone in what it no longer is and, in relation to its expectations, can no
longer be. Prometheus's resignation is Epimethian, distrustful of the cheerfulness
of the generation whose development he has forced:
Also schreiten sei mir Kinderleichtsinn
Und mit rohem Tasten in den Tag hinein.
Möchten sie Vergangnes mehr beherzgen,
Gegenwärtges, formend, mehr sich eignen,
Wär es gut für alle; solches wünscht ich.

[So they stride, with childish thoughtlessness and with rough trial and
error, into the day. If they would take past things more to heart and,
shaping, appropriate present things more, it would be good for every-
one; such things I would wish for.]

It is a wish for the unification of the divided Titanic tribes.

This reformed Prometheus does not have the last word. Fading Eos, who has to
yield to Helios [the sun], speaks it. Eos has still been able to disclose to
Prometheus the vision of the rescue from floods and fire of the Titans' children,
who are sure to receive the gift from the heavens that their fathers' going astray
had compelled them to do without. Here, the principle of pure grace, embodied
in Pandora's return, governs:
Gleich vom Himmel
Senket Wort und Tat sich segnend nieder,
Gabe senkt sich, ungeahnet vormals.

[Instantly, from heaven, word and deed descend, blessing; the gift
descends, unsuspected in advance.]

The principle of groundlessness rules. In every age it has led people to expect
that the new man would become a reality precisely when every expectation was
against him. The expectation is not followed, here, by an emergence [of the new
man], if only because Goethe failed to connect the new to the change in
Prometheus: Philerus's father could still have punished, but could no longer have
saved him.
So the last words that Eos combines with his ''Fahre wohl, du Menschenvater!"
[Go well, you father of men!] are once again a warning

 Page 509

not to interfere in the new course of history. The meeting of man's real needs
should be left to the gods:
Gross beginnet ihr Titanen; aber leiten
Zu dem ewig Guten, ewig Schönen,
Ist der Götter Werk; die lasst gewähren.

[You Titans make a great beginning, but to guide (men) to the eternal
Good and Beautiful is the work of the gods; do not interfere with it.]

This is the complete revocation of what Goethe had once connected with the
name "Prometheus." The attempt to maintain an identity on the strength of the
antithesis of his original self-definition now requires a predominant Pandora, and
still more: a pantheon, an agency of the separation of powersin Goethe's new
favorite word, of "balance."
It is obvious that Prometheus has no business in the plan of the second and final
part of the allegory. While that is not the reason, it is certainly a symptom of the
fact that, as I believe, we can consider ourselves fortunate not to possess the
second part of the play. Pandora's realm, Wilamowitz once enthused, was
identical with the Platonic realm of the Ideas. Whether that is mistaken or
correct, it can scarcely give rise to a feeling of loss. Goethe still noted down the
key words symbolic fullness for Pandora's parousia, in which she was to arrive
with vintagers, fishermen, agriculturists, and herdsmen. What she brings is
exposed, with "happiness and comfort," to every presumption of
commonplaceness. At the end there are "Sitting demons. Science. Art.
Curtain"but between Jena and Erfurt it was easier to speak of doing without
Pandora than of her return.
The sketch of the second part is dated May 18, 1808. It is understandable that a
mere five months later the poet whom Napoleon had asked for a Death of
Caesar no longer found these notes vivid and no longer felt a relation to a
Platonic gift from the gods. The fact that Pandora remained a fragment is itself
indicative: There was still no relief for Prometheus. In the outline there is no
further reference to him. So the expedient is to make the resigned Prometheus
disappear from the tableau.
To have his identity rescued by the tyrant was not, of course, what Goethe
wanted either. Since the Weimar life-world could not, in fact, be preserved
through the crisiswhat would he have wanted, what

 Page 510

would have been his alternative to the days of Jena and Erfurt? Goethe gave his
answer when, in May 1814, Iffland, the director of the royal theater in Berlin,
approached him, as the "foremost man of the German nation," to contribute a
festival play for the celebration of the triumph of the allied monarchs over
Napoleon. Des Epimenides Erwachen [Epimenides's awakening] was first
performed on the anniversary of the entrance into Paris.
Goethe assigns to Epimenides a different gift from Pandora's, the gift of sleep:
Da nahmen sich die Götter meiner an,
Zur Höhle führten sie den Sinnenden,
Versenkten mich in tiefen langen Schlaf.

[Then the gods came to my aid. They took me, in contemplation, to

a cave, and sank me in deep, lasting sleep.]

Sleep is the extreme form of avoidance of reality, of the reduction of its

demands, so as to protect an identity against history's invasion of the protected
sphere of a self-created life. It is not the experience of reality but rather sleep in
the cave, as the extreme figuration of an unmolested, screened-off statemade
aesthetic perhaps by its dreams that is the "inexhaustible source of wisdom." It
is the gods who grant the privilege of sleeping through the crises of history:
Zeiten, sie werden so fieberhaft sein,
Laden die Götter zum Schlafen dich ein.

[In times that will be so feverish, the gods invite you to sleep.]

While the gates before Epimenides's resting place are still being closed, by
genies, the distant thunder of war can already be heard. It is only a thin disguise
for the history that he has just experienced without being granted the favor of
sleeping through it, when Goethe makes the campaigning army appear in the
"costumes of all the peoples whom the Romans had first conquered and then
used as allies against the rest of the world." Here, too, Goethe conceals himself;
if defeated peoples had to appear, then let them at least be those who were
defeated by the Romans. His "predilection for what is Roman," which he once
explained as the result of his having had a prior existence under Hadrianhis
liking for "this great intelligence, this order in every aspect of life. . . " 56was
something that this time he could only show indirectly.

 Page 511

While history takes its turn on the stage, Epimenides dreams of his past or of his
future. With the approach of the army on campaign, the Napoleonic character
appears, the "demonic" in figura [personified], the demon of war itself. His
"delight," he says, is when "the countries round about quake" [beben, as in
Erdbeben, "earthquake"]. Even with this deepest-lying and oldest of his
metaphors, Goethe does not say what he [privately said that he] saw: "the
progress of a demigod from battle to battle and from victory to victory.'' 57But
still he lets it be known that he does not see the renewal as something forced
upon Europe by the [previous] destruction, but rather sees the destruction as a
precondition of the renewal. In the light from the devastating conflagration, he
has the demon proclaim that the field is free for a creative command:
Ein Schauder überläuft die Erde,
Ich ruf ihr zu ein neues Werde.

[A shudder runs through the earth; I call to it a new 'Become!'j]

What is contrary to his whole experience is the poet's operalike wish fulfillment
that the demons appear while he sleepsand perhaps only dreams them. Them,
and the shocks undergone by the earth, which can be so ambiguous in their
significance only in this dream: representing the downfall of an existing world
and the transition to the terrors of the interim, but also the emergence of a new
constitution of reality. With the doubled earthquake, Goethe reduced the impact
of his lifelong anxiety about the stability of the ground. Not only the sleeping
temple priest Epimenides is a self-representation, but also the demon who
appears in the form of a courtier. Who else should possess the faculty of sensing
the imminent earthquake?
Ich fühle sie wohl, doch hör ich sie nicht;
Es zittert unter mir der Boden;
Ich fürchte selbst, er schwankt und bricht.

[I know I feel it, but I cannot hear it; the ground trembles under me;
ven I fear its pitching and breaking.]

To this sensitively attentive demon, even the columns of the temple seem to
sense the earthquake and to make it advisable for him, suspicious of what still
stands, to go into the open center, out of reach of collapsing walls. Even the
stage directions show the attitude to history that the poet, if he cannot be the
sleeper, after all, desires:

 Page 512

"At this moment everything collapses. He stands in silent, open-eyed

contemplation."
How was the courtier able to have a presentiment of the earthquake? We learn
this, in the next scene, from the mouth of the demon of oppression, who appears
in the costume of an Oriental despot and shows appreciation of the preparatory
work done by the demon of cunning. What has been created in the course of long
years of freedom cannot, he says, collapse all of a sudden, when the trumpet of
war sounds, but only if the ground has been carefully prepared for this:
Doch hast du klug den Boden untergraben,
So stürzt das alles Blitz vor Blitz.

[But you have cleverly undermined the ground, and everything collapses
in a flash.]

One remembers what Goethe had written to Lavater as early as 1781, apropos of
Cagliostro's intrigues, about the undermining of the moral and political world
and the preparation of its downfall.
The drama Goethe wrote, as in duty bound, for the celebration of the liberation
[of Germany from Napoleon], reveals in many ways the poet's failure to join in
his contemporaries' rejoicing, a failure for which they were not to forgive him.
Goethe showed them the basic pattern in terms of which he understood the
defeat [of Germany by Napoleon]: The new kingdom of the virtues, which is
proclaimed by allegorical figures without great joy and in a scene that does not
compete, in texture, with those involving the Napoleonic figures, requires a
downfall to go before it. The return of happier circumstances is based on the
same principlethe undermining of the ground on which the Imperial intermezzo
takes placeas was the earlier collapse of the old world. Once again there is a
secret alliance, a conspiracy of virtue to produce this downfall:
Im Tiefsten hohl, das Erdreich untergraben,
Auf welchem jene schrecklichen Gewalten
Nun offenbar ihr wildes Wesen haben. . . .
Doch wird der Boden gleich zusammenstürzen
Und jenes Reich des Übermuts verkürzen.

[Hollow out the deepest level beneath the earthly kingdom in which
those terrible powers now openly carry on their savage doings. . . .
But the ground will suddenly collapse and cut short that kingdom of
arrogance.]

 Page 513

It is the formula of all apocalyptic dreamers, that the old must perish so that the
new can dawn: "Die Welt sieht sich zerstörtund fühlt sich besser . . . [The world
sees itself destroyedand feels better. . . ]. A genius summons Faith, Hope, and
Love, softly to prepare the way for Doomsday. It is the day of judgment for the
demonic conqueror:
Denn jenes Haupt yon Stahl und Eisen
Zermalmt zuletzt ein Donnerschlag.

[For a thunderbolt finally pulverizes that head of steel and iron.]

What had boldly emerged from the abyss, the geniuses (sisters of the virtues)
sing, can, it is true, subjugate half of the world, but it has to return to the abyss.
The demonic, whatever violence it can inflict on the world, in the end succumbs
to the pull of its origin.
The problem with the play has to do with the plausibility of the pairing of the
disastrous and the promising downfall. Does not Goethe subject his audience,
which is jubilating over its freedom, to the irony of all promises of salvation that
depend on downfalls when he makes the demon of oppression himself, emerging
from the ruins of the collapse that was prepared for him, utter the essential
sentence of every eschatological bringer of blessings: "Paradise has arrived!"
Did Goethe still want to avoid what it was, objectively, impossible for him to
avoid: that Epimenides, finally awakening, should nevertheless seem, when he
encounters "the wild chaos of creation," to have less confidence in the rhetoric of
this formula than in the terrible sign of the comet that appears in the heavens?
For he evidently takes the images that passed in review before him while he slept
in the temple for reality, and what the geniuses with their torches now show him
for a "dream full of anxieties." Only when he goes closer, in the torchlight, does
he realize that during his sleep,
. . . ein Gott
Die Erd erschüttert, dass Ruinen hier
Sich aufeinander türmen. . . .

[a god shook the earth, that ruins are piled on top of one another here. . . . ]

He recognizes that reality has had its history and that this has made everything
present strange to him:

 Page 514
So ist es hin, was alles ich gebaut
Und was mit mir yon Jugend auf emporstieg.
Oh, wär es herzustellen! Nein, ach nein! 58

[So everything that I built and that rose with me, from my youth
onward, is gone. If only it could be restored! No, alas, no!]

Even while it celebrates the victory over Napoleon, the play lets one perceive
Goethe's sorrow that, for him, the wish to sleep through the dominion of the
demons, in the role of the priest in the temple, and to avoid the traumatic threat
to the identity of the Promethean ego, had not been fulfilled. He dearly consoles
himself by making Epimenides encounter the mirror-image difficulty of identity,
the difficulty of dealing, after the fact, with the privilege of his history's
interruption by vegetation. The old tablets are broken and no longer legible, and
loud is the lamentation of the failure of memory. Only one song still retains it, a
song that has to be repeated by an invisible chorus; it is like an incantation
against all earthquakes:
Hast du ein gegründet Haus,
Fleh die Götter alle,
Dass es, bis man dich trägt hinaus,
Nicht zu Schutt zerfalle. . . .

[If you have a solid house, beseech all the gods that it should not
crumble into ruins before you are carried out of it. . . .]

Epimenides is full of suspicion that the geniuses who accompany him with their
torches could be demons. But the old man is torn out of his despair over not
being able to bridge the lost time by the martial music of the allied armies, which
are drawing near. The painful scene only reveals what the author is incapable of.
From the repeated "Hinan!Vorwärtshinan!" [Upward!Forward! Upward!] to the
laconic stage directions to the effect that the ruins are now erected again and that
part of the wild invading vegetationmemories of Rome! is left for decoration, he
cannot conclude without making audible some groans and creaks of dutiful
patriotism. Finally Epimenides has to declare that he is ashamed of his hours of
leisure and that it would have been profitable to suffer with the others, who have
now become greater than him, as a reward for their pain. The poet pays tribute to
his triumphant contemporaries. But also to his own dream, because he has
Epimenides set straight by his attendants, who

 Page 515

object that by being preserved undisturbed he has been made capable of a purer
perception, and begins to resemble what the others could only achieve in the
future. In that case the wish-fulfilling dream would already have accomplished
what the age denied to the poet: to know himself to be, in the longed-for
convergence, at least headed in the same direction as his world, and in advance
of it by the painful years between the abysses and earthquakes.

Epilogue
Epimenides is crowded with demons who are not yet really instances of the
"demonic." Goethe will only gradually gain a more definite grasp of the
coloration of that phenomenon. What he will call demonic in Napoleon, and for
which he occasionally offers what are only vague conceptual equivalents,
belongs to the category of the mythical. By this I mean to say only that it
circumscribesdoes not explain, perhaps only gives a name toa potency that has
not been fully analyzed historically. That may be chargeable to the weak
judgment of one fascinated individual. But a whole century of analytical and
descriptive elucidation of the phenomenon by historiography, which cannot
tolerate mythical qualities, leaves, as a remainder that resists the grasp of theory,
something of the kind that the poet at least gave a name to. Goethe's
bewilderment in view of something that he took to be numinous is transformed
into theory's disappointment that the center of the phenomenon, the power
source of its dominance, the derivation of its energies and visions, has at bottom
remained untouched and undiscovered.
Precisely when science itself is not ready to acceptand could not prepare people
forthe narrowness of what is possible for it, the digestion of such
disappointments falls back on mythical delineations. But the myth that theory
thought it had suppressed or reabsorbed has its underground presence: In the
undated outline of the 'typical,' the singularity that could not be cleared up at
least loses its unfamiliarity. Familiarity does not explain anything, but it makes it
possible to deal with this very fact. History can never have the familiarity of
ritual. Where its theory fails, where it remains speechless in the production of
comprehensible connections, and finally where contempt for it can become an
institution, the offer of mythicization always seems to be present. Or can
theoretical rationality itself employ a fundamental

 Page 516

pattern of myth, that of the repetition of the same? In that case this would of
course not yet be the effort of the concept,k but certainly that of the type. The
study of the half-ironic case with which this epilogue is concerned shows the
kind of processeswhich are easily mistaken for mythicizationthat are natural in
this situation.
In a single paragraph of a letter to Arnold Zweig, Sigmund Freud described the
incomparable event that had taken place in June 1986 on the occasion of his
eightieth birthday. "Thomas Mann, who delivered his lecture on me in five or six
different places, was kind enough to repeat it for me personally in my room here
in Grinzing on Sunday the fourteenth." 59We can no longer make the scenewith
this speaker and this listener, at this most terrible time, in this most threatened of
all locationspresent to ourselves in its pregnance. Part of this is also the anything
but coincidental fact that the one of them was in the midst of his greatest epic
work, the Joseph tetralogy, which he had already been writing for more than a
decade, while the other was working on the last of his speculations, and the one
that would probably astonish his contemporaries most of all: the book
(composed of three individual essays), Moses and Monotheism. Both were
contributing, in their own ways, to the myth of a mythless God, who tolerated no
images or stories around him.
One of the preconditions of this great scene of the spirit of the age, which hardly
had another scene comparable to it, is the relationship to Nietzsche that both
partners shared. Nietzsche's ideadirected against all historical 'spirit'
[Geschichtsgeist]of the "recurrence of the same" as the sole way in which reality
occurs (a reality that was supposed to be able to generate its meaning in itself)
stood in the background of their conception of the processes that mankind goes
through. Freud, to be sure, had from a certain point onward refused contact with
this thinker, but only because he knew that, and to what extent, his thinking had
been anticipated there. "In later years I have denied myself the very great
pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche, with the deliberate object of not
being hampered in working out the impressions received in psychoanalysis by
any set of anticipatory ideas." In consequence, he had to be prepared to forgo all
claims to priority in the instances in which the philosopher's intuition had
anticipated the results of laborious investigation.60
Thomas Mann had in fact begun to read Freud only in 1925, although much
earlier material points in this direction and The Magic Mountain

 Page 517

exhibits resistance to the irrationality ofa romanticized natural science. His own
remarks, and the signs of use in the edition of Freud's works in his library, verify
that Totem and Taboo was, for him, the most important of Freud's writings. A
marginal comment that he wrote in Oskar Goldberg's Wirklichkeit der Hebräer
in 1929 already gives the formula for the recovery of myth from the political role
for which it had already visibly been drafted: "Freud's unreactionary emphasis
on what is primitive/unconscious/preintellectual. It cannot be exploited for
wicked purposes." 61In the same year, 1929, Mann gives his first public lecture
on Freud, at the university in Munich: "Freud's Position in the History of
Modern Thought," where he uses Alfred Baeumler's essay on Bachofen as his
example of the opposite type, the "great 'Back! Back!'"l
Both the origins of Freud's Moses and those of Mann's Joseph ultimately go back
to the opinions and speculations about the connection between the psychic life of
the individual and that of peoples that Freud had presented for the first time in
Totem and Taboo. As so often, it is the simultaneity of intellectual developments
that had been worlds apart that seems to remove the moment of the Vienna
meeting in 1936 itself from the realm of contingency and give it the quality of
myth. Almost at the same time as Totem and Taboo, Thomas Mann had
produced the first specimen of his mythicizing procedure of "allusion" and
suspension of time in Death in Venice, in 1911.
Now, there is also a "satyr play" to follow the scene in Vienna: Freud's self-
parody of its consequences. In November of the same year, Freud writes to
Thomas Mann about the pleasant recollection of his visit in Vienna and about his
reading of the new volume of the Joseph story. For him, he says, this fine
experience is past, because he will no longer be able to read the sequel. But in
the course of reading the volume something had formed itself within him that he
would like to call "a construction." He does not take it very seriously, but it has
"a certain attraction" for him, ''something like the cracking of a whip for an ex-
coachman."
The structure of the reflection is, evidently, as follows: If Joseph, in Egypt, had
found guiding principles for his life in the pre-imprinted mythical models of the
patriarchal past, for whom could Joseph, in his turnafter an appropriate phase of
latencyhave been the mythical prototype, "the secret demonic motor"? The
answer is: for Napoleon.

 Page 518

With the shortened procedure that he used successfully only with his historical
and literary patients, Freud analyzes, in Napoleon, a Joseph complex invented
specifically for this case. By way of the 'motor' of the unconscious, the principle
of repetition propels [Napoleon] as the superior strengthcontinuously operating,
dangerously undealt-with, always ready to burst outof the life that has already
been lived, that is formed once and for all. For an onlooker like Freud,
positioned in Vienna in 1936, it is no longer only what the motives,
considerations, or plans of a historical figure were, but, above all, from what
underground or abyss it drew its energies that emerges as the central problem of
history.
The attribute of the 'demonic' surfaces here too when the secret motor of the
Joseph fantasy is 'divined' in Napoleon; but it is now only an item from the
literary vocabulary, a reminiscence of Freud, the reader of Goethe. What is
crucial is that this vague classification of the phenomenon has to leave it in the
neuter, and thus elevates unfamiliarity to an element of its definition (similar, to
that extent, to Rudolf Otto's descriptive neuter terms, numinosum, augustum,
tremendum, and fascinans), while only the giving of a name produces the outline
of and the initial possibility of dealing with something so strange. One has again
before one's eyes what stories that were attached to names and extracted from
names were once able to accomplish, since in our new uneasiness in the face of
what we have not masteredthe exclaves of the unknown in a territory that is
densely occupied by sciencethey still have to accomplish it. In that sense Freud
grasps in his own work, in this late parody, precisely what the century at the
beginning of which it had begun had pursued the most, and had to pursue the
most, because it had forced open an entirely uncanny dimension of 'sheer
dependency.'
Freud developed four analogies that connect the first Napoleon in, as it were, a
subterranean manner, or a subtemporal one, toowith the biblical Joseph.
Bonaparte's problem, in his childhood, was that among a multitude of siblings,
he had not been the first. But the first, the oldest of the brothers, was named
Josef (this is the way Freud spells it). Corsica equips the privilege of the eldest
son with an especially strong sanction. Thus what is, in any case, difficult to deal
withthe forever insuperable human problem that not everyone can be the firstwas
intensified even further. "The elder brother is the natural rival; the younger one
feels for him an elemental, unfathomably deep

 Page 519

hostility for which in later years the expressions 'death wish' and 'murderous
intent' may be thought appropriate. To eliminate Joseph, to take his place, to
become Joseph himself, must have been Napoleon's strongest emotion as a
young child."m
Now the founder of psychoanalysis arrives with one of its great devices, the trick
of "conversion" that was discovered in the Studies on Hysteria. If one is already
so hopelessly lost that one can only wish for the death of one's rival, but cannot
bring it about, then it is more practical, psychologically, to reverse the spear.
Since one cannot become the eldest, that means to leap right out of the sequence
of siblings and seize the father's role, the exercise of which now requires love
instead of hate. Not only is the quantum of energy that has been summoned up
employed in a different manner; an entirely different language is spoken. Since
we possess testimony only in this later language of indulgent brotherly love, the
trick that is imputed to nature becomes entirely a trick of interpretation. That
someone is loved who deserved love so little cannot come about naturally, and
that in turn must have fateful consequences. "Thus the original hatred had been
overcompensated, but the early aggression released was only waiting to be
transferred to other objects. Hundreds of thousands of unknown individuals had
to atone for the fact that this little tyrant had spared his first enemy."
If the literature of his school had not 'forced' entirely different blossomings of
the art of interpretation, one would be tempted already at this point to suggest
that we are present at a self-parody on the part of the master. But only the further
connections of the Corsican to the Joseph archetype free us from any doubt. The
widow (young, it is true, but nevertheless older than himself) whom the general
has to regard it as useful to marry has, to the delight of the analyst, the name
Josephine. However she may treat him and deceive him, through the medium of
her name he fastened to her a piece of his relationship to his elder brother, and so
even this weak character can be sure of his unlimited indulgence and passionate
devotion. What inevitability!
The inventor of psychoanalysis, addressing himself to a historical subject,
necessarily becomes a backward-facing prophet when he extrapolates
Napoleon's Egyptian escapade from the Joseph complex. As far as the
speculative configuration is concerned, Freud here falls in with Kant, who
enjoyed offering his friends, over dinner, the excitement of daring prognoses
about contemporary events. His "con-

 Page 520

jectures and paradoxes" about military operations during the wars of the
Revolution were fulfilled, according to his biographer, Wasianski, just as
precisely "as his great conjecture that there was no gap, between Mars and
Jupiter, in the planetary system. . . . " Kant regarded the news of Napoleon's
landing in Egypt as merely a piece of the sleight of hand that he admired in
Bonaparte, intended to disguise his true intention of landing in Portugal. 62
This shrewd error on the part of a great philosopher is only made intelligible by
Freud's explanation that for people at the time it had to be impossible to gain
rational insight into the actions "of that magnificent rascal Napoleon, who
remained fixated on his puberty fantasies, was blessed with incredible good luck,
inhibited by no ties apart from his family, and made his way through life like a
sleepwalker, until he was finally shipwrecked by his folie de grandeur."63It is
obvious that the most incomprehensible of Napoleon's actions, precisely because
it is this, would be concealed in these formulas and extractable from them.
Napoleon had to go to Egypt. This is not the construction of a convenient
compliment for the author of Joseph: "Where else could one go but Egypt if one
were Joseph and wanted to loom large in the brothers' eyes?" All the reasons
given for this undertaking "were nothing but the willful rationalization of a
fantastic idea."
The climax is not yet complete. Because Joseph had failed in Egypt, he had to
reestablish the conditions under which it became possible for him to behave as
though he had been successful in Egypt. For this, again, a trick of conversion is
sufficient: He had to treat Europe as though it were Egypt, in order to be able to
become the nourisher of his brothers. "He took care of his brothers by making
them kings and princes. The good-for-nothing Jérôme was perhaps his
Benjamin."
Finally Napoleon becomes disloyal to his myth. He renounces the servitude of
attending to the archaic ritual. He becomes a 'realist.' When he rids himself of
Josephine, his decline begins. "The great destroyer now worked on his self-
destruction." The thoughtlessness with which he does something that is not in his
'program'the campaign against Russiais "like a self-punishment for his disloyalty
to Josephine." The great fictions driving from unconscious motivesthe 'as if'
Egypt that is Europe, and the 'as if' father of his brothersare tom out of their
anchorage in the psychic prehistory.
That reads, I already said, like self-parody. But it is also a reciprocation of the
ironic tone that Thomas Mann had given to his Joseph's

 Page 521

repetitions of primeval history. The repetitions, which are embedded in the

security provided by primeval history, easily give up the seriousness of those
primeval stories, which, as it were, 'did not yet know' that they were
prototypical. Freud, too, in his vocabulary, does not take the "classic
antigentleman" Napoleon seriouslyeven though he grants that he was "cut on the
grand scale" 64because he is an imitator, one who is fixated on his role and only
for that reason (literally) falls out of it.
Goethe's vacillation between fascination and condemnation had an entirely
different character. For him the uniqueness of the demonic figure is not yet in
question, not even as a result of the projection [on it] of the ancient Titan. For
Napoleon's convergence with Prometheus is with a figure that has already been
torn free of the myth, both aesthetically and biographically. To be that figure
himself was something that Goethe had to have previously given up on.

Translator's Notes
a. Goethe's wife.
b. The author has continued his discussion of the GoetheNapoleon relationship,
and made more explicit what is involved in the key idea of "delegation," in
"Mon Faust in Erfurt," Akzente, Feb. 1983, pp. 42 57 (on "delegation," see
especially p. 44).
c. Goethe worked for years on a theory of color that he thought was needed in
order to correct a fatal flaw in the (by his time) orthodox Newtonian theory. It
was published as Zur Farbenlehre in 1810.
d. U-topia was coined from Greek roots meaning, literally, "no-place."
e. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols sec. 49, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 554.
f. A member of the volunteer force led by Adolf, Baron von Lützow, in the
"wars of liberation" against Napoleon.
g. List der Vernunft, a central concept in Hegel's philosophy of history.
h. Fehlleistung, what the translators of Freud call parapraxis.
i. On Vulcanism, see translator's note c to part 2, chapter 1.
j. Or "Let there be!" (Fiat), as in Genesis.
k. Anstrengung des Begriffs, by analogy to Hegel's Arbeit des Begriffs, "work of
the concept."

 Page 522

l. Thomas Mann's "Freud's Position in the History of Modern Thought" can be

found in his Past Masters (1933; rptd. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press,
1968), pp. 167ff.; original: Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), vol.
10, pp. 256ff. Alfred Baeumler's "Bachofen essay" was his lengthy introduction
to Der Mythus von Orient und Occident, eine Metaphysik der alten Welt; aus
den Werken von J. J. Bachofen, ed. M. Schroeter (Munich: Beck, 1926).
m. Freud to Mann, November 29, 1936, in Letters of Sigmund Freud (New
York: Basic Books, 1960), p. 432. Subsequent quotations (one slightly revised)
are from pp. 433 434.

 Page 523

4
Ways of Reading the "Extraordinary Saying"
One who, like Knebel, trimmed the light too short, or even snuffed it out, was
never again permitted by Goethe to undertake this task.
Note made by Karl Eberwein
When Goethe says to Eckermann that Napoleon provided an example of "how
dangerous it is to raise oneself into the absolute," he knows that this utterance
also applies to the dream of his own youth. 1Napoleon had finally dared what
Goethe, in his metamorphosis as Prometheus, had believed himself capable of:
to make a world, even though a world already existed. The fact that thisas world
based on one thought and cast in one moldhad, at one point, almost been
achieved was often sufficient to make it seem a matter of indifference that this
world had disintegrated again, and also to consider what it had cost. Despite all
the summoning up of terrors, this attitude can still be sensed in Epimenides'
Awakening.
Because Napolean had now really become Prometheus, right down to being
chained to the rock of Saint Helenaprecisely the divine type that Goethe had
resigned himself to not beinghis memory is conjoined with the "extraordinary
saying" in part 4 of Dichtung und Wahrheit. The saying did not originate in this
passage, but Goethe's comparison of himself to Napoleon is consummated in it
here, as the mythical summation of their incomparable relationship and their
unique existential claims.
This is so because in the final part of Dichtung und Wahrheit, which was just
almost completed [before Goethe's death], the "extraordinary

 Page 524

saying" stands as the culminating point and the final proposition in the
development of the category of the "demonic." Here, because the experience of
that which seemed to enjoy only the impossible and to "reject the possible with
contempt" could be illustrated by Count Egmont, Napoleon is not named.
Goethe only indicates that during the course of his life he has been able to
observe the appearance of the demonic a number of times, "sometimes near at
hand, sometimes at a distance."
When Eckermann had the manuscript of this part in his hands, he pressed Goethe
for final clarity. He noted the different character of the last five chapters within
the whole, chapters that are full of portent in relation to what is to come in this
life, rather than merely recounting what was happening at any given time; in
them one can perceive "a secretly operative power, a sort of destiny, which
tightens diverse threads into a fabric that only future years are to complete."
2Two days later, while dining with Goethe, Eckermann leads the conversation to
this "inexpressible riddle of the world and of life," the demonic. Goethe
confesses that things that cannot be analyzed by understanding and reason are
remote from his nature, but he has to submit to them nevertheless. Napoleon, on
the contrary, had been demonic in nature, "to the highest degree, so that scarcely
anyone else can be compared to him."3Eckermann's further inquiries do produce
names, but they do not clarify the relation between the demonic and the
"extraordinary saying.'' He is fascinated by the question of the power that
demonic people exercise over others, over the mass of people, and even over
nature; but he ignores the statements of the manuscript that he has in his hands,
to the extent that it concerns the overcoming of the demonic beings themselves.
Within the world, Goethe wrote, nothing withstands them, not even the elements
and certainly not the "combined powers of morality"; but they are finally
defeated "by the universe itself, with which they have undertaken a
contest. . . . "4
This statement, which gives a surprising turning to the catalog of the things that
are overcome by the demonic by presenting it as itself capable of being
overcome, is separated by only a semicolon from the immediately following
introductionwhich concludes the whole developmentof the "singular but
extraordinary" saying, "Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse" [No one (can stand)
against a god unless he is a god himself]. In the closest possible connection to
what has gone before, Goethe says of the dictum that it may well "have origi-

 Page 525

nated . . . in observations of this kind." This connection is all-important if one

does not want, while displaying speculative acuteness, to isolate the saying, as
always happens when one regards it as the motto of the whole fourth part of
Dichtung und Wahrheit. But it was not put in that position by Goethe himself,
nor was it put there with his approval.
It is quite surprising, when one considers the logical connection in the text, that
the saying here is neither purely monotheistic (by describing a counterposition,
against God, as illusory), nor exclusively polytheistic either (by setting up one
god against another), but rather has a pantheistic implication: Only the entire
universe can prevail against a demonic-divine nature, which is able to overpower
every individual power within this universe. The universe is the absolute, which
cannot be shaken, in its power, by what occurs within it. From this point of view
it becomes clear that the "extraordinary saying" deals with equivalences that, by
their type, are only possible in a pantheon of the pagan kind, but that can at the
same time be surpassed with a limiting idea that introduces Spinoza's absolute,
as a unique magnitude, into the mythical context.
Whatever the saying may have meant initially or later on in the history of its
genesis for Goethe, the constellation in Dichtung und Wahrheit that concludes its
use determines it within the reference triad of monotheism, pantheism, and
polytheism. The balance sheet of his survey of the Promethean destiny is drawn
upin a manner that aims at reconciliation but does not obscure conflicton the
highest metaphysical plane. From this point, one can confidently venture a
retrospective consideration of the "origin" [of the saying], of which Goethe does
explicitly speakwhich he would hardly do if he had taken the saying over, from
whatever source, as a fixed datum. The result of such a consideration is that the
question of a foreign and distant derivation of the saying, whether it be Gnostic
or Pietistic, mystical or Spinozistic, becomes not only irrelevant but
unintelligible in its justification. If the saying had "originated in observations of
this kind," that is, observations such as precede its pointed quotation at this point
in Goethe's self-presentationwho else should have made these observations,
since they constitute, unmistakably, the uniqueness of Goethe's life experience?
The complete manuscripts of this last part of Dichtung und Wahrheit do not
exhibit any motto provided by Goethe himself. We can be confident that the
choice of the motto was agreed upon by the three

 Page 526

administrators of Goethe's literary remains, Eckermann, Riemer, and von Müller.

No utterance of Goethe's regarding the motto can have been known to the three
administrators, or Eckermann could not have written, in a letter to Chancellor
yon Müller of January 19, 1833: "I have prefixed a motto to the volume that
expresses the power of the demonic and that Riemer completely approves of and
considers superior to those he sent to you." 5
But what are we to think, then, of Riemer's testimony in his Mittheilungen,
which first appeared in 1841 in Berlin, that during the search for a motto for the
third part of the autobiography he had proposed this saying and Goethe had
accepted the proposal?6Must wehaving corrected his error in referring to the
"third part" rather than the fourthreject the statement altogether, in view of the
way the sources point to the administrators as having determined the motto? I
think there is a weak probability in favor of the hypothesis that the
"extraordinary saying" could already have been under consideration once before,
and actually for the third part of the work. There we read: "Care has been taken
that the trees do not grow as high as heaven" [or "into the sky"]. This is not, to
be sure, the equivalent, in German, of the "extraordinary saying,'' but in view of
the developments that conclude the third part it is, nevertheless, one possible
interpretation of that saying, if one takes the verb that is omitted from the saying
as being a 'contrary-to-fact' subjunctive. What Riemer had already,
unsuccessfully, proposed for the third part would then have been approved, with
his participation, for the fourth part. In spite of the lack of further evidence for
such a hypothesis, it seems to me that because it would involve a smaller failure
of memory [on the part of Riemer], it cannot at any rate be excluded. It would
then be the case that Goethe made no decision about a motto for the fourth part,
but that he probably had previously included this suggestion of Riemer's among
the final alternative possibilities for the third part. The "extraordinary saying"
had become too impressive and too persistently provocative for Riemer, across a
quarter of a century, for us to be free to burden him with an excessive looseness
in his recollection [of these events].
It had been Riemer who had heard the saying for the first time, and in the simply
original situation, from Goethe's mouth. It was May 16, 1807, after the
inspection of the battlefield of Jena, a day when Goethe was in a bad humor on
account of politics and on account

 Page 527

of . . . dogs barking. After a meal with the Frommanns, a stroll around the town,
and, in the course of that, those "jokes out of Zinkgräf." 7The note duplicates
itself, or else the second mention of Zinkgräf for this day refers to a different
time of day: "Idle talk with Goethe. Drawing on Zinkgräf's Apothegms." Riemer
does not note down who, in the middle of the talk, quoted the definition of God
from the collection of sayings: that he is "an unutterable sigh, at the bottom of
people's souls." Presumably this came from Riemer, who was versed in
quotations. Otherwise he would not go on to say: "Goethe cited another
one. . . . " I think that this transition was misread by the editor of Riemer's diary.
For Goethe does not ''cite" [anführen] at all; rather, he "connects" [anfügen]
another saying [with the one just quoted]. On the basis of Riemer's later
assignment of the "extraordinary saying" to Zinkgräf, it seemed too self-evident
that Goethe could only have been "citing." Philologists are in any case easily
inclined to believe that something could only have been "cited." But what we are
dealing with here is a scene of purely oral communication, and there it is not
quite so easy to say "cited." That is, after all, precisely the reason why, in his
Mittheilungen über Goethe much later, Riemer turned a conversation ambulando
[walking] into a scene of reading, with "hundreds of sayings and aphorisms"a
scene that certainly presupposes a different situation from that in the original
note.
So the transition to the 'first performance' of the "extraordinary saying" does not
necessarily require that Goethe too meant to quote from Zinkgräf's collection of
sayings when he now says, "Nihil contra Deum, nisi Deus ipse" [Nothing (can
stand) against God unless it is God himself]. This is, of course, Riemer's way of
writing it. Whence did Riemer, ambulando, know the correct way to write the
saying down? Did Goethe explain this for him? Surely not, since the one time
that Goethe himself included the saying in his works, he had it printed
differently.
Only in 1841, in the Mittheilungen über Goethe, did Riemer unambiguously
undertake, without the uncertain connection in the note in his diary, to assign the
saying to Zinkgräf. Now he speaks above all of the impression that, among
hundreds of sayings and aphorisms, this one made upon him: "All at once I had a
presentiment of boundless applications. . . . " The reason why he claims to have
proposed the saying as the motto for the third part of Goethe's autobiography is
to be found in this impression. The claim need not be unjustified if

 Page 528

the dating of the note to the year 1807 cannot be maintained; it must, Scheibe
thinks, have been "written down a considerable while after Goethe's death." 8But
Scheibe's attitude to the importance of the "extraordinary saying" is not without
a peculiar aspect. His requirement that the saying must be eliminated, as the
motto to the fourth part, from a critical edition of Dichtung und Wahrheit, is
certainly fully justified, but his conclusion from this, that the saying
"consequently loses its outstanding importance,'' is simply
incomprehensible.9This importance is after all surely determined by its position
in the text, and could not be increased by one iota if Goethe himself had chosen
the sentence as the motto too.
Even if the saying had been taken from the source referred to, or any other, a
much greater material importance would have to be assigned to the question of
what was the disposing factor that put Goethe in a position to adopt this one in
particular among those hundreds of aphorisms. The only comparably important
question is how he understood the saying, and wanted it to be understood, the
first time he used itso that we could investigate whether his interpretation of it
was constant or changed. With such an ambiguous image, and considering that
his dealings with it extended over such a long period of his life, it cannot be
assumed that from the first moment of its discovery or invention a fixed
interpretation was, and remained, present.
If we can take it as a premise that Riemer's diaries are more authentic and more
reliable than the Mittheilungen that he produced a decade after Goethe's death,
then a note that dates from the year 1807 (no day being indicated), containing a
remark of Goethe's that "must be assigned to a time in the vicinity of the
sixteenth of May,"10deserves special attention: "A god can only be balanced by
another god. That a power should restrict itself is absurd. It is only restricted, in
turn, by another power. This specified being cannot restrict itself; instead the
whole, which specifies itself, restricts itself, precisely by doing sothe individual
being does not."11If one assumes that something is expressed in this for which
Goethe sought a more pregnantor a most pregnantformula, then the resulting
interpretation of the final form of the thought, which immediately leaps out, is
governed by the indefinite article associated with the substantive god. In the way
in which Riemer always writes the "extraordinary saying"but in which it is
precisely not written in Goethe's sole authorized version, in them

 Page 529

manuscript of Dichtung und Wahrheitthe capitalization of Deus excludes the

indefinite article. The reading that takes it as God's name and thus as expressing
personal identity would then be given as a matter of course, with the result that
interpretation could not avoid the path leading to a monotheistic mysticism:
"Against God, only God himself." An intradivine dissension, a division at the
foundation of the divinity such as is described by Jakob Böhme, would then be
suggestedunless, interpolating a contrary-to-fact subjunctive, one produces the
formula of resignation: "Against God only God himself (could be and
accomplish something)." But precisely this sort of reading is excluded when
Goethe pronounces talk of a power that restricts itself absurd. Absurdity
designates the limit that is set to paradox.
As a paradox, the saying does hit the nail on the head in relation to Goethe's "bad
humor" on the day when he walked over the battlefield of Jena, and also in
relation to his solution to this bad humor, since the next morning he begins
dictating the Wanderjahre.a With this his period of flagging energy, which had
begun about 1802 1803 (above all after Schiller's death and his own serious
illness), comes to an end. It is well known that Goethe had thought it possible
that his creative powers were exhausted. This phase of depression and doubt is
the end of his self-figuration in Prometheus. Everything points toward and
augurs a willingness to delegate the role to another person, whose influence he
will perceive on the battlefield of Jena, but whose altered importance for himself
he was only to grasp more than a year later.
The saying, then, marks the solution of a life crisis, a solution that is able to
renounce the Promethean status in favor of the idea of balance, which was to
find its poetic expression in the same year, already, in the characteristic scenic
symmetry of Pandora. Let us not forget with what asymmetry aesthetic rebellion
had presented itself in the neighborhood of the "Prometheus" ode:
Mir geht in der Welt nichts über mich,
Denn Gott ist Gott, und ich bin ich.

[Nothing in the world outmatches me,

Because God is God, and I am I.] 12

For that very reason, the failure of the Promethean self-definition can be
described by the reading of the saying that makes it say that "Against a god, only
a god (could have rebelled)." After the dark

 Page 530

period of the five years from 1802 to 1807, this is acquiescence in no longer
laying claim to the status of a Titan.
The Titans in Pandora represent the new principle of 'balance,' the deeply
polytheistic fundamental idea that the restricting counteraction must always be a
different power. It is the mythical principle of the separation of powers. But it is
also the pantheistic possibility of reconciliation, which sees everything
individual and each particular power as, in its turn, a specification of the whole,
which restricts itself in the process of realizing itself. Spinozism is not replaced
by polytheism, but tied to it as its manner of both aesthetic and historical self-
presentation.
The idea of balance appears again in connection with the "extraordinary saying"
after Goethe's relation to Napoleon had taken its turning, and in fact in such a
way that he can now relate his life metaphor to this relation as well. Again, it is
Riemer who notes the mention of the saying, on July 3, 1810, in the evening
after dinner. "Nihil contra Deum, nisi Deus ipse. A magnificent dictum, with
endless applications. God always confronts himself; God in man again confronts
himself in man." Singled out from among the "endless applications," that
appears as the monotheistic version, a conception that is most nearly a
personalized one, remote from nature pantheism and at least not excluding the
idea of the Incarnation. For the moral follows hard on its heels that no one has
reason to have a low regard for himself in comparison to the greatest, since, if
the greatest falls into the water and cannot swim, "then the most miserable
Hallore pulls him out.'' 13From here Goethe makes the leap to applying the
principle to his encounter with Napoleon, to the 'equality' that had become
manifest in it: The man who conquered the entire continent "does not find it
beneath him to converse with a German about poetry and the art of tragedyto
consult an artis periturn [one skilled in the arts]."
The situation that, in the formula at Jena, had still contained the unreality
[Irrealität: the 'contrary-to-fact' status] of "balance" as [the reason for]
resignation from Promethean claims has become, as a result of the encounter in
Erfurtin an unexpected constellation with the "demonic" the reality of an
equilibrium. Thus Goethe's personal experience with Napoleon becomes a
specification, an application, a manner of appearance of the universal world-
principle: "So divinely is the world arranged that each in his position, in his
place and at his time, balances [gleichwägt (balanciert)] everything else." It is
the formula

 Page 531

of a new self-consciousness, which had resulted from his standing his ground
against the Corsican's gazethe description of a separation of powers based on a
situation corresponding to the fundamental pattern of polytheism.
Here it is quite logical that what had first been pronounced apropos of the scene
of the fateful defeat is now repeated and transformed in regard to the
overcoming of this fate by this one individual. The secret harmony between
Goethe's early Spinozism and his aesthetic polytheism is maintained in his use of
the "extraordinary saying." Because the legitimation of equality in the encounter
in Erfurt is no longer that of individual divinities, but rather of universal divinity.
The polytheism of the schema remains in the foreground: There is a god, and
whoever means to oppose him or even merely to stand firm against his gaze
must already be 'another god.' It is no longer aesthetic self-empowerment, but
rather a laying bare that resulted from having lived through being faced with
something entirely alien.
It is true that Riemer, again in his late Mittheilungen, said of himself in 1807 that
he "had a presentiment of boundless applications" of the saying. But the entry in
his diary from July 3, 1810, puts it beyond doubt that this is not, in fact, his
formulation, for, according to this entry, Goethe characterized the "magnificent
dictum" as having "boundless applications." This cannot be unimportant. If the
saying had merely been ambiguous [vieldeutig] from the first, it would not only
have been daunting for any attempt at interpreting it, it would also have emptied
the object that was being examined of its meaning. Unless those "applications''
came from Goethe's carrying the saying with him through his own experience,
and were enrichments of its meaning by what it was able to deliver in each case.
The saying becomes fertile only if it can be read differently from the way
Riemer writes it, if it can be detached from the unequivocally monotheistic
mysticism of intradivine dualization with which he associates it and set in the
more comprehensive reference system that includes pantheism and polytheism.
For this, Goethe's continual use of the saying in regard to Napoleon, which he
keeps up from 1807 to 1830, gives the most solid support, despite his retraction
of the "divine" into the [merely] "demonic."
If we view it in this way, there is no "correct understanding of the saying," but
only the question which of its ambiguous meanings could satisfactorily
epitomize Goethe's self-experience in each case. Knowl-

 Page 532

edge of the [saying's] source, assuming the clearest evidence of its derivation
from it, would nevertheless still not be an "important prerequisite for the correct
understanding of the saying." 14Consequently it is only an observation made in
passing when I say that it seems to me to be out of the question that such a
source should not already have been found, if it existed.15Goethe's reading was
not in such out-of-the-way texts that something contained in them could have
escaped the ubiquity of philology. No piece of humanistic evidence has ever
been searched for so intensively. But Goethe was familiar with the pattern of the
genus, paradox, and formal imitation was not something he found difficult. The
all-important fact is that for Goethe himself, the use of the term god with an
indefinite article was the natural one. It is not the expectation that a source could
finally be reliably assigned and exhibited that can lead us astray, but rather the
insistence that the result of any investigation of the use of the saying must be an
unambiguous interpretation of it. On the contrary, it is in agreement with both
Goethe's admissions and his intentions that he left the addressees of his dictain
the widest sense, his audiencestanding unenlightened before their ambiguity
precisely in cases where he meant to communicate something that was important
to him. The pedant Riemer is a clear instance of such withholding on Goethe's
part.
This insurmountable reservation can give rise to disappointment only when a
singular situation defines people's interest in the "extraordinary saying" as
unequivocally as it had visibly come to be defined immediately after World War
II. Carl Schmitt rightly traced the scholarly exertions that were revived then back
to the fact that the sentence "was quoted and interpreted, by people who were
familiar with Goethe, in countless nonpublic conversations during the last war
(from 1939 to 1945)."16The admiration for the apothegm was almost inevitably
fixed on the implication, unmistakable in the circumstances at the time, that what
was meant was the blasphemy of the pretension to measure oneself against God.
The secret comfort from Dichtung und Wahrheit, with which those who knew
Goethe consoled themselves, will have presented itself as an image in the fact
that Goethe had before his eyes, in that fourth part, the failed Napoleon, the
incarnate demon who had been able, if any man at all was able, to confront God
with defiance, and whom only the summoning up of the universe was able to
overcome. But let us not forget, for Goethe there is always bound up with the
category of the demonic, down to the end, the

 Page 533

element of justification that was indispensable for him in order to prevent his
own finding of identity under Napoleon's gaze from having been fruitlesseven
after the latter's end on the rock of Saint Helena.
Not everything that can be discovered can be discovered at any time. Part of the
character of the concern for knowledge that was devoted to Goethe's saying after
Germany's downfall is that in the midst of the saying's endless applications still
another unsuspected new one could be found in an entirely conventional
philological manner, namely, in the search for its source. That the saying could
be capable of still another Christianization is something that one would least of
all have been able to suppose. Nevertheless, when Carl Schmitt says that
Goethe's dictum"which he no doubt himself formulated in Latin""was derived
from Christology," then this would seem to me more plausible, in terms of the
configuration with which Goethe was familiar, then to search in the obscurity of
mysticisms of divine self-estrangement à la Jakob Böhme. For Goethe did, after
all, see in Prometheus the son of Zeusas a result of ignorance of the original
mythand always saw in the myth his own conflict with his father. A connection
between the saying and the Christian tradition would not have had to impose any
restriction on its applications when it was in Goethe's possession. Predefined
interpretations are no more important than the 'source.' The saying does not have
a context; it acquires one only by seizing it.
Thus the finding that Carl Schmitt has submitted only increases the extent to
which the horizon of possible significances is occupied. It is a passage from a
sketch of a drama, Catharina von Siena, by Jakob Michael Lenzone of the
literary versions of Sturm und Drang rebellion against the father that wanted to
legitimate themselves by means of higher consecrations and summonses, such as
those of aesthetic genius or (in a merely metaphorical case) of the spirit of
holiness. In Lenz's fragment, the theme is Catharina's flight from her father's
tyrannical love to devotion to God. For Catharina the renunciation of her earthly
artist-beloved, whom her father rejects in favor of his choice, and the turning to
her heavenly beloved, whom he cannot reject, sets the stage for holiness as a
flight, on which her loving and lovingly violent father pursues her. In shuddering
awareness of the danger of being overtaken by his loving tyranny, she sees
herself not, it is true, directly involved in the conflict of gods, but represented in
it:
 Mein Vater blickte wie ein liebender

 Page 534
Gekränkter Gott mich drohend an.
Doch hätt' er beide Hände ausgestreckt
Gott gegen Gott!

[My father looked at me threateningly, like a loving, aggrieved god.

But if he had reached out both his handsGod against god!]

With these words, according to the poet's stage directions, she draws a small
crucifix from her bosom and kisses it, promising herself to the other God:
Errette, rette reich
Mein Jesus, dem ich folg', aus seinem Arm! 17

[Save me, rescue me, my Jesus, whom I follow, from his arms!]

So the god who stands against the father-god here is the Son of God. When
Catharina protects herself against the merely imagined temptation of the
outstretched hands of her father by the 'apotropaic' [illaverting] grasping of the
crucifix, then this, in an exaggerated theological metaphor, is itself the conflict
of gods as a monologic expression of the impossibility of the embrace: It would
be the unthinkable disaster of a confrontation of god against god.
He who wishes to can find in this monologue of Catharina evidence that in the
Sturm und Drang cult of "genius" he has before him the secularized form of the
absolute claim of grace, of inspiration, contempt for the world, holiness. Lenz
himself suggests this interpretation. The scene comes from the first of four
revisions of the play, to which Lenz at first gave, in the last version, the title "A
Religious Drama," only to strike out the adjective "religious" and put ''A Drama
of Art."18Since the third version was written in Weimar, where Lenz stayed
from April to November of 1776, and since there is evidence of his intending to
dedicate the play to Goethe, one cannot exclude the possibility that Goethe was
acquainted with the monologue containing the exclamation "God against god!"
But then, Goethe had long since put his "One against one!"b at the beginning of
his involvement with Prometheus.
Let us leave aside the fact that in this line of the monologue, Lenz is probably
only bringing forward Aeschylus's "deus contra deum" from the Choephoroi,c
where it had characterized the conflict between the gods of public law and the
gods of family tiesa constellation, then, having less to do with the separation of
powers than with the

 Page 535

historical replacement of one generation of gods by another. 19Even if there is a

probability that Goethe knew Lenz's fragment and that its pagan background
remained hidden from him, still I would consider it at least as probable that this
sort of embedding in Christology would have spoiled the formula for him and
made it unserviceable for his own use. Think of the sixty-sixth Venetian
Epigram, where the god with the indefinite article gives what the poet can
endure, but the God who is represented by a cross, and who is given his proper
name only in the autograph manuscript, is as repugnant to him as poison or a
snakeand this in the low society of tobacco smoke, bugs, and garlic. A nameless
god, to whom he submits, opposed to the named God, who is repugnant to him.
That leads back to the point where Carl Schmitt, with his discovery in Lenz, will
be found to be right in the end: Both here and there the talk is not of the one God
and his possible self-estrangement, but rather of two gods, of the
dualismprevented only with difficulty in the history of Christian dogmaof the
Creator and the Redeemer, the demiurge and the man-god, the constraining
Father and the liberating Son.
If we must proceed from the assumption that the "extraordinary saying" was not
to be found anywhere, and consequently could not be "cited" from or picked up
by reading anything, then its definitive formulation, for Dichtung und Wahrheit,
will hardly have been laid down by Goethe without any exchange with Riemer,
the Latinist. The latter does pride himself, in the Mittheilungen, on having
reminded Goethe of it as a motto, but nowhere reveals any part he may have
played in its definitive production. When Goethe was dead, the administrators of
his literary remains were able to set the most daring dictum on the title page of
the fourth part of his autobiography. But it is a different question whether any of
them would have wanted to see this ambiguous saying, which bordered on the
blasphemous, attributed to himself, especially when from the textwhich screens
everything with the name of "Egmont"the relationship to Napoleon nevertheless
had to emerge unmistakably for the reader, if only from the order of magnitude
[that was implied].
When Riemer agreed to the administrators' proposal for the motto for the fourth
part, he may not have remembered his diary entry of 1810 about the close
connection between Goethe's utterance of the "magnificent dictum" and his
remark about Napoleon and the world

 Page 536

balance. The decision, as we know from evidence that was unknown for a long
time, was made at the beginning of 1833. It was not Riemer who thought of the
"extraordinary saying" this time. He had made up his mind, on the contrary, in
favor of a motto relating to Lili,d as he writes to Chancellor von Müller on
January 18, 1833: "In regard to the motto, I am also more in favor of the Lili
material, and I have accordingly written down several such as suggestions. . . . "
20That was Riemer's answer in response to the alternative, posed by Eckermann,
of bringing out, in the motto, either the thematic reference to Goethe's
relationship with Lili or the reference to the demonic. On the very next day
Eckermann communicates to Müller a different and final decision, which goes in
favor of the demonic: "I have given the volume a motto that expresses the power
of the demonic and that Riemer entirely approves of and considers superior to
those that he sent to you."
If one keeps in view this incident, which first became clear in 1964 and was
therefore still withheld from the postwar discussion about the saying, then
another piece of evidence, which was extracted from the Weimar archive as
early as 1954 and which derives from the same year, 1833, becomes more
eloquent. It is a note, dated the afternoon of May 7, 1833, that Riemer made
while reading Heine's book, which had just appeared in Paris and Leipzig, Zur
Geschichte der neuren schönen Literatur in Deutschland [On the history of
recent belles-lettres in Germany; later retitled Die romantische Schule, The
Romantic school]: "'Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse' is a principle that I have
always privately applied to Napoleon, although it does not fit him alone, but
every circumstance that has to be put an end to by a reactionand see, here, Heine,
on p. 59 of his newest pamphlet, applies this idea in just the same way, without
mentioning the saying by name. 'And in fact, no one at all could avail against
Napoleon but God himself.'"21
This note is already precious because in it Riemer confirms, one single time, the
wording of the saying (apart from the spelling of the name of"God") that
appeared in Dichtung und Wahrheit and was taken over for the motto.
Elsewhere, in all his notes and communicationseven including those made a
decade after this noteRiemer writes "Nihil contra . . . " ["Nothing (can prevail)
against . . . " as opposed to ''Nemo": "No one"]. One could call that the
impersonal wording of the saying, which seems to fit the pantheistic conception
better than the polytheistic one. The differentiation may be of secondary impor-

 Page 537

tance in view of Riemer's vague understanding of the saying, but in relation to

the question of whether the saying is a quotation or an invention, the deviation is
crucial. Riemer would hardly have followed Goethe's way of writing the saying
if he had known the "Nihil contra . . . ," which he prefers elsewhere, to be in
agreement with any documented use. The philologist and pedant would not have
diverged from a prior source like Zinkgräf. Something that was freely invented
was less binding. That is why only the text that Goethe left behind him could
determine the wording of the motto, even though it was contrary to Riemer's
notes about what Goethe had said (and what he, Riemer, had preferred).
But the second difference between Riemer's way of writing the sentence and
Goethe's (which was taken over into the motto) lies in the fact that Riemer
begins the name of God with a capital letter, and Goethe begins it with a
lowercase one. When Riemer rediscovered the application of the saying to
Napoleon, in Heine's statement, as one that he had himself privately carried out
all along, this showed that he understood not only the saying but also its
application to Napoleon entirely differently from Goethe, because he had to read
it as saying that against a god (like Napoleon) only (the one) God himself can
avail. For it is in just that way that Heine would have had to understand the
saying if he had actually had it in mind in connection with the statement Riemer
quotes. Overlooking for a moment the fact that in this way Riemer extracts from
the saying an additional meaning, and one that is entirely foreign to Goethe, he
demonstrates his characteristic tendency to hold firm in every case to the
monotheistic interpretation as it results from his capitalization of the namein
which case it can only be for the sake of paradox that Napoleon, too, is called a
god.
Riemer knew that Goethe had taken a different path in this regard, and had fixed
it definitively with the category of the "demonic." When I say that he knew it,
then, at least for the period after Goethe's death, I assume more than the sort of
diffuse comprehension that finds satisfaction in the profundity of the formula.
How do I justify this? From Riemer's literary remains, which are preserved in
Weimar, a slip of paper has come to light that was contained in an envelope
labeled "Eliminated from the material for the Reflections and Maxims" and that
exhibits something Goethe had come up with that Riemer himself explicitly
describes as a "good interpretation" of the "extra-

 Page 538

ordinary saying." 22On the slip, first the following verse is noted down: "Saepe
premente Deo fert Deus alter opem" [Often, when one god afflicts you, another
god brings aid]. Riemer adds that the verse seems to be from Ovid and that
Goethe made a note of it in his "memorandum" book.23Riemer's evaluation of
the verse Goethe had found is of independent interest on account of its again
testifying to Riemer's preferred way of writing the "extraordinary saying": ''I
make a note of it as a good interpretation of 'Nihil contra Deum nisi Deus ipse.'"
It is the reading that corresponds to the 'separation of powers': If one god
oppresses you, another one helpsbut it has to be a god.
On Riemer's slip of paper there is one more, final notation, which puts it beyond
doubt that he had become conscious of the different character of polytheism,
which was implied in his recognition of the Ovid verse as a "good interpretation"
of the saying. For he pronounces nothing less than the generalization of Ovid's
verse into a structural principle of mythology: "In Greek and Roman mythology
it is certainly the case that often one god gives aid against the other one. No
doubt also in Indian mythology." Here, at the latest, Riemer had to have realized
that Goethe's note, once it was brought together with his way of understanding
the "extraordinary saying," did not agree with his own interpretation and way of
writing it. Because in the Ovid verse, the term god unquestionably has to be read
with the indefinite article. It is the god of the Venetian Epigram: "Duld ich reit
ruhigem Mut, wie es ein Gott mir gebeut" [I put up with (objectionable things)
calmly, as a god commands me].e
Even if there is no evidence that Goethe picked out and copied the Ovid verse
with an eye to the interpretabilityand to his interpretationof the "extraordinary
saying," still the structural principle of myth that is expressed in it, the principle
of mutual adjustment and of the separation of powers, precisely suits his remarks
(in connection with the saying) about the balance of powers within the world, up
to the limiting case of this equilibrium that is seen in the fact that the demonic
can only be overcome by the universe itself. Myth does not yet have any idea of
this limiting case, because it already presupposes the combination of polytheism
with pantheism. In that respect, Goethe's final and only unquestionably genuine
remark, in the fourth part of Dichtung und Wahrheit, goes beyond everything
that has previously been written down by others. It is the final balance that only
Napoleon's

 Page 539

fate had made it possible for him to draw upthe demon's end, brought about by
the whole.
In concluding his excursus on his early religious and metaphysical turnings, his
approaches to the supersensible in the extreme forms of Pietism and a religion of
nature, Goethe says that he articulates in this 'empirical demonology' something
that reaches far ahead of the phases of his life that he is discussing (up to his
flight from Lili to the court at Weimar)something of which he "convinced
himself only much later." For at that time, as he was "concentrating himself in
himself," he arrived, instead, at the realization "that it was better to ward off
thoughts of what is monstrous and incomprehensible.''f Only in the image of
Count Egmont was there already present what was only to gain conceptual
clarity so much later, as a result of his own experience.
I would now like to attempt to reduce the hermeneutics of the "extraordinary
saying" to an issue that would not go beyond what can be dealt with in a
methodical manner. I employ for this purpose the most important apothegm that
Goethe himself provided in regard to the essential ambiguity of his concept of
divinity. We are, he said, "pantheists in the investigation of nature, polytheists in
poetry, monotheists in ethics." 24Can this central self-interpretation be used as a
means of elucidating the ambiguity of the paradox on the same subject?
This is already made to appear likely by the fact that the three positions, in their
peculiar nonexclusiveness with respect to one another, are sufficiently dearly
visible in the late demonology of Dichtung und Wahrheit: the moral world-order,
which is crisscrossed by the demonic power, and the demonic element, which
can only be overcome by the universe itself.
Here one is led far back to the peculiar misunderstanding that had emerged in the
"Prometheus" scene between Lessing and Jacobi, when the polytheism of
Goethe's early ode was supposed to have caused Lessing to reveal his
Spinozism. It seems that for Goethe himself the "extraordinary saying" analyzed
itself into three aspects corresponding to the three '-theisms.' In this connection
the linguistic form is not contingent, not an external addition, but instead is
closely bound up with the immanent genesis of the saying.
In regard to its formal construction, the interpretersinsofar as they regarded
Goethe as its author, or at least allowed room for that possibilityhave assumed
that the pedagogue Riemer will certainly

 Page 540

have assisted Goethe in its Latin formulation. There is, after all, no doubt about
the fact that, precisely in May 1807, Goethe borrow ed a collection of Zinkgräf's
apothegms from the Weimar library and (according to the evidence of his diary)
read in it frequently, primarily after meals. We know on equally good authority
that Riemer enjoyed putting things into Latin and that he said of Goethe that he
found Latin formulas like "difficilia quae pulchra" [what is beautiful is difficult]
or "ars est de difficili et bono" [art derives from what is difficult and good]
especially expressive and rich in references. 25It is easy to forget, in this
connection, that even if the source had been Zinkgräf, the translation into Latin
would still remain to be accomplished, since the anthology contains, as its title
says, Teutsche scharpfsinnige kluge Sprüche Apophthegmata genannt [German
sagacious and clever sayings, which are called apothegms]. So the mere
quotation of a German saying would not have sufficed, nor would it have
satisfied Goethe's desire for form, since he advises modern authors to write in
Latin precisely "when they have to make something out of nothing."26
But Riemer was twenty-five years younger than Goethe, and became his
secretary and his son's tutor only in 1803. What came before that? On October
10, 1786, in Venice, Goethe notes in his diary that for years he has been unable
to look at any Latin writer on account of memories of Italy, of the image that he
yearned for. "Herder always made fun of me for having learned all my Latin
from Spinoza, because he noticed that it was the only Latin book that I read."
This document is made invaluable by another from the same year. Earlier that
year, on February 20, Goethe had written to Herder, regarding the dispute about
Lessing's final convictions, that he had not been able to finish reading
Mendelssohn's polemic An die Freunde Lessings [To Lessing's friends], and had
passed it on to Frau yon Stein, who would perhaps have better luck with it.
Insteadbut not without regard to the central name in that disputehe had
immediately, "for an evening benediction," opened his Spinoza and read some
pages in it, beginning with the proposition: "qui Deum amat, conari non potest,
ut Deus ipsum contra amet" [He who loves God cannot desire that God should
love him in return].27The subject was the nineteenth proposition in part 5 of the
Ethics, which Spinoza proves by establishing, in man's desire that God should
return his love, the contradiction that such a man would desire, at the same time
as he loved God, that God should not be God. That is traditional metaphysics:
God can be loved and

 Page 541

thus move everything, but he can have only himself as the perfect object of his
thought and his love, and nothing and no one else besides. One who nevertheless
wants to move God on his own behalf contradicts his essence, does not want him
to be what he is.
From our distance, the proof may seem like hairsplitting. But it consists only in
the establishment of the contradiction, not in the conclusion that because of the
contradiction that would be involved in his love being returned, man cannot be
capable of wanting God to exist. On the contrary, man is considered to be
capable of the selfless love of God that is thus enjoined upon him. That is the
exact antithesis of the central proposition of the late medieval and Reformation
theologies, that man by nature cannot by any means want God to be God.
Rather, he must necessarily, as a result of his nature alone, want to be God
himself. 28Pantheism's amor dei [love of God] is directed against the type of
antinaturalistic theology that is expressed in this maximal formula. We should
compare to this the 'contrary-to-fact' reading of the "extraordinary saying": Man
cannot take a stand against God; only one who was also a god could do this. The
demonization of the ungraced [i.e., the "natural"] will, which is involved in
Luther's thesis,g is excluded from the realm of what is possible for man.
Following the example of the way the Bible was used in his parents' house,
Goethe was a chance opener of books. He opened them at random and found
what he was looking for. It confirmed, for him, that life flowed to him, in
exemplary self-presentation, and displayed itself to his perception of its own
accord. Regarding that "evening benediction," too, after his satiety with the
Spinoza dispute, we can assume that he reached for the Ethics and let it open at a
chance page. In this way he came upon the proposition about the absolute
selflessness of the unreciprocated love of God. This proposition contains almost
the entire verbal material of what will appear in his own saying about God. That
may seem like too little on which to found the assumption that the one was
constructed from the other. But the logic of the proof leads further, to the
transformation of the proposition.
To expect reciprocal love from God would mean to require him, himself, to give
up his essencein other words, it would mean to offer him the epitome of hatred.
But the metaphysical tradition asserts without exception that what is perfect can
only be loved and desired, and its existence can only be met with assent.
Consequently, following

 Page 542

Spinoza's previous thesis, it is impossible to desire God's nonexistence so that

one could be God oneself: "Nemo potest Deum odio habere" [No one can hate
God]. Not to love God is just as much contrary to man's essence as it would be
contrary to God's essence for him to love man in return for that. The proof
follows from a premise that neither the late Middle Ages nor the Reformer
would have shared: from the condition that man possesses an adequate concept
of God's essence. The import of these propositions of Spinoza's is that no one
can oppose God who has understood what he is; and the conclusion is that the
only one who could oppose God would be one who was himself godwhich
cannot possibly be, since the one God is already everything. From the point of
view of Spinozism, the "extraordinary saying" says, in Spinoza's language, that
nothing and no one can oppose God, because this would imply the existence of a
second God, which is a contradiction.
Spinoza's God is a God without an antithesis, without opposition, a God of
acquiescence in what in fact exists, as what is necessary: For the rebel, he is a
God of resignation, and for the lover, a God of unthreatened unity. There is no
possible counterpart to the divinitythe divinity would itself have to become
repugnant to itself, to undergo division in the depths of its own foundation, in the
manner described by Böhme, which, in Spinoza's logic, is sheer absurdity. For
Goethe, that is a position opposed to Christianity, to propositions like Luther's
anti-Scholastic disputation thesis.h All of that is excluded by the more general
early proposition of the Ethics: "Praeter Deum nulla dari, neque concipi potest
substantia" [Besides God, no substance can be nor can be conceived]. 29
In the fourteenth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe will assign to a much
earlier date his predilection for the proposition of Spinoza's that he picks out, in
writing to Herder, as something hit on by accident. There Spinoza providesin the
face of Fräulein yon Klettenberg's Pietism, Basedow's frivolities, and Lavater's
zealous dilemma, "Either a Christian or an atheist!"the gentle antidote of a God
whom no one can oppose and in loving whom no one falls into the selfishness of
expecting a response or a reward. To the young man, this God could appear as
the hypostasis of pure friendship, of what Goethe will describe, so much later, as
his "highest desire": "To be unselfish in everything, and most unselfish of all in
love and friendship." Here, then, we will have to gather how, in the web of his
relations to Lavater,

 Page 543

Basedow, and Jacobi, the thesis that he later quoted to Herder becomes the
nucleus around which a fundamental metaphysical disposition crystallizes, in
which everything is to be given and no advantage expected.
The mediator between Goethe and Spinoza had been Merck, and Goethe had
followed Mephistopheles's temptation with suitable caution.i On April 7, 1773,
he writes to the Giessen legal scholar Höpfner: "Merck has given me your
Spinoza. Would you mind if I kept it for a little while? I just want to see how far
I can follow the man in his tunnels and lodes." A decade later he reads the Ethics
with Charlotte von Stein. "This evening I will be with you and we will read
further in the mysteries that are so congenial to your disposition." 30Two days
later he reports to Knebel about this shared reading: "I am reading Spinoza's
Ethics with Frau von Stein. I feel myself to be very close to him, although his
spirit is much deeper and purer than mine."31In this situation, the impact on him
of "Jacobi's metaphysical nonsense regarding Spinoza, in the course of which he
also, unfortunately, compromises me," was only incidental.32When Goethe
writes to Charlotte on November 19, 1784: "I will bring Spinoza in Latin, where
everything is much clearer and more beautiful,'' this was once again only a
borrowed copy. Only for her birthday, on December 25, does Herder make Frau
von Stein a gift of the copy of the Ethics that he had himself received from
Gleim as a present in 1776. The high point of intensity was that, anticipatory
provocation addressed to the unmasker of Spinozism: "I train myself on Spinoza,
I read him and read him again, and I look forward to the day when the battle will
break out over his dead body."33
In his autobiographical recollection of this period, Goethe no longer knows what
he may have read out of or read into the Ethics; but he remembers the challenge
to selflessness, the calming of his passions, that emanated from this work. "But
what especially riveted me to him was the utter unselfishness that shone forth in
his every sentence. That singular statement, 'He who truly loves God must not
require God to love him in return,' together with all the preliminary propositions
on which it rests, and all the consequences that flow from it, filled all my
reflections." If we take this assertion seriously, and also the information, which
is not unimportant in our context here, that Goethe preferred the Latin edition of
the Ethics, then it is not too great a leap to the idea that he may have devised
paradoxical variations on that

 Page 544

theorem, and may at least have drawn near to what, at the end of Dichtung und
Wahrheit, he will no longer describe merely as a "singular statement," but rather,
with increased intensity, as an "extraordinary saying." A formula that has such
deep roots in the course of a life takes on an outline long before its literal
formulation springs forth.
One should not picture such further work on Spinoza's proposition as free
variation. There were already limiting preconditions for it. Thus it is remarkable
that Goethe's admiration for the "singular statement" relates exclusively to the
human amor dei [love of God] as a prototype for selfless love and friendship, but
not to the divine partner [in the relationship], who seems to be introduced only in
order to cut off every byway and outlet of self-reference, while in himself he is a
cold and unmoving figure. Goethe had no feeling for the God of metaphysics,
the unmoved mover, who, after all, still stands behind Spinoza's concept of God.
The center of the Ethics is, for him, only a metaphor for human matters.
Whereas the divine that becomes tangible and experienceable is god in the
plural. It is the concept of god that is founded in the Promethean experience of
conflict, a concept that already violently contradicts Spinoza's by its use of the
term hatred: "I worship the gods, but I still feel enough courage to swear eternal
hatred for them if they mean to behave toward us the way their image, men, do."
34
No statement is conceivable that would be more remote from Spinoza. So here is
a person who knows and says of himself that he could be against 'God,' and who
has not yet excluded the possibility that he might be capable of this as being a
god himself. For his archaicj premise is that not only can like be known only by
like, but also only one of a like kind can oppose himself to another of the like
kind. Goethe is, after all, not only the author of an out-of-the-way theory of color
directed against Newton, against the microscope and the telescope, he is also
(without having achieved historical clarity about this himself) opposed to the
entire epistemological process that stands behind modern science and in which
relations of equivalence between subject and objecteven the palest form of the
Aristotelian "Anima quodammodo omnia" [Soul that is in a certain way
everything]had been abandoned. Goethe's theory of knowledge, which he never
developed and which probably hardly could be worked out, would only have
been a special case of the universal world-principle of equivalence according to
which, in general, only like things can enter into relations

 Page 545

of any kind, including those of confrontation and enmity. Where the world is not
connected by means of equivalences, it is pure indifference.
Goethe proceeded from a mythical world-principle whose positive formula
would be that only like relates to like, while its negative expression would be
that only like can rebel against like. For the divine, the ancient world had
expanded this into the thesis that the soul can know the divine things in the
heavens and above the heavens only because it is itself a divine thing that
originated in the heavens. Goethe knew the verses of the Stoic, Manilius, and
wrote them on September 4, 1784, in the book on [the summit of] the Brocken:
Quis coelum possit nisi coeli nomine nosse
Et reperire deum, nisi qui pars ipse deorum est?

[Who is able to know the heavens except by their name, and to find
out God unless he himself is a part of the gods?]

This Stoic equivalence motive is stronger than the genuine Platonism in the
famous poem written in the autumn of 1805 after reading Plotinus: "Wär nich
das Auge sonnenhaft . . . "[If the eye were not sunlike . . .].k But that is the most
vivid formula the equivalence principle has found.
Just as one can only recognize a god if one has something divine to employ in
doing so, one can only resist a god if one is a god oneself. But one can be a god
only if gods are possible, many gods. It is just this that Luther had excluded from
consideration and translated into monotheistic terms: He who wanted to be
Godand it was naturally self-evident for him that man had to want thiscould only
want to be it in place of the one God. Where no equivalence is possible, thinking
has to take the form of the desire to annihilate; the potential murder of God can
only be gotten rid of by the annihiliation of the nature that has to desire itby the
replacement of that nature, through an act of grace. Only in a polytheistic
context does the 'contrary-to-fact' construction of the "extraordinary saying"
become one that expresses a possibility. In relation to Spinoza, that is the
mythical tendency in Goethe's recasting [of Spinoza's theorem]his pre-Christian,
fascinating, but of course historically quite unattainable anachronism.
The equivalence principle deprives the insubordination of its moral seriousness:
Spinoza's God cannot return our amor dei, but he makes up for that by not
playing with us either. Jean Paul discovered the briefest characterization of what
sets the mythical apart: "Gods can

 Page 546

play, but God is serious." 35So Goethe, affected in an entirely different,

immediate way, had said in a letter to Kestner as early as 1773, as the heartfelt
sigh of one who has been robbed: "May God forgive the gods for playing with us
in this way."36But he had also drawn a different comparison, not much later, in
opposing Lavater's zeal: "Your thirst for Christ moved me to pity. You are in
worse shape than us pagans; after all, our gods appear to us when we are in
distress"37
The Incarnation of the God who withholds himself carries no weight against the
ubiquity of the pagan gods, against the small comfort of their ability to appear,
the comfort that metamorphosis, despite its unseriousness in comparison to the
great seriousness of the Incarnation, still furnishes. Finally, one has to add the
grim irony with which Goethe defended himself against the charge of paganism
by pointing out that he precisely did not permit the author who ruled and passed
judgment over the fates of his characters to be interpreted as a pagan divinity;
according to Varnhagen's report, Goethe, speaking to General von Rühle,
answered such a reproach by saying: "I, a pagan? Come now, I had Gretchen
hung and let Ottily starve, isn't that Christian enough for them? What more
Christian behavior could they ask for?"38The author, in relation to his creations,
in the bitter earnest with which he obeys what is necessary for them, leaving
them no 'play,' is, for their world, the one God who tolerates no foreign gods
alongside himself.
I would like to consider what we have arrived at here once more, from the point
of view that is defined by Riemer's notes of his conversation with Goethe on
February 1, 1808. The occasion was Goethe's having heard that someone had
called him a "godlike [göttlichen] man."l In the language of Sturm und Drang,
this had been a common phrase. Even Schiller had used this language in
describing how he was repelled, in the beginning, by Goethe's person and
conduct: "To be often in Goethe's company would make me unhappy. . . . He
proclaims his existence beneficently, but only like a god: without giving
himselfthis seems to me to be a consistent and methodical mode of behavior,
which is aimed at the maximum enjoyment of self-love. People should not allow
such a manner to develop around them. He is hateful to me on account of it,
although I love his spirit with all my heart and think him noble. He seems to me
like a proud prude, whom one must make pregnant in order to humble her before
the world."39Now, twenty years later, when Goethe's "godlikeness" is
addressed, his

 Page 547

contradiction is harsh and consciously paradoxical: "To the devil with

godlikeness!" He may not even have imagined that Schiller had once compared
him to Spinoza's God, from whose mute incapacity for love he had himself
wanted, after all, to extract a totally different metaphornamely, a metaphor for
selfless friendship.
Now he sees that the attribute of divinity can end by furnishing itself with a
focus for resistance, for others to use in establishing themselves by not
respecting it. They only acknowledge as godlike, he says, one who lets them
have their way in whatever they feel like doing. A god who cannot do that is a
stimulus to rebellion, one who provokes the contra [opposition]. According to
Riemer, Goethe expressed this on another occasion as follows: "People do not
regard anyone as a god except when they want to act in a way that is contrary to
his laws, because they hope to deceive him; or because he puts up with things; or
because he relaxes his absoluteness enough to let them be absolute too." That is
a retrospect, already almost contemptuous, on the former Prometheus, who had,
as it were, fallen into the trap of becoming a god. The point of the myth is the
inevitability, for the god, of engendering other gods, defiant demiurges, by the
fascination of the absolute. The weakness of Zeus, who had not been able to
prevent the theft of fire and the practice of deception in sacrifice and who has to
be (halfheartedly) satisfied with a punishment that, while it does make the
criminal suffer, does not remove his power to the extent of abolishing the
consequences of his deedthis weakness was a more important condition of the
possibility of Prometheus than his consciousness was. The formulas that Goethe
uses can only be understood polytheistically, because neither in Spinozism nor in
monotheism can there be such a thing as a relaxation from absoluteness. Goethe
concludes his warding off of the attribute of divinity by exchanging the roles, so
that he is no longer Prometheus, but Zeus: "I am like God in that he continually
allows things to happen that he does not want to happen." 40
The god who cannot tolerate any foreign gods beside himself procures them for
himself only by virtue of the fact that he wants to be a god. It is only against a
god that there are gods at all; this is what pantheism wanted to rid the world of.
When the conversation in which Goethe wards off "divinity" took place, early in
1808, he had in fact had an experience with such a god, who had defined himself
in opposition to him. The year before thatthe year in which the "extra-

 Page 548

ordinary saying" had found its formula for the first timeKleist's Amphitryon had
appeared in Dresden: the drama of a rivalry between a god and a man over the
man's wife. Kleist does not make Jupiter hide from the homecoming commander
with the help of metamorphosis. Even if he may not have been certain of success
with Alcmene without that aid, nevertheless afterward he is all the more
confidently and cynically conscious of his ascendancy over the victor in battle.
The comedy ends in a conciliatory mood, with generosity on both sides: After
all, Zeus has already begotten the son whom the commander desires from the
godHercules, the performer of "immense works" and candidate for apotheosis.
Did Kleist, as Katharina Mommsen concluded, 41represent or simultaneously
have in view, in the comedy, his bitterly competitive relationship to Goethe, and
his conception of himself in relation to Goethein other words, did he present
Goethe in the form of Jupiter and himself in that of Amphitryon? Her decoding
is based, above all, on the irony of the pantheistic sayings that are put in the
mouth of Jupiter, where his manner of speaking formally imitates that of Faust in
his confession of faith to Gretchen. It must have had "an unpleasant effect on
Goethe when he encountered the mockingly frivolous pantheism verses in
Amphitryon." And he encountered them immediately after their appearance, as
his diary shows with a note made in Karlsbad on July 13, 1807: "I read and was
astonished, as at the most singular sign of the times. . . . " Remarks made to
Riemer and Reinhard on subsequent days confirm the way the play occupies and
irritates him, if only because he scents Romanticism in the alienated Christology
of the "annunciation":
Dir wird ein Sohn geboren werden,
Dess Name Herkules . . .

[A son will be born unto you, whose name will be Hercules . . . ]

The way the spirit of the age suggested that one read the work is spelled out by
Adam Müller to Gentz on May 25, 1807: It deals, he writes, "with the
immaculate conception by the holy Virgin." What Müller gives out as the
evidence of a "new age of art" seems to Goethe, in the retrospect of his Tag- und
Jahreshefte [Daily and annual notebooks] (written in 1823 for 1808), as "an
important but unwelcome meteor in a new literary sky." If Adam Müller had
written the preface to Amphitryon, Goethe knew what that meant; because only
in 1806,

 Page 549

Müller had expressed, in his Lectures on German Science and Literature, the
expectation that Goethe would be surpassed by a greater writer who would be
able to unite antiquity and Christianity. That was the program of contradiction in
relation to which Amphitryon was meant to be read. In the letter of rebuff that he
wrote to Müller on August 28, 1807, Goethe opposes the principle of
"organization" to the principle of "contortion," by which he designates what
Müller was calling for. Katharina Mommsen conjectures that Goethe's
experience with the "Helen" act of Faust, which had run aground in 1800 and
which he had followed in his Winckelmann of 1805 with the program of a pure
classicism, made him prone to irritation by this sort of synthesis. Should another
writer, after all, have already been able to achieve what he was only to
accomplish in 1827, with the "classical-romantic phantasmagoria" of Helen?
The increase in significance that accrued to the "extraordinary saying" in the
year of its incarnation becomes manifest in connection with the conversation in
which Goethe wards off "divinity." It becomes possible to read it as describing
the rivalry of Romanticism with yesterday's god. Illustrated with the Amphitryon,
that means: Does not the "extraordinary saying" present a formula, at the same
time, both for the resignation of the soldier returning home to Thebes who is
faced with the god sharing the couch of his Alcmene, and for the cynicism of the
self-confirmation of the god before whom one who looks forward to such a son
and such worldwide fame must humble himself? Amphitryon resigns himself,
because only a god could refuse to pardon what this god had done, since also
only a godin Alcmene's placecould have resisted him. But Kleist also makes this
Jupiter who stands for Goethe declare what will be his [Kleist's] own fate: that a
rival for the Olympian laurels, in the Germany of the muses after Schiller's
death, himself had to be a god. No 'contrary-to-fact' subjunctive here, for Kleist
did not, in fact, exclude this possibility. After his death, people were not allowed
to pronounce "the name of this Zeus" in the presence of his sister, Ulrike.
Goethe had gained this type of experience, not in relation to another but in
relation to himself. The Prometheus program had been that one had to be a
godand, as a genius, one also could be a godin order to accomplish one's own
will-to-a-world, as though no world yet existed that imposed the conditions of its
'reality' ['Realität,' literally, "thinghood"] on the artist. Goethe's reversal of the
Prometheus con-

 Page 550

ception as he grew older, and in his old age, implied that one could not be a god
if one did not want to provoke everything to oppose one's willto provoke the
universe finally to pull itself together in order to destroy the demon who
stretches himself out to be a god, as Napoleon's end had demonstrated (which
did not leave Goethe's self-comparison to him unaffected, either). The advantage
of Spinoza's God was that he could be loved selflessly and that he made hate
impossible. But he was also, precisely on account of his proximity extending to
identity, a case of sheer indifference, by which nothing and no one needed to feel
affected. The result was that there was no room for any story, any image, or any
movement. For the artist, this advantage of Spinozism was an undiluted loss.
Polytheism, which makes everything possible, aestheticallythe pure principle of
metamorphosisreplaces Spinozistic indifference with the separation of powers,
with the continual summoning up of god against god. If the "extraordinary
saying" can no longer be read Spinozistically, as a 'contrary-to-fact' construction,
it is now the fundamental formula of myth in all its figurations.
It is not God's dissension with himself that is conceived as the limiting case of
the absolute (and thus at the same time as the negation of every other possibility
of opposing a god who alone is able to oppose himself), but rather the original
schema of man's liberation from anxiety in the face of all the powers that he
cannot comprehend, insofar as these seem to stand only against man, and must
consequently be thought of as being turned aside by opposition to one another.
Gods, when there are many of them, have their respective competencies, among
themselvesthe system of their strengths and weaknesses. Since they are
originally forces and powers, they are, like forces and powers, in their nature
unrestricted, unless other forces and powers restrict them. Becauseand that is a
reason for the dominant god's jealousya god is never curbed except by another
god.
The Humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, cunningly deprived the saying's antique
forerunner of its point and precision when he translated it, ambiguously: "Deo
nemo potest nocere." [No one can harm (a god) (God)]. 42He is rendering
Creon's pronouncement, from Sophocles's Antigone, that the denial of burial
cannot dishonor the gods, since no man whatever possesses the power that
would be necessary to dishonor gods. Erasmus considers it a pious statement,
although the king of Thebes spoke it out of an impious disposition: "Sententia
pia est, sed

 Page 551

a Creonte impio animo dicta." Erasmus eliminated the divinity's plurality and
exploited the ambiguity that is inherent in the lack of an article in Latin. But
above all, by using the verb harm he avoided letting the statement deny that
dishonor could be done to God, since the entire doctrine of sin and of the
necessary redemption, in Christian dogma, depends on that.
Thus, finally, the pious Christian meaning of the ancient dictum, for Erasmus,
turns out to lie in the fact that it attests to the intactness of the divine being
throughout the process by which, from the womb of the Virgin, it became man.
As the proposition stands there, in the end, it has been reduced to the triviality
(for monotheism) of an assertion about the powerlessness of every other being
over against the One. God is God at all only by virtue of the fact that no one can
be against him. That is also Spinoza's fundamental idea; but in his case it is
founded on the uniqueness of the substance of everything in existence, outside
which nothing whatever exists that could stand against it. The secret potential of
Spinozism, which is still dimly visible in Goethe, in the fourth part of Dichtung
und Wahrheit, is that it permits talk of gods insofar as they are "appearances," as
everything else is in relation to the identity of the ultimate substance. Polytheism
would then be a perspectival, anthropocentric way of expressing pantheism, and
would still be possible as the 'rhetoric' of the latter.
But that is not enough. Prometheus and Jupiterthey suffer from the fact that they
cannot conquer one another, but also cannot do without one another, because
each is the condition of the possibility of the other. As applied to Goethe's
youthful experience, this means that aesthetic genius is not absolute, having to
resort to defiance only in opposition to those who impede and restrict it; on the
contrary, it has an entirely intrinsic need for rebellion, because its originality can
only be a counterposition. In a modernized linguistic mode, one would say: The
aesthetic is essentially historical; its character as an origin proves, to the
observer who is at rest, to be "reoccupation." At the same time this implies that,
in the strict sense, "creativity" does not exist. Historicism, in a crime for which it
has never been forgiven, destroyed the consciousness of itself that was
characteristic of Idealism, as the delayed systematization of Sturm und Drang.
The fact that Goethe's "extraordinary saying," however one reads it, is a pagan
apothegm is made evident by comparing it either to Luther's seventeenth thesis
against Scholastic theology or to Erasmus's

 Page 552

Christianization of Sophocles. One would not need to emphasize this if it were

not for the fact that Carl Schmitt has introduced and argued for a christological
reading. This reading evokes the Trinitarian frame of reference. One must make
clear to oneself what that would mean, if it could be successfully maintained. It
cannot, of course, mean an apotropaic [ill-averting] invocation, as in Catharina
of Siena's monologue in Lenz's fragment. On Christological premises, a "God
against God" can only signify the delegation of the cause of mankind, vis-à-vis
the Father, to the Son, as the Atoner. That excludes metaphysical dualism,
whether of a Gnostic or a Neo-Platonic derivation.
In its historical function, the Christian dogma of the Trinity was, after all,
intended as a means of barring the way to dualism, by reducing the impact of the
bifurcation of the divinity that the production of the Son brings with it, by means
of a third agency that the two cooperate in generating, and binding that
bifurcation to the origin, without retracting it or destroying its meaning in terms
of salvation. In this way the dogma succeeds in doing what Neo-Platonism had
failed in, when it was able to produce everythingin the end, the manifold
appearances of the visible worldfrom the original ground of the One in no other
way except by rebellion and apostasy, by loss of being and forgetfulness of the
origin, so that the only possible recommendation was to trace the result back to
its origin and surrender it, again, in the latter. This metaphysical history of the
world as a single turning away of entities from their origin is the root of
everything in our tradition that makes the inner decomposition of the divinity a
precondition of man's world, which is seen as essentially tempting. By contrast,
the attempt of emanatism to interpret the origin [of the world] as the overflowing
of the original spring remained irresolute. For this conception came into conflict
with the attempt, which began at the same time, to characterize the One as the
unbounded; metaphor and concept conflicted here in a way that could not be
harmonized. Hence the inner bifurcation, which avoids making what is perfect
capable of being seduced, in any way, by something outside it, and makes itself
into its sole possible source of opposition. For this position Carl Schmitt appeals
to the thesis of Gregory of Nazianzus that the One (to Hen) is always in revolt
(stasiaston) against itself (pros heauton). 43
The early Christian development of dogma drew its life from the fact that it
liberated itself from Neo-Platonism's schema of decline, and arrived at
irreversible hypostases, which did not need to be 're-

 Page 553

duced' [brought back to the origin]. Nothing is taken back from them even in the
destruction of the world. The avoidance of every form of docetism requires, in
addition, that the Son remain man for all eternitysomething that is inexcusable in
a god, and consequently is always burdened with the residual difficulties that are
still evident in the speculative attempt to work out conceptually, in
Scholasticism, an eternal predestination to become man. There it becomes
evident that despite all the conjuring up of love and unity in the Trinity, traces of
the old dualistic temptations have remained ineffaceable. Especially in the
distribution of roles: of creation to the Father and redemption to the Son, as well
as of the posteschatological (even antieschatological) institutionalization of the
store of grace, which is assigned to the Spiritthe Spirit of Disappointment. Thus
when, rather than looking at the conciliatory formulas, one analyzes what is
implicit, an element of opposition always remainsalways something of
Prometheus in the way the Son acts in solidarity with mankind, who have fallen
from Paradise. That applies to the demand that we should see the harshest
sacrifice as the offer, to the Father, of the ransom for man; but it also applies to
the intradivine rivalry for the assumption of the office of judge at the end of the
ages. A Gnostic interpretation of the New Testament, like Marcion's, could not
have arisen if the bringer of salvation had not already been, by his function
alone, a reproach and a contradiction vis-à-vis the Creator of the world and his
love for man. One will have to bear that in mind in considering the possibility of
a Christological reading of the ''extraordinary saying." The proposal touches on
the elementary tensions in the structure of our tradition.
It is easy to smile at the zeal of the "political theologian." But there are
unmistakable connections between the possible source that he has introduced
into the discussion and Goethe's mythical thematics. The fragment of Lenz's
Catharina was produced in the period of the Prometheus fragment and at no
great distance from the fundamental attitudes of the young Goethe that underlay
it. It is possible that Goethe borrowed from the characteristics of the figure, in
the drama, of the painter Correggiothe rival (prohibited by Catharina's father) of
her heavenly beloved. Still more important is the fact that Goethe, too,
understands this conflict between gods as a father-son conflict. That is not only
an episode ending with his departure for Weimar. It meshes with his life
program, which is formed in opposition to the sober skepticism of his father,
who does not accept his genius as a reliable

 Page 554

constant. When Goethe himself has become the rigid bookkeeper who
administers his sphere with painstaking exactitude, he may have criticized his
breaking away from his father with the formula that he would only have been
able to assert himself against the god if he had really been the artist-god that he
had made it his program to be. A motto like the one assigned to the third part of
Dichtung und Wahrheit would have fit perfectly among the maxims of his father
that he had received with mockery at the time: "Care has been taken that trees do
not grow as high as heaven." The "extraordinary saying" is not only
metaphysicsand if it is metaphysics, it is metaphysics constructed on the ground
plan of an experience of life.
Carl Schmitt wrote, regarding his discovery in the dramatic fragment of Lenz,
that he was certain "that the much-discussed riddle of Goethe's saying has been
deciphered here." Can we share his certainty of this? If one relates the saying to
the Prometheus myth, appropriated (in Goethe's manner) as a father-son conflict,
then a sort of 'mythogram,' reduced to abstraction, is the result. But this
assumption in particular does not permit a Christological hermeneutics. Even for
the supposed source, Catharina's outcry in Lenz's fragment, no Christological
interpretation presents itself. Catharina becomes a saint because the Son
becomes her God. Her flesh-and-blood father enters the picture only under the
metaphor of the "loving, aggrieved god." His tyranny cannot return Catharina to
him because she has on her side the God whose name genius only
metaphorically and episodically borrows. If her father had embraced her,
bringing her back to him and interrupting the path of holiness, then the Son of
God, to whom she engages herself with her kiss and whose image she holds out
against him, would have been a deadly enemy in the bosom of the father-god. A
scene in which the Son is invoked as spiritual authority for the final break with
the sacredness of the father cannot be Christological.m
Carl Schmitt's reading of the "God against god" formula would bring the
"extraordinary saying" into the neighborhood of Schelling's analysis of the
Prometheus myth. Schelling drew the ultimate consequence from the tendency
that was implicit in the collateral tradition according to which Prometheus was
Zeus's son. For myth, what is also divine can only develop into something
antidivine; under Idealism's postulate of autonomy, being a son inevitably turns
into being an enemy. Consequently spirit, as that in man which is, in its origin,
divine, is, on account of its autonomy, potentially what impels man

 Page 555

to rebel against the gods. "I am speaking of Prometheus, who on the one hand is
only the principle of Zeus himself and, in contrast to man, is something divine, a
divine element that becomes the origin of man's intelligence, that confers on him
something that had not been granted to him by the previous world order. . . . But
over against the divine, Prometheus is will, which is indomitable and
indestructible, and which is therefore able to withstand the god." 44
A sufficient reason why Christianity (though Schelling would not have admitted
this) is not the logical result of the Old Testament is that it implies a break with
the first of the Ten Commandments. Schelling seeks to escape this by means of
the converse principle: What is also divine does not fall into rivalry if it satisfies
the Trinitarian conditions: mythical multiplicity is confined by means of
dogmatic unity. That is why Prometheus is "not an idea that a man invented, he
is one of the original ideas that force themselves into existence and that unfold
logically. . . . " In the still mythical image of the uninvented original idea, the
conflict of gods can be avoided on the assumption that the (episodically) hostile
will is, in its innate logic, identical with the will to which it is antagonistic. As a
result, Prometheus's long-range, historically universal intentions for the human
species that was present independently of Zeus"that is, which originally
belonged to a different world order"would finally converge with what Zeus
himself had wanted when he meant to "put a new species in place of the present
human one." The god of salvation produces the same mankind that the god of
nature, in his rejection of the actually created species, had in mind.
From the perspective of the end of his story and of history as such, Prometheus,
after all, becomes one of the hypostases of Zeus, the implication of his desire for
a world. "So there was after all something in Zeus in conformity with which he
could not simply not like what Prometheus had done." No longer only in the
sense of the Stoics' Providence, but also in that of an Idealist total history of
spirit, Prometheus is the secret sonstill unknown to his fatherof Zeus. The
disclosure of his filiation is the completion of the sense of history in favor of
man, the integration of the demiurgic species into a reconciled universe.
Polytheism is not obliterated or even just corrected by Trinitarian monotheism,
but is decoded by it. For that, too, the "extraordinary saying" provides the
diagram: It designates the myth as an episode of history, and the possibility of
that episode as itself myth

 Page 556

as such, which, in its Trinitarian suspension and continuation [Aufhebung],

merely reveals its hidden logic.
In the young Goethe's Prometheus configuration there is no refuge whatever for
the conjecture that the demiurgic rebel and aesthetic benefactor of mankind
could in all this, after all, have had the job of carrying out the hidden wishes of
Zeus, the father. The Titan's immortality is the rock-hard support for his
defiance, just as the child Johann Wolfgang had thought of immortality in view
of the earthquake of Lisbon. Goethe had no relation to theodicy, as his childish
variation on the sermon about Lisbon already shows; instead of that, his
fundamental idea will be that God would have had to arrange the world
differently if he had been concerned about man.n That is why, in the "God
against god," there is no secret understanding between the son and the father.
The fact that the "extraordinary saying" would not only, following Riemer's
presentiment, have "boundless applications" but also fit precisely, in its
[different] readings, into Goethe's argument with himself, into his self-discovery,
leads to the disappointing realization that his metaphysical gesture promises no
single meaning that could be inferred from a distant source or from a unique
instance in which it was put forward. But we can be reconciled with its
ambiguity by the fact that it is only through it that this gesture remains equal to
the forces that deform this life itself. Thus it also brings us close to the limiting
danger that was concealed in Goethe's predilection for paradoxes the danger of
dissociation from reality. After Epimenides' Awakeningin July 1814; Zelter is
visiting, the czar is expectedCharlotte von Schiller sees him in a state "as though
he did not find himself at home in the world's element," in fact, as though he
were awakening, like the priest of the temple, from having mercifully slept
through [a period of] history. What he pronounces resembles the ambiguity that
has reached the stage of boundlessness against which he had to guard his
paradoxes: "Thus he spoke only in sentences that contained a contradiction, so
that one could interpret everything however one wanted to." 45Could not one of
these sentences have been the "extraordinary saying''?

 Page 557

Translator's Notes
a. Wilhelm Meisters Wandejahre [Wilhelm Meister's travels], which was finally
completed only in 1829, was the sequel to Goethe's autobiographical novel,
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship] (1794 1796).
b. In the Prometheus fragment that was added to the ode. See the fifth paragraph
from the end of part 4, chapter 2.
c. The Libation Bearers, the second tragedy of the Oresteia trilogy.
d. Lili Schönemann. Goethe's relationship to her is a major theme of Book Four
of Dichtung und Wahrheit.
e. Venetian Epigram no. 66, translated by David Luke in Goethe (Baltimore:
Penguin Books, 1964), p. 119.
f. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book Four, chapter 20, ed. Scheibe, p. 640.
g. The "Reformation" proposition quoted above and in note 28.
h. See note g.
i. Goethe often compared his cynical friend, Johann Heinrich Merck, to
Mephistopheles.
j. Arcraisch here, perhaps in all three senses: (a) old-fashioned, out-of-date, (b)
ancient, and (c) associated with 'the beginnings' (Greek: archai).
k. "If the eye were not sunlike it could not see the sun," in Goethe, trans. Luke,
p. 282.
l. Göttlich can be rendered in English either as "godlike" or as "divine." The
latter would be more accurate, but has become so trivialized by its use in vulgar
(nowadays often satirical) grandiloquence that I have generally preferred the
former, which still has a certain amount of dignity attached to it.
m. Since in German every noun is capitalized, the author (like Lenz, whom he is
summarizing) did not face the decision of whether to capitalize Father in these
sentences. The English practice of capitalizing common nouns only when they
refer to biblical or other "monotheistic" divinities requires us to be explicit as to
whether our use of such terms is to be taken literally or metaphorically.
n. This sentence refers to one of Goethe's maxims in Maxims and Reflections
(Werke, ed. E. Beutler [Munich: Artemis, 1945-], vol. g, p. 611), which was
quoted in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1983), p. 244.

 Page 559

PART V
THE TITAN IN HIS CENTURY

 Page 561

1
Passage through the Philosophy of History
. . . the indestructible simply shows itself all the more enduring, the stronger
the blows are that strike it.
Karl August Varnhagen von Ense

The nineteenth century did not take warning from the example of Goethe's
identification with Prometheus. In a way that was comparable to no other epoch
before it, it comprehended itself in and by means of the Titanand not only by
means of an aesthetic and allegorical interpretation of him. Only when Nietzsche
rediscovers in Prometheus the central figure of ancient tragedy, and finds in that
figure the absolute antithesis of the Socratic type, does it become clear that the
century had wagered on Prometheus as the victorious conqueror on behalf of
mankind, the god who invents ways to combat the gods' playing with men's
fortunes, the patriarch of historical self-discovery. It is not by accident that
Burckhardt's posthumous Griechische Kulturgeschichte [History of Greek
culture]with its assertion, going even further than Nietzsche, that the Greeks'
pessimistic diagnosis of existence is reflected in the shackled Titan on the
Caucasuswas published almost exactly at the turn of the century. The century
had indeed used the Titan's great gesture of the institution of fire as a metaphor
for its own accomplishments, but it had not been able and had not wanted to bear
in mind the gods' jealousy of all earthly happiness, a jealousy that, according to
Burckhardt, permeated the myth. It had

 Page 562

not connected the mythical idea that earthly consummation could never be
anything but "an encroachment on the gods' privilege of happiness and their
perfection"a with the suspicion, or even fear, that in making himself comfortable
in the world man might have to be prepared for resistance, for limits, or even for
objections imposed by overwhelming force. Burckhardt's description of Greek
culture coincided with the eschatological change of mood that accompanied the
fin de siècle. Precisely because the epoch's consciousness of itself was so firmly
associated with the Promethean material, every addition to what could be
perceived in it, such as Nietzsche's and then Burckhardt's, was bound to seize
upon its already acquired 'significance' and to intensify it to the most penetrating
impressiveness.
In the decade in which it was discovered by psychoanalysis, involuntary
association is the up-to-date symptom of the century's affinity for the figure of
the Titan. Franziska Reventlow, later the bohémienne of the Schwabing 'cosmic'
circle,b recounts in one of the letters of her youth to Emanuel Fehling what
happened to her during a class in teachers' college: "Today we read in Childe
Harold that for someone whose breast was lacerated by the ceaseless vultures (of
regret) it was beneficial to linger by the Rhine. Dr. Ernst asked me who the poet
meant by that; I was far away in my thoughts, and beaming with joy cried
'Prometheus.' The entire class, even Ernst himself, burst out in Homeric laughter,
and I was deeply ashamed (?)." 1In Byron's narrative poem the combination of
regret, vultures, and the Rhine is found in the third canto. Stanza 59 sings of the
farewell to the Rhine, which the traveler only reluctantly leaves and the charm of
which he describes by means of the contrast that even one who was afflicted by
the most extreme self-torment could find rest and relief of his agony here. True,
the pilgrim's actual departure is described, but in the greatest imaginable
intensification of what the landscape could bring about for an unnamed person in
the extremity of self-torment. So the young countess's answer was not at all
foolish; the poet alludes to Prometheus, without comparing his pilgrim to him.
This epic, whose third canto had been written in 1816, in Switzerland, not only
made Byron the romantic hero of the day in the literary salons of London but
also represented Romanticism for the century in the most effective way, that of
required reading in school. The allusion is confirmed, explicitly, by stanza 163
of the fourth canto: Prometheus embezzled the lightning bolt, but the artist who
exalted

 Page 563

man by representing God in his form, as the Apollo of Belvedere, cleared away
the debt and justified the fire-giver. The Titan's theodicy is not his suffering, but
the fact that God can be represented in man's form. The hand that created the
work of art was animated by the fire of the lightning. Since this train of thought
is central to the poem, it is impossible that the effect of the romantic landscape
of the Rhine should appear to the poet as describable in any way other than as
being able to provide even a suffering Prometheus with relief. But this sufferer
himself has only metaphorical interest. It is no longer the defiant gesture of the
artist who brings forth worlds, as in Sturm und Drang, that causes the Gaucasus
to be forgotten, but rather the aura of his work. The tragic quality disappears in
it, making it possible for it to be rediscovered when Romanticism recedes.
It is not the superabundance of examples that makes the century's affinity for the
figure of Prometheus so impressive, but the heightened intensity of the work on
his myth, work that is indicated by the extent of the deformations, the revisions,
the changes of genre, and the drive to achieve definitive unsurpassability. There
is also, as evidence of the energy involved in the relationship, a sort of pressure
to fill the role: Anyone who did not entitle himself "Prometheus" allowed
someone else to do it. The periodical to which Goethe had promised his
Pandora, in 1807, is the initial exhibit in a huge collection, as the delayed
showpiece of which we also have "Australopithecus prometheus," whose
possesion of fireasserted by his discoverer, Dart, in 1948later, ironically, had to
be disallowed, because the black coloring at the location of the find, in the cave
at Makapansgat, could be explained by other means.
As the allegorical and emblematic interpretive proceduresbut also etiological
explanations tracing myths back to prehistoric eventsceased to be generally
accepted, the position defined by the Prometheus material had become vacant,
less definite in function and capable of being occupied in various ways. Perhaps
the key to this ambiguity is the discovery that Diderot made as early as 1774 in
his refutation of Helvétius's anthropology. 2This consisted in the simple
statement that there have been many men like Ixion or Prometheus, and equally
many vultures that have lacerated them. In the context this means that the
situation that creates a need for Prometheus continually recurs, that it is in fact
constitutive for man's history, as a continuity of work that could not be kept in
motion by onetime gifts. That, Diderot says,

 Page 564

is the business of those who allow themselves to be broken on the Ixion's wheel
of the sharpest attention, whom the vulture of lackonce it has been
recognizedunceasingly attacks. The pluralization of Prometheus follows from a
philosophy of history: Progress does not alter the situation of the individual who
is ready to push it forward, because his vulture is the plague of ideas and of the
exertion directed at each next step. Diderot thinks he finds in Helvétius the
implication that a fruitful idea resembles, in its accidental character, the tile that
detaches itself from the roof and falls on someone's head. This is what is left of
[the idea of] inspiration, even if it presents itself under a more modest name;
whereas Diderot sees the omnipresence of Prometheus and his vulture in history
as excluding accidents from it. Of course the fact that history plagues man does
not justify Rousseau's criticism that he could and should have avoided it.
Rousseau, according to Diderot, did a poor job of upholding the original, savage
condition against the social one. He faded to note that it is fear that, like
Prometheus's vulture, propels the work of culture. If Rousseau had been willing
to imagine a type of society that appeared still half savage and already half
civilized, then it would have been more difficult to reply to his argument. Men
came together in order to combat their constant enemy, nature. They were not
satisfied to defeat herthey wanted to triumph over her as well. They found a hut
more comfortable than a cave, and when they had a hut, they aspired to a palace.
Diderot believes that there is a limit to the process of civilization, a limit that
accords with man's happiness and that is by no means as far removed from the
state of savagery as people imagine.
The question, he says, is only how one could return to this limit, when one has
overstepped it, and how one could remain at it when one has arrived there. We
will have to think of the great stock-taking of the Encyclopedia as part of the
answer to this question. But it hardly still permits the utopia of the hypothesis: If,
somewhere on earth, one could make a fresh beginning, perhaps it would be
possible "to find a mean that would retard Prometheus's son's steps forward
[progrès], protect him from the vulture and fix civilized man between the
childishness of the savage and our decrepitude." Mankind must be protected, not
from Prometheus and his sons, but from the vultures that urge them on. That is a
subtle shift of the accent in the configuration, from the sons of Prometheus to the
vulturesa shift of which the following

 Page 565

century was not to take notice, however natural it may remain, even with
Diderot's pluralization of the Prometheus story.
When one considers that the founder of the Encyclopedia wrote this almost at
the same time that the "Prometheus" article of its thirteenth volume, published in
1765, was being written, the pressure of the conceptualization of a philosophy of
history, which leads to the abandonment of the aesthetic features of the mythical
figure, becomes evident. It is not by accident that a century later the historian of
France saw in Diderot himself the true Prometheus, who created more than
works: He created men, and breathed his animating breath over France and over
Germany (being more influential in the latter, through Goethe, than in the
former). 3Admittedly, Goethe cannot have been acquainted with Diderot's Titan
of the work of history when he shifted the Prometheus of his early ode from his
artist's workshop under the open sky into the smith's caves of Pandora, because
the text of the Refutation of Helvétius was not available to him and to his
contemporaries for the greater part of the century. It was published for the first
time in Assézat's edition of Diderot in 1875.
At that time Nietzsche had discovered a new aesthetic function for Prometheus,
that of typifying the opposite of the Socratic divergence from the veracity of the
tragic consciousness, and thus at the same time also typifying the opposite of the
spirit of the waning century. What had been unmistakable in the suffering figure
of the historical doer as he appeared in Diderotnamely, myth's permanent
unspoken thought that for every gain and every achievement a price has to be
paidbecomes incompatible with the regaining of tragic authenticity, of the
incomparable immanence of the mythical figure. True, Diderot had pointed to
the impetus behind history, whose operation puts Rousseau in the wrong, when
he said that it is fear that drives man out of the supposed paradise of his initial
naturalness; but he could have added that it also drives him out of the
antiparadise of the tragic self-conception as the refusal of history.
The transformation of the suffering Prometheus into the triumphant one, of the
Titan into the Olympian, takes place, as it were, on the quiet. When Max Klinger
conceives his polychrome monument to Beethoven with the features of a
Prometheus, it finally becomesbeyond the period of its genesisa Zeus on a
pedestal of rock, at whose feet an eagle has alighted, which looks up at the
genius with amber eyes. This monument, which was at first much admired and

 Page 566

then very quickly scorned as a "conglomerate," and which not only dealt with
the power [Kraft] of genius but was itself a 'feat of strength' ['Kraftakt'], was the
product of preliminary studies extending across seventeen years. The plaster
model that was made in Paris in 1885 still exhibits the comparison of the
composer with Prometheus, a conception that had already been canonized by the
Vienna monument by Kaspar Clemens von Zumbusch that was unveiled in 1880.
The Verein Beethovenhaus [Beethoven House Association] in Bonn acquired
Klinger's first model in 1937 and exhibited it in the summerhouse erected
specifically for that purpose in the yard of the memorial from which it takes its
name. As times and tastes changed, the model was finally shown only on special
request, since visitors had long ceased to be interested in such things, or even
regarded them as beneath them. Times and tastes having continued to change, in
1977 the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts is again able to put the monument, for
the first time since the Second World War, in its collection on display. The great
museums of Europe scramble for the right to be able to show this still, in fact,
scorned product of an esoteric aesthetics and an overstrained cult of genius, in
the Klinger exhibitions they now have to put on.
The crisis of this turn of the century, which likes to paint itself in apocalyptic
colors, must be examined over and over again in the light of the programs that
had been furnished for the century as it was beginning. On account of its gradual
dissemination, I have still counted among these the French Encyclopedia, with
its characteristic 'realism,' which carried the work further than its authors'
philosophical programs could ever have foreseen. To see this one must study not
so much the articles in the text as rather the volumes of plates, which document a
new intensiveness and extensiveness of observation and which made distinctly
visible things that the perfected world of illustrations in modem encyclopedias
runs together again. The parade of cultural gains in the pictorial part of the
Encyclopedia, which, with its interweaving (induced by alphabetical order) of
instruments of self-preservation and means of self-presentation, makes the user
forget Rousseau's problem of the incendiary effect of fire from heaven,
legitimizes what is by reference to what can be in the future. In doing so it
makes what could throw doubt on the origin of this inalienable stock seem
insignificant. The suggestion that the fire stolen from heaven might not be pure
already belongs to the process of the Enlightenment's going

 Page 567

beyond itself, which unites Rousseau and Kant. Rousseau did not provide any
theory of why mankind was not satisfied, in the moderate light of reason, with its
naked self-preservation; but Kant was to show that the principle of self-
preservation already contains the principle of going beyond oneselfthat reason
already contains the potential of its "pure" use. There is such a thing as the
Rousseauism of reason, and Kant's critique is the high point not only of the
Enlightenment but also of its self-demarcation against exuberance and excess,
against the claimnourished by its consciousness of successto totality.
One of his last publications in the Berliner Monatsschrift [Berlin monthly], in
1796, still protests not so much against "a refined tone that has recently arisen in
philosophy," as its title says, but rather against reason's behaving like a thief as
soon as it wants to make visible more, or pretends to be able to see more, with its
light, than is a vital necessity for it. It seems to have become necessary for the
critique of reason to attend to the office of a "police in the realm of the sciences,"
a police that must not tolerate seeing what can be attained through work
neglected in the name of a philosophy of immediate intuition and thus of pure
presumption. Everything is permissible, Kant concedes, as a means of enriching
the parsimonious formalism of a philosophy of law with supporting feelings, but
this can only be "ex post," after the "brazen voice'' of duty has first been heard.
Here we again encounter Jacobi. What he had offereda philosophy that founded
morality on feelinghas to be rejected, Kant says, however desirable it is to
enliven by every means that has first been established rationally. It is the "death
of all philosophy" when it does more than bring the law to conceptual clarity,
and in "enthusiastic vision" seeks the aesthetic mode of representation involving
personification and mythicization, so as to turn "the reason that issues moral
commands into a veiled Isis," and make the logically explicable "presentiment of
a law" into the ambiguous "voice of an oracle." This metaphor enables Kant to
refer back to Fontenelle's treatise, which had inaugurated the Enlightenment, on
the falling silent of the oracles.
Kant attributes to the new Platonists, Schlosser, Jacobi, and Stolberg, the claim
to have kindled their light of Enlightenment from Plato himselfwho, however,
was unable to state what his light consisted of and "what was enlightened [or
"clarified": aufgeklärt] by it." Since the origin of the new light of reason
becomes, in this way, a mystery,

 Page 568

Plato permits his disciples to assert, without being contradicted, that it is a light
derived from a higher source. Precisely at this point Kant's thought leaps from
Plato to Prometheus. "But so much the better!" Kant makes his new Platonists
exclaim: "Because then it is obvious that he, a second Prometheus, wrested
[entwandt] the spark for this light directly from heaven." 4Wrested [entwunden]
or stole [entwendet]?c If the bringer of light, that "supposed Plato," cannot
define the enlightening effect of his light, it is natural to suspect that it derives
not from a higher mystery but from illegitimate recourse to an 'immediacy' that
belongs only to the gods.
Of course, in one of the final years of the century of the Enlightenment, this is a
text of resignation. The fact that more than a decade after the critique of reasond
a philosophy of feeling was still, or again, possible was bound to escape the
comprehension of one who thought he had made the success of the
Enlightenment final by defining its limits. This situation is reflected, at the end
of Kant's experience with the effects of reason, by the problematic savior figure
of Prometheus.
The name that Kant attaches, in this way, to his late disappointment points back
across almost half a century to his earliest attempt to come to grips with the very
great expectations that had become attached to scientific reason in mankind's
coming to grips with nature and that had undergone their crisis as a result of the
earthquake at Lisbon. Kant commented three times, in the Königsberger
Wochenzeitung (Königsberg weekly news], on this natural phenomenon, which
had provoked the six-year-old Goethe's 'theodicy.' In the "fragility of the ground
under our feet," as Kant calls it, the most extreme destabilization of the one
taken-for-granted constant of our life-world, the ground under our feet that
supports us, suddenly became manifest. As was to be expected, the great alarm
called forth bringers of salvation, among them the Göttingen professor (and
member of the academy there), Hollmann, who proposed making a vent for the
subterranean forces by boring holes in the earth's crust.
In this matter Kant relies on a "certain correct taste in natural science," which he
thinks is guided by a belief in "man's incapacity" vis-à-vis the elementary
powers of nature. Kant does not have complete confidence even in the lightning
rod, which had just been invented and had immediately been installed by
Reimarus's son on the Jacobi Church in Hamburg, as a symbol of the triumph of
the Enlightenment. For him, the offers to deprive the earthquake, like the
lightning bolt,

 Page 569

of its power, come under the name of the Titan to whom, as the first in the series
of the great inventors and conquerors of the fear of unknown powers, Benjamin
Franklin had been brought into relation, although he hardly suspected, as yet, the
future usefulness of this tamed power of nature: "From the Prometheus of
modern times, Mr. Franklin, who wanted to disarm the thunder, to the person
who wants to extinguish the fire in Vulcan's workshop, all such efforts are
evidence of man's daring, which is joined to a capacity that is very small in
proportion to it, and finally lead him to the humbling recollectionwith which he
would have done well to beginthat he is, after all, never anything more than a
man." 5Reason, in its human condition, is not satisfied. It tugs at its
restrictionsnot yet, as in the critique of reason of the 1780s, because it wants to
be "pure" and cannot choose anything else whatever without a feeling of loss,
but still as an agency of power in relation to natureas a way of securing success
in life, as the Cartesian "marcher avec assurance en cette vie" [to walk with
confidence, in this life]. Before he contradicted reason's arrogance of purity,
Kant had brought doubt to bear on its epochal program of reincarnating
Prometheus.
Historical caesuras, new beginnings, cannot be posited without the asserted
worthlessness of what had preceded the claimed break becoming a burden to the
subject that is supposed to have made the new beginning. If reason itself ascribes
to itself the necessity of a new beginning, it must face the question what else,
then, what other agency, could have been responsible for the intolerable state
that went before it. Where subject and reason assert their identity with one
another, the desire for justice to the totality of history must become
overwhelming. As soon as the ingenuousness of the zero point has disappeared,
the question takes shape: What, then, did mankind do before, and how (if that is
what happened) did it deprive itself of its rational equipment so as to become so
much in need of emancipations? Seen from this point of view, Romanticism and
historicism are not phenomena of mere reaction against [the Enlightenment's]
cheerlessness [Ungemütlichkeit], but are answers to the embarrassment of
contingencyaggravated by the century of reasonthat belongs to the modern age,
which had enough to do in any case to make the Middle Ages "dark" and to win
the querellee with the ancient world. Insofar as, finally, the French Revolution
enacted the epoch's claim only phenotypically, it brought the necessary
complement out of the wings:

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its [own] Romantic, Napoleon, as well as the Romanticism that rebels against
him.
Part of the question that Romanticism posed about the unity of history's subjecta
subject that has not yet taken on the solidity of the "world spirit"is the question
whether the oldest poetical materials could be not only preserved but renewed,
under changed circumstances. This inevitably becomes a further experiment with
the constancy and hard-wearingness of the ancient myths. Friedrich Schlegel's
program for Romanticism, in his Dialogue on Poetry, asks itself the question
whether something like the ancient tragedies could ever be produced again.
Toward the end of the first version, written in 1800, the answer is that if the
mysteries and mythology were first "rejuvenated by the spirit of physics," it
could become possible to compose tragedies "in which everything is ancient, and
which yet would be certain to capture the sense of the age through the meaning."
6
Rejuvenation by the spirit of physicsthat is not the subjugation of poetry to the
scientific spirit of the modern age, but more nearly the expectation of a different
physics, which could make possible relationships of reciprocal influence and
which had already been proclaimed in Novalis's speculations. Among the
mythical themes that would be capable of such rejuvenation, the Camilla of the
dialogue wishes for a Niobe, Antonio for the myth of Apollo and Marsyas,
which seems to him "very timely," or indeed "probably always timely in any
well-composed literature," and Marcus comes to the lapidary conclusion: "I
would much rather ask for a Prometheus." No reasons are given, but it is natural
to see the common denominator of the chosen themes in the fact that they would
each, in their way, serve to express the fate of the artist and of art, because that is
the only thing that can still take on tragic dimensions.
In Schlegel's revision of the dialogue for the 1823 edition of his works, the talk
is no longer of the rejuvenation of myth by the spirit of physics. Of Prometheus,
we now read: "This thinking Titan, as he forms his men in defiance of the gods,
is really a model for the modern artist and poet, in his struggle against an adverse
destiny or a hostile environment."7The Ludovico of the dialogue knows how to
convert that immediately into a stage allegory, which shows Prometheus, the
exemplary, in his actual situation: "Instead of the rocks of the Caucasus you can
have the new Prometheus shackled and chained to the stage of any of our
theaters; there he will lose his Titanic arrogance." That

 Page 571

reminds one of Karl Moor's scornful comment on the contemporary fate of

everything Titanic: "Prometheus's flaming spark of light has burnt out, and in its
place people now use the flame from club-moss powdera theater fire that cannot
light a pipe of tobacco."f
For Romanticism to be able to integrate the myth into itself, it is crucial that it
should be able to carry out on it part of the recovery of the identity of the single
historical subjectthe rediscovery of the single language of mankind, which
would be spoken and understood even across the break between epochs. The
place of the first version's rejuvenation by physics has been taken by a postulated
philosophy of life: "If the inner natural meaning of the old saga of the gods and
heroes, the sound of which reaches us on the magic stream of imagination as the
giant voice of the primeval ageif this meaning will be more closely revealed for
us, and will be renewed for us, too, and rejuvenated, by the spirit of a philosophy
that is itself alive and that also understands life dearly: then it will be possible to
compose tragedies in which everything is ancient, and which yet would be
certain to capture the sense of the age through the meaning." Philosophy has
become the agency of that sought-for identity; it grasps the possibilities that
come down, preformed in the stream of history, for each age.
The renewal of myth within Idealism is not a simple task, because Idealism is
itself a myth. That a story has to be told about the spirit, a story that can only be
imprecisely surmised on the basis of the actual history of ideas, is also part of the
attempt to overcome the contingency that oppresses the self-consciousness of the
modern age. In that effort, the philosophical 'isms' appear like actors in a world-
encompassing story: "Idealism in any form must transcend itself in one way or
another, in order to be able to return to itself and remain what it is. Therefore,
there must and will arise from the matrix of Idealism a new and equally infinite
realism, and Idealism will not only by analogy of its genesis be an example of
the new mythology, but it will indirectly become its very source." 8The pattern
followed by such a story is independent of the fact that Friedrich Schlegel wants
the term Idealism to be understood in an epistemologically unspecific sense, as a
characterization of the spirit of the age and without regard to the "scientific error
admixed" with it. As such, it is, above all, a means of self-protection against the
charge of Spinozism.
In the context of this passage of the programmatic work, which was struck out in
the second version, to talk of Prometheus as the

 Page 572

Idealist is without hubris: "So at present I do not expect the Idealist, like a new
Prometheus, to want to place the power of the divine single-handedly in has own
ego, since in any case this Titanic arrogance and error cannot spread far, and
must automatically call forth its antithesis." It looks like the formula for the
actual history thatbetween Goethe's early Prometheus and his late Pandora,
1773 and 1806, on either side of the date of the Romantic programhas already
almost run its course and will soon present itself as the symmetry of Prometheus
and Epimetheus.
It is not Prometheus's defiance of Olympus that fails, but rather Idealism's test of
itself in the same endeavor. That which time and again calls itself realism is
engendered by the disappointments of the programs that are its forerunnersin the
same way, even the nihilism that Nietzsche extols will be only the extreme form
resulting from the disappointment of an unsurpassable demand for a trustworthy
reality [for Solidität]. Idealism's interpretation of itself as aesthetic can be
regarded as an anticipatory way of avoiding disappointments, insofar as the exit
into the aesthetic realm creates the purest form of irrefutability. Paradoxically,
aestheticizing the world makes its reality superfluous, since it would always be
even more beautiful merely to have imagined it. When perception itself takes on
the characteristics of an aesthetic action, what is by its nature improbable is lost
in the uniformity of everything. In the Jena lectures on transcendental
philosophy of 1800 1801, this consequence is blocked only by the fact that the
world is presented as "incomplete." Room is left for an artificiality that is
equivalent to nature: "Man, as it were, composes [dichtet] the world, only he
does not immediately know it." 9Since there is nothing whatever left for him to
do but to compose it, he ceases to have any Promethean character. With the ease
and impunity of the gesture of creation, defiance and suffering no longer have
any function. It is logical that the history that is restored to its unbroken identity
under the favor of all the gods makes mythical founding acts of rebellion and
deception nonsensical.
Accordingly, the myth sinks back to the level where its etiological origins could
be conjectured to lie. In the Vienna lectures on the philosophy of history of
1828, Friedrich Schlegel now sees the Prometheus story only as a myth of the
origin of the Greeks, in which they continue to perceive vaguely their derivation
from a Caucasian race who had everywhere displaced and oppressed, but had
never

 Page 573

entirely exterminated the original Pelasgian inhabitants of Greece. The Titan on

the Caucasus is an ethnic protagonist. His myth no longer belongs in the
typology of the Enlightenment, for whose concept of reason this kind of story of
descent and migration would have been a matter of indifference. Now "descent"
means that reason wants to reclaim the background of its history, the sources of
the unified stream flowing through time. The philosophy of history is the
interpretation of remembrance, as the most distant accessible figure of which the
Caucasian ancestor, Prometheus, stands out. He is not only a progenitor, but,
above all, the receiver and bearer of an original revelation, of the precise
opposite of a theft of fire. Mankind's archaic dowry was preserved by means of a
tradition that is continually threatened by incomprehension, and in cryptic forms,
in such a way that its Romantic regeneration turns out to be more a surmise than
an interpretation.
In the first of the Vienna lectures, the unity of the human race, as a precondition
of this hidden tradition, becomes a condition of the possibility of a philosophy of
history. So that "the hidden light of an eternal origin" can be enclosed in all men,
room cannot be allowed to the myth of autochthonous people, who are supposed
to have sprung up everywhere from the fertile mud of the earth. Prometheus is
the figure opposed to that. He is the progenitor, furnished with wisdom, of all
men, though also of the Greeks in particular. "Now this quite universal human
belief in Prometheus's heavenly light, or however else one wants to designate it,
in our heart is in fact the only thing we may presuppose here, and which we must
everywhere take as our point of departure." 10The 'transcendental' character of
the pattern of thought is manifest: With the opposite view, "no history at all, and
no science of history, is possible."
Then everything inevitably is concentrated on presenting Prometheus's theft of
fire as the great misunderstanding of the myth, as uncomprehension of an
original act almost of [divine] grace. He did not steal what had been entrusted to
him as a historical property for mankind: "So Prometheus's divine spark in the
human breast, when it is characterized more accurately and sharply and
expressed more historically, depends on the word that was originally given to
man and inborn and entrusted and communicated to him as that in which his
most characteristic essence, his spiritual dignity and also his higher destination,
consists, and from which it results."11

 Page 574

It is not by accident that Schlegel repeatedly calls the philosophy of history that
is founded on the "principle of [man's] likeness to God" the "legitimate" world
view. Here it is not the enlightenments that have destroyed the identity of the
tradition; the idea that reason would first have to find [finden], if not invent
[erfinden], itself had only been made possible by the historical subject's loss of
identity, when it was not really able to fix a "proper beginning" for itself or,
correspondingly, a ''proper end" either. It had surrendered its definite outline.
Romanticism projects the legitimacy problematic of the period following the
Revolution onto world-historical dimensions. The plurality of intrahistorical
positings of 'substance' is replaced by a single archaic act of establishment, a
treasure handed down in traditionanalogous to theology's depositum fidei [store
of faith]for which the name of a blessed [begnadeten] (rather than a pardoned
[begnadigten]) Prometheus brings with it the potential energy of an unbaptized
'significance.' In the seventh lecture Prometheus serves to distinguish man's
substantial likeness to God from what appears, in myth, as a merely external
finding of a convenient form: "But the divine image in man does not consist, for
example, in a passing ray of light, like a lightning bolt, or in individual thoughts,
but in Prometheus's kindling spark. . . . " 12
The other Schlegel, August Wilhelm, published a poetic renewal of the
Prometheus material in Schiller's Musen-Almanach [Muses' almanac] for 1798,
even before his brother's program for Romanticism. It is certainly the most
verbose and tedious product of consideration of this myth; but it gives an
opportunity, in passing, to study still another variant of Goethe's art of keeping
silent. The poem's expansiveness permits 'observations' regarding the myth that
have to be seen as correctives to its employment in Sturm und Drang. For
August Wilhelm, what we inherit in the myth is already the prehistory of a
consolidated Idealism of freedom, no longer that of a defiance that enjoys itself.
O goldne Zeit, auf ewig hingeschwunden!
Wie süss bethört es, deine ferne Spur
In alter Sänger Sprüchen zu erkunden!

[O golden age, vanished forever! How delightfully beguiling it is to

search out your remote traces in the sayings of old singers!]

Whatever else may follow, this beginning has to cite the Romantic Prometheus,
because philological duty has already become too strong to allow one to deform
too much of the inherited picture. It is the

 Page 575

age of the Titans themselves that glimmers so golden in the distance, as it cannot
glimmer for any classicism; the power of fatherly Cronus is precipitately
interrupted by Zeus's seizure of power. It is the childhood of men, which the
bound Titan recalls in a dialogue with his mother, who here (significantly) is
Themis. With the fall of the Titans, the situation had become serious for man:
Dich aber, Mensch! erheb' ich über dich.
Die goldne Kindheit darf nicht wiederkehren,
Die dir im weichen Schooss der Lust verstrich.
Drum lerne handeln, schaffen und entbehren! 13

[But you, man, I elevate above yourself. Your golden childhood, which
slipped by in the soft lap of pleasure, cannot return. So learn to act,
to create, and to do without!]

What Prometheus has to do is 'adjust' man to the post-Titanic age. A new kind of
self-preservation is called for; to "form" it, in the metaphorical sense, is
Prometheus's scheme. His creative activity is described no more clearly than
Idealist philosophy described the creative activity of the subject, which, by
virtue of its derivation from Kant's Transcendental Deduction,g is supposed to
combine the production of necessary conditions with the conditions of a free
aesthetic project. But how is freedom supposed to consist of something that has,
after all, always already been settled, behind the back of the subject who
experiences himself, and that never determines his inner experience and self-
consciousness? "O Sohn! du hist von Schöpferwahne trunken!" [O son, you are
drunk with the delusion of creation!] is mother Themis's weak protest against the
Idealist contemporaries of this Prometheus of 1798. But the delusion of creation
is not restricted to the Promethean figure; it reaches its climax in the
reflexiveness of creation, in self-creation. This is the manifestation of what
Prometheus himself describes as his ''joy in deeds": His creature, he says,
emerging by way of "the nights of error," is the creature who "was created only
to create himself." Zeus "chose" the world and he, Prometheus, chose manthat is
the formula for the conflict both between ancient and modern and between
cosmocentric and anthropocentric metaphysics.
So that this can be entirely and without pretense a history of man's freedom, the
primary concern of the Titan as he anticipates his punishment must be the
question of whether man would be affected,

 Page 576

along with him, by the demonstration of Zeus's power. Themis's verdict on this
question is based solely on the fact that even power must submit to fate, so that
Zeus can do nothing that destiny prohibits to him:
Zeus kann die Bildnerei dir bitter lohnen,
Doch hemmen darf er nicht was sie erzielt.

[Zeus can repay you severely for your sculptor's work, but he may
not obstruct what it produces.]

That is the central sentence of the poem. At the same time, it is a weak spot,
because the appeal to fate cannot be translated into Idealism's language of self-
creation. One could say that this poetic weakness also makes it evident why
Idealism of this kind could not satisfy the new century. It makes unintelligible
the core of a self-conciousness that sees the irrevocability of its own
achievements as the guarantee of its historical invulnerability. So, in Schlegel's
poem it is only reliance on Themis's promise that fate sets a limit to power that
makes Prometheus ready to suffer his punishment.
Wanting to give the poem to Schiller's Musen-Almanach, Schlegel sent it to
Goethe, because Schiller was Goethe's guest at the time. One can assume that
Schlegel, like Schiller, had a very accurate idea of Goethe's affinity to this
material. Schiller had written to Körner in April 1795 that Goethe was occupied
with a tragedy in the ancient Greek style, whose subject was supposed to be the
liberation of Prometheus; and as late as June 18, 1797, one month before his visit
in Weimar, he begs Goethe: "Do not forget to send me the chorus from
Prometheus." We know nothing beyond these hints about such a plan for a
tragedy in the 1790s. One can imagine with what curiosity Schiller awaited
Goethe's reaction to another writer's "Prometheus," but how Goethe too was
conscious of this sort of expectation in the others.
His reaction is, if nothing else, perfection of understatement. He writes to
Schlegel in a manner of the utmost indifference, as though he had never been
involved with this material: "By sending me your 'Prometheus,' you have put me
in a position to entertain my guest in a very agreeable manner. . . . " They had
both, he says, read the poem repeatedly and with pleasure. Schlegel had
succeeded in "endowing the myth with a deep meaning and expressing it in a
serious and noble way. . . . " Furthermore, the verses were very successful,
containing passages of surprising sublimity, and the whole would be "one

 Page 577

of the leading ornaments of the Almanac." 14No reminiscence of his own

experiments with Prometheus, no warning of the explosive power of the subject
that, though harmlessly versified here, nevertheless surpassed Goethe's
conception with its 'creativist' interpretation. The coolness that emanates from
such conventional phrases can hardly be attributed to the fact that here someone
who certainly had to know what he was doing was competing with Goethe's
treatment of the same material. Rather, we should assume that, not having found
access to the reformulation of the Prometheus material that will be presented a
decade later in Pandora, he nevertheless already was unmoved by the high-
spirited talk of creator and creationthat he no longer trusted the demiurgic
register. The fact that Schlegel's poem, which is hardly stimulating any longer,
tested Goethe in this regard allows it nevertheless to retain its place in history.
It is only close to the middle of the century that Prometheus's installation as the
figuration of the philosophy of history is completed. This occurs with Schelling's
Berlin lectures on the philosophy of mythology in 1842 and 1845.
Schelling's point of departure is Aristotle's doctrine of the "active intellect,"
which was such a source of irritation for the Christian tradition. The fact that the
"active intellect" had been assigned the attribute of divinity meant, for Aristotle,
as much and as little as it meant for the Greeks in general, but it arrests
Schelling's attention. Aristotle, he says, did not explain the meaning of his
assertion that the nus poietikos ["active intellect,'' in Greek] operates on the
cognitive faculty from without, and where this operation comes from. This
unclarity then gave the Arabs the opportunity to give priority to the unity of the
intellectus agens ["active intellect," in Latin], over consideration of its divinity.
The fact that this was not a capricious decision, because the unity of the active
intellect merely represented a necessary condition of its function in establishing
universally valid truths for individual subjects, cannot interest Schelling a great
deal. Given the way he uses these terms, it is natural to assume that the intellect,
if it is divine, cannot be God, in which case it can be the "divine" only against
God. Then it is no great step further to say that "the antidivine is also that which
can put itself in God's place."15That thought is hardly in keeping with myth;
more nearly with Luther. In the mythical polycracy [rule of many], one god can
be against the other without this having the lethal implication that the divine, as
something that is, in each case,

 Page 578

uniquely so, can only exist by means of the annihilation of everything else that
also wants to be this. In polytheism, what is against a god is, in order to be this,
also a god, but it is not the 'antidivine.' So metaphysical dualism is not the threat
that arises from the reduction of a polytheism; rather, it is produced by the self-
cleavage of a monotheism that cannot handle the problem of vindicating its God
against the reproach that his world is not in keeping with his concept.
Schelling makes his Aristotle stop short of this threat with his doctrine of the
active intellect: With it, he had "come to a boundary that he was not to cross." It
seems beyond question to Schelling that he saw him thus also "arrived at the
boundary of what ancient philosophy was capable of." The fact that with the idea
of the active intellect Aristotle had said something ultimate about the soul could
be gathered already from the way he "is seized by an unusual afflatus of almost
Platonic enthusiasm."
Philosophy had had its origin in the turning away from myth, and it is not an
easy matter for it to cross the boundary into the realm of possible stories again.
But what is much more important is the fact that Aristotle had no reason to
vindicate his God on account of the world or in relation to anything else, because
his world was eternal and depended on this God only in respect to its motion,
which, however, it provided for itself through its eros. Only when a creator God,
in the ultimate logic of his self-defense, is driven into a corner and obliged not to
let his creation lack anything, will he finally make the world his equal, as in
Giordano Bruno. At the same moment it will become his enemy, since it has
already drawn to itself all the attributes of divinity and leaves no remainder of its
transcendent origin, but swallows it up in its own infinitude.
A substantial distortion of historical perspective is needed in order to perceive
any conflict of this sort in Aristotelian metaphysics. Only when that "active
intellect," on this side of or beyond its theoretical function of generating
universal validity, is conceived as an elementary willingnamely, a willing of
itselfdoes a potential for metaphysical conflict arise.
Schelling's "will of the will" ["Wille des Willens"], whose boyish impertinence
consists in nothing else but the fact "that it has its own will," is, in its turn, only
the common element in all acts of volition, the freedom that controls caprice by
not tolerating the contradiction that is involved in an action that conflicts with
the very possibility of

 Page 579

caprice. But why could this "will of the will" not be satisfied to will itself in the
way that, in that same Aristotle, the unmoved mover, free of all needs, was one
with himself by having nothing to think but himself? The question that one
hardly dared put to this thought of thoughtwhat, then, it actually thinkscan be
addressed less reverently to the "will of the will" as the question what, then, it
actually wills. The reason for the greater ease of the latter question is that the
will can only will itself if it does this implicitly in the process of willing
something else that contains the potential of a contradiction to its ability to will
itselfjust as talk of self-preservation only makes sense as long as there is a
possibility of losing oneself. The world, as the sum of everything that the self is
not, is at the same time the sum of everything that, as an object of the will,
creates a reason for the. "will of the will" by acting as a diversion and a threat.
Thus the will, in contrast to the supposed thought of thought, comes to itself only
by way of the world.
And that is its essentially Idealistic quality. The philosophy of Idealism is a
philosophy of roundabout routes. The absolute cannot remain by itself; it must
come to itself by way of something other than itself. This means, in Schelling's
words (which project it, historically erroneously, onto Aristotle's "active
intellect"): "Therefore, the spirit must set about knowing things; it does not exist,
it comes into being as understanding. . . . " This is "essentially what Aristotle
also indicates."
Having systematically prepared his listener in this way, Schelling now lets him
consider Prometheus as the image (rising up as though surreptitiously and by
chance) of the terrible detour that the divine has to take, by way of the
antidivine, in order to comeat all, and everto itself. The affinity between
Idealism's roundabout route and Prometheus does not immediately leap to view,
because it requires us to consider the configuration from Zeus's point of view.
Only now that he has set up Prometheus as an antidivine principle, sent him
away to he tortured, and allowed his own scion to liberate him, has the quality of
Zeus's power achieved a finality that is worthy of a god. Something that has
hardly ever been treated as important in the reception of the myththe fact that
this cousin of Zeus had been his ally in the struggle for power with the
Titansunexpectedly gains declaratory power in Schelling's allegorical
interpretation in terms of the equivocal character of spirit [Geist, here =
"intellect" in Aristotle]. Only because Prometheus has the same divine origin can
he represent

 Page 580

"the principle of Zeus himself" to men as something external and foreign to

them, something not inherent in their being, and make it penetrate them "from
outside," like Aristotle's nus poietikos [active intellect]. Prometheus represents
what, according to Schelling's reproach, had escaped Aristotle: Aristotle had
"recognized the divine, but had not given equal recognition to the antidivine,
although the two are inseparable."
Representing not Zeus but Zeus's principle, Prometheus becomes the self-will
that opposes the divine and is invincible for it. As such, he becomes the
"principle of mankind." The fundamental idea is that a mediator figure between
god and men cannot be something intermediate, but necessarily becomes
antidivine.
One is, first of all, amazed that this function is not seen in the figure of Hercules
instead. As the hitherto most potent son of Zeus, Hercules does not fear his
displeasure when he kills the god's eagle and deprives Prometheus's punishment
of its severity. In the ancient myth of Hercules, the extent of possible
rebelliousness against Zeus was nowhere near to being exhausted. Otherwise
Zeus could not have been on the way to a new procreation when the culprit's
revelation (purchased by his release) that Zeus would produce a rival who would
overthrow him, this time, made it plain that he should refrain. Only the
anonymous unbegotten one would have been the extreme case of the principle of
antidivinitythe image of the god's self-deprivation of power. If it does not come
to that, then it is at the cost not only of Prometheus's definitive release but also
of the restriction of Zeus's power by nothing other thanand nothing less thanthe
history of an unloved mankind. Schelling cannot view Hercules and the
unbegotten one in this way, because Hercules is the son, and as such the final
and the last. He has to be elevated to something greater than disobedience to the
father-god.
If Aristotle had named that aspect of the spirit [or intellect] "divine" which is the
antithesis of an Idealist "history"namely, its exemption from any disposition to a
storythen the question arises how an emergence from that self-satisfaction
nevertheless comes about. For Schelling, philosophy is not able on its own, by
its own dynamic, to overstep the limit at which Aristotle had stopped. It first had
to be told, "from outside," that the world is only a condition and not an essence
[ein "Seyn"]; that, in other words, it is not "something with which we are
unconditionally confronted,'' but rather something that

 Page 581

is made episodic by the fact that, according to the apostle's promise, "the fashion
of this world passes away."h It follows logically, then, that the world, as soon as
it becomes the mere interim of God's relation to himself, makes more demands
on its both creative and destroying God than the Stagirite's eternal cosmos does,
and at the same time possesses less authentic and autochthonous reliability than
what is uncreated.
This establishment of Idealism on the basis of the New Testament is the most
daring part of Schelling's mythology. It sticks to the biblical mode of speech,
designated the visible world as "this world" and attaching to it the clear
suggestion that it is a world that is "posited together with the present human
consciousness and as transitory as it is." Consequently, Idealism can only be a
post-Christian concept; it "belongs completely to the new world, and needs to
make no secret of the fact that Christianity opened for it what had previously
been a closed door."
If one accepts this assumption of the spirit's incapacity, on its own, to produce
Idealism, and is then compelled to apply it to the ancient world, then the whole
oddity of the undertaking that seeks to call up Prometheus as the prototype of
Idealism's roundabout route becomes evident. Schelling's recasting of the myth
has to be aimed at moving Prometheus closer to Zeus, in his origin, and at
ascribing the allied action against the Titans to him not only as a premeditated
piece of' cleverness but as the consummation of a bond that has to precede his
future history, in order to give it the definite character of a detour. If Prometheus
is supposed to become the patriarch of the principle of mankind, he must
confront mankind as a foreign principle; as the image of the principle that enters
into its reason from outside, he must at the same time have renounced his origin.
Even in the role of mediator he remains a tragic figure, because he allows the
irreconcilability of the indissoluble rights on both sides to persist, and must fully
contest the contradiction "that we are not to suspend, but, on the contrary, to
recognizefor which we have to seek the right expression."
Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology mythicizes Christianitynot its dogmas, not
its fundamental documents, but its sheer existence, after antiquityso as to exhibit
one myth as the magical preformation of the total myth that is narrated by
Idealism. That is possible only if history is not a dimension of contingent events,
but rather the execution

 Page 582

of an immanent teleology that only the vision of the philosophy of history,

sharpened by everything that came later, is capable of perceiving in the myth.
The philosophy of history is a speculative retrospect.
Because the world's persisting in existence cannot be taken for granted,
Prometheus is able to become a figuration of the philosophy of history by
identifying his antidivinity, his contradiction, with the world's persistence. If the
Promethean principle of "god against god" did not exist, "this world" would not
yet or no longer exist, or would at any rate amount to nothing in the face of the
irresistibility of the divine. So Prometheus, in an unsurpassably intensified
function, no longer stands merely for mankind, but for the universe, and against
its innermost nothingness. It is world time itself, as the universe's interval of
grace, for the continuance of which he dismisses any thought of submission. He
"wants to fight through the millenniums-long time, the time that will not cease
except with the end of the present age of the world, when even the Titans, who
were expelled in the earliest times, will be freed from Tartarus again."
The world-preserving equilibrium of the enmity of the gods, the contradiction
that is antidivinity, can only be endured, it cannot be dissolved. A solution can
only come from outside, through a new world generation that is no longer
marked by contradiction. Only when "a new race of sons of the gods comes into
existence, who will mediate between gods and men because they were begotten
by Zeus with mortal mothers," can one of these liberate Prometheus. The real
combination of divinity and humanity in Hercules stands beyond the
contradiction, but by the same token it is already eschatological, no longer
historical. Until then, Prometheus, "in his sufferings, is only the lofty prototype
of the human ego, which, precipitated out of its quiet communion with God,
suffers the same fate, being chained with damps of iron necessity to the rigid
rocks of an accidental but inescapable reality, and hopelessly regards the
breachirreparable and, at least directly, unneutralizablethat arose as a result of
the deed that preceded the present existence and consequently can never be
retracted or revoked."
Here, it is not a story that is told, but rather the story of history [die Geschichte
der Geschichte]. The liberation of Prometheus cannot remain an external act of
force, which Zeus, as it were, merely allows to happen. It becomes something he
can agree to, because he recognizes in it something of which he was capable,
which is revealed to him by

 Page 583

his being contradicted. Schelling evidently does not identify the mankind that
was bequeathed to Zeus by the Titans' era, and which he considered unworthy to
exist, with Prometheus's creatures; otherwise Zeus, in Schelling's account, could
not in the end recognize precisely Prometheus's creatures as the new species that
he himself had had in mind. This invention on the part of the philosopher allows
him to say that there was, after all, in the end "something in Zeus that prevented
him from simply not wanting what Prometheus did." As Schelling reads it, the
Prometheus story is the key to the myth of Zeus: The continued existence of the
other's creatures on the strength of his own principle produces a new level of
susceptibility, in him, to these same creatures. Hence the inevitability of the
begetting of god-men [Gottmenschen] like Hercules, who transform the state of
contradiction and hostility between Olympus and the Caucasus into a final
consubstantiality. If Prometheus was the figuration of antidivinity, Hercules is
that of God's incarnation [Gottmenschlichkeit].
If the myth is the a priori story of history, it cannot be a mere product of
imagination, or even of millenniums-long selection. The Romantic revival of the
'original revelation,' this highly visible reversal of the schema of progress,
becomes inevitable. While its content is not something that had withdrawn, once
and for all, from any experience, it dearly is something that could not always be
experienceable, because it only constitutes philosophy's late experience of
history (and especially of its own history). The Titan. would be the prefiguration
of something that, according to every current assessment, is not accessible even
to simultaneous description but only to the most retrospective: "Prometheus is
the thought in which the human race, after it had produced from inside itself the
whole world of the gods, turned back to itself and became conscious of itself and
its own destiny (the thought in which it perceived the unfortunate side of belief
in the gods)."
This thought of incipient consciousness has, for Schelling, a mysterious origin,
between invention and inspiration (as Romanticism permitted itself to
conceiveor to make inconceivablethe origin of products of anonymous
processes): "Prometheus is not an idea that any man invented; he is one of the
original ideas [Urgedanken] that force themselves into existence and that unfold
logically when, as Prometheus did in Aeschylus, they find an abode in a
thoughtful spirit in which to do so." One only needs to understand what assertion
is

 Page 584

supposed to be avoided: Schelling ascribes an unconscious genesis not only to

the world of the gods, for the Greeks, but also, and again, to "nature," for his
contemporaries, the "Idealists." 16
The Prometheus myth, treated in this way, is no longer an element in the class of
myths, but rather the one myth of the end of all myths. The fact that the story of
history can be read off from this prefiguration accords with the negation of
cyclicalbut also of linearconceptions of history by a metaphysically grounded
pattern of history as a whole, a pattern that made up the tempting attractiveness
not only of the Idealist philosophy of history but also of all of its competitors,
including those that overthrew it. The act of philosophizing about history has
itself become part of the making of history.
Following this model, a piece of myth becomes the reflection of all myths,
however much the inner logic of mythical repeatability may be opposed to this.
The discovery of that "original idea," in the course of the reception of the myth,
must inevitably be the last act of everything that the myth can in this way for the
first time be read as having spoken of.
The twenty-five-year-old Goethe identifies with Prometheus as the aesthetic
demiurge and rebel against the Olympian father; in the last book of Dichtung
und Wahrheit that he lived to publish, the fifteenth, he calls Prometheus, along
with myth's other figures of suffering, Tantalus, Ixion, and Sisyphus, "my
saints." The twenty-five-year-old Marx looks upon Prometheus, in the last
sentence of the preface to his dissertation, as the "most eminent saint and
martyr" in an imaginary "philosophical calendar."i If there is, again, a gesture of
rebellion in this, then the father of gods against whom a philosophical
dissertation could most readily help one to become a martyr would have been
Hegel, who had been dead for a decade. But the uprising is still more
comprehensive. It is philosophy itself that, in one of the hypostases that the
author accomplishes effortlessly, makes Prometheus's rebellion its own
rebellion, its confession and its motto "against all heavenly and earthly gods who
do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity."
The Prometheus conclusion seems willfully to slip out of the pedantic style of
the introduction to an academic treatise, to the "primitive purpose" of which, as a
dissertation, the author himself attests. One reason at least why the still late-
bourgeoisj reader does not see the transition to the Aeschylus quotation and the
canonization of Pro-

 Page 585

metheus deafly before him is that an evidently important appendix to the

dissertation has been lost. In it, Plutarch's polemic against Epicurus's theology
was supposed to be examined, no doubt as a model of "the relation of the
theologizing intellect to philosophy," and thus for any situation in which
philosophy is ever brought "before the forum of religion." The priest of Delphi
was supposed to stand as the prototype of a whole historical genus. If this could
have replaced the "primitive purpose" of the dissertation by a higher one, then
that was hardly possible vis-à-vis the faculty in Jena, from which the doctoral
candidate wanted to get his degree by means of the actio per distans [action at a
distance] of sending it his treatise and the fees. When Marx quotes from
Aeschylus precisely the words in which Prometheus says to the intermediary,
Hermes, in refusal, that he would rather be a slave on the rock than be such a
loyal emissary of father Zeus as he is, this gives no hint of the hidden role that
the opposition between Plutarch and Epicurus may have played for him; above
all, it certainly does not give "some grounds for the conjecture . . . that Marx
may have unconsciously identified Plutarch with his father." 17Such
speculations would not be worth mentioning here, since presenting the author
who is especially attacked in the lost portion of a youthful dissertation as having
been secretly an imago of the author's author can hardly be described as original
any longer, but it does serve the further penetration of the analysis if one can
make manifest, in the frequent appearance of liver attacks (among many later
symptoms of the onetime doctoral candidate), his identification with the
mythical sufferer on the Caucasus, on whose liver Zeus's eagle fed daily.
To the extent that one has not yet entirely succumbed to unseriousness, one is at
least stimulated to inquire as to how Marx subsequently related himself to
Prometheus. The relationship has, I think, something to do with the
"philosophical calendar" that is mentioned in the last sentence of the preface to
the dissertation, or, to put it differently, with philosophical chronology. This
metaphor needs some elucidation.
We lack not only the appendix to the dissertation with its discussion of Plutarch's
polemic against Epicurus but also the larger treatise that is announced in the
preface, on "the cycle of the Epicurean, Stoic and Skeptic philosophy in their
relation to the whole of Greek speculation." What type of "relation" this would
have been when it was exhibited can only be guessed; much is promised when
the thesis is supposed

 Page 586

to be that the Hellenistic systems referred to are no less than "the key to the true
history of Greek philosophy." Anyone to whom that does not seem odd or
inflammatory should consider its methodological implication that nothing could
be settled definitively regarding the dominant authors of ancient philosophy,
Plato and Aristotle, without making use of the key provided by the supposed
epigones, in what has always been regarded as a period of decline. An author
who announced his next, larger work with this promise in 1841 himself wrote
this from the situation of an epigone. He was burdened by
arrivingunavoidablytoo late: by arriving after the definitiveness of Hegel. With
the philosophical comrades of a foreign age, who were hardly still able to
venture the great gesture of discovering truth, after the classical unsurpassability
of the antipodes (as they were seen) of Plato and Aristotlewith these comrades,
Marx defended himself and the horizon of possibilities of his time.
This is the point of connection to Prometheus, and the provocation of a
Promethean gesture: The world has already been mastered by another, time has
been fulfilled, history has been concludedand the Titan nevertheless wants to
make his creatures and let them live. For Marx, as he takes his degree,
Prometheus can also, and especially, be a saint and a martyr in the philosophical
calendar because he had been a demiurge come too late who did not allow the
nature that was already complete to dispute his right to his work; it was the same
with one who was still making a start in philosophy after Hegel, one who rejects
the denial "that men can live at all after a total philosophy."k What could be
gathered from the paradigm of postclassical Greek philosophy was a revolt
against the historical state of rest that is implied in every assignment of 'classical'
status, but also, and above all, the recovery of a historical perspective on
something that was supposedly final. Epicurus had not only remained possible
after Plato and Aristotle, but Plato and Aristotle had for the first time been
'realized' through him, as his idle and carefree gods were the 'form of life' of the
"unmoved mover," which presented itself as the epitome of life's immunity to
concern.
That Prometheus was not only the one who avowed hatred for the gods, in the
tragedythe Prometheus whom Marx quoted in the prefacewe know, above all,
from his preparatory work for the dissertation. There one can see the merging of
the mythical image not only with the figure of Epicurus but also, beyond that,
with the figure

 Page 587

of every late philosophy, insofar as it suffers the odium of coming too late. Here
we need not go into the way in which Marx reduces to a Hegelianizing schema
the philosophical movement from Anaxagoras, through the Sophists, to Socrates,
and again from Socrates, through Plato, to Aristotle. But it is worth noticing
how, at "nodal points" (as Marx describes them), philosophy is theatrically
personified. Thus, in this history there are moments "when philosophy tums its
eyes to the external wood, and no longer apprehends it, but, as a practical person,
weaves, as it were, intrigues with the wood, emerges from the transparent
kingdom of Amenthes and throws itself on the breast of the worldly Siren."
18Marx all too readily combines such personifications with metaphors of
masking and disguise, by which nothing is more naturally suggested than
exposure and unmasking. Hellenism, too, becomes the "carnival [Fastnachtszeit]
of philosophy," and it is then "essential" for philosophy ''to wear character
masks." Thus the Cynics, Alexandrians, and Epicureans are presented in dress
that is specific to their schools. In this context, Prometheus makes his entrance.
He stands as an image of this kind of involvement of philosophy with the world,
in which one of its fundamental ideas posits itself as a totality, that is, enters into
competition with the world. The mythical doubles [Doppelgänger], Deucalion
and Prometheus, constitute a complicated context: Philosophy resembles the
production of men by the throwing of stones backward insofar as it casts "its
regard behind it when its heart is set on creating a world." But, then, it is
Prometheus who, "having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to
settle upon the earth"; like him, now, "philosophy, expanded to be the whole
wood, tums against the world of appearance." This is followed, without
interruption and in lapidary fashion, with an unexpected leap from ancient into
modem Hellenism, in the tiny sentence: "So jetzt die Hegelsche" [The same now
with the philosophy of Hegel].
Only when philosophy, in this manner, has "sealed itself off to form a
consummate, total wood" does it fulfill the condition for it to "turn into a
practical relation toward reality." One who cannot read this from the process of
ancient philosophy, as its "historical necessity," cannot avoid the logical
consequence of denying that it is possible to live at all after a total philosophy.
Since men, and philosophizing ones at that, evidently continue to live, then there
must be an escape from totality, a post-histoire of the completed world
philosophy. What still has to be proven for the present could have been
demonstrated in

 Page 588

the form of Epicurus's Hellenistic philosophy. Not to be merely, and no longer to

be, an epigone is the effort that is called for and that requires one to function on
a Titanic scale. Without naming the name again, but certainly connecting
direcdy with Zeus's, Marx apostrophizes Prometheus: "But titanic are the times
which follow in the wake of a philosophy total in itself and of its subjective
developmental forms, for gigantic is the discord that forms their unity. Thus
Rome followed the Stoic, Skeptic and Epicurean philosophy."
The hypostasis of philosophy as a historically acting person reaches its climax
with the construction of a typical curriculum vitae, which knows monuments of
its birth and also carries those of its late and final phases, just as "from the death
of a hero one can infer his life's history." The possibility of a turnabout is like a
compensation for the late arrival of one who will never have the opportunity to
construct a classic totality. When the author understands Epicurus, not as the
result of the philosophy that went before him, but as the possible turning point of
its "transsubstantiation into flesh and blood,"l he grasps the Titanic opportunity
that remains for a latecomer in a world that is already occupied and allocated.
Thus, deep in the preliminary work, the canonization of Prometheus that takes
place at the end of the preface to the dissertation is announced. For this is
undoubtedly the latest piece in the sequence of the texts that have survived.
When, in the process, the upshot of the train of thought enters the narrow context
of a passage that is colored throughout by criticism of religion, Epicurus's protest
against the gods only blends, after all, with the defiance of the lettered
Prometheus in the tragedy, producing what Marx calls "Prometheus's
confession"m and quotes only in Greek: "In simple words, I hate the pack of
gods." If this is supposed to be philosophy's own delayed confession, then it is
an expression of its jealousy directed at the possibility that otherheavenly or
earthlygods might "not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest
divinity." The closing formulation of this jealousy, in Old Testament language,
is: ''It will have none other beside it." Thus speaks not the Prometheus of myth,
whose defiance, after all, is only against the fact that another does not want to let
him be beside him, but rather the enemy of gods who, motivated by godliness,
has left the separation of powers behind, presses toward dogmatic absolutism,
and imposes a claim to uniqueness on philosophy.

 Page 589

When this Prometheus rejects the messenger of the Olympian god with the
words from the tragedy, he is not only meant, in this passage, to contradict those
who rejoice "over the apparently worsened civil position of philosophy," but also
to testify to the self-consciousness that goes with his inherited knowledge, from
his mother, that history has not come to rest with Zeus's power, that instead there
is a doom hanging over this despot's future: the threat posed by the next
generation, in the form of a son he has not yet been warned not to beget. The
dictum that provides the denouement of the tragedy"He will not rule the gods for
long"has become the comforting word, from the philosophy of history, for those
who are tired of totality. As a figure of history as a whole who combines the past
struggle for power against the Titans with the threat posed to that same power by
its own wantonness, Prometheus stands for what was still hidden from
philosophy, in the future, but was soon to be disclosedby the author of the
dissertation.
In Hegel's Berlin lectures on the philosophy of religion, which were a substantial
factor in the potency of his influence, the name of the Titan who would be called
on a decade after Hegel's death to ensure that human life, as philosophy, could
again become possible is a weakly illuminated allegory: an "important,
interesting figure," a "natural power," a ''benefactor of men," who taught them
the first arts and brought them fire from heaven. To ignite fire, "a certain
cultivation" was already necessary, so it was not the earliest early morning, not
the precondition of all human culture; instead, at that point, "man had already
emerged from his initial brutality." Prometheus is clearly moved away from the
act of creation and admitted into history as one of its notable episodes, not as the
act of its original foundation. The myth is leveled off and stands in a
panoramalike complex with other things that need to be appreciated by being
brought to mind, and that are held in readiness for that by mythology: "Thus the
first beginnings of culture have been stored up, in grateful remembrance, in
myths." 19
As soon as Prometheus is no longer the conveyor of the elementary requirements
of the naked prolongation of life, but instead has already begun to serve
'debrutalization,' he moves within the reach of condemnation by every type of
Rousseauism. If his fire from the heavens already stands for the first refinement
of nourishment, for the illumination of caves, for the working of metals, then it
stands in the

 Page 590

context of the irresistible increase of needs. Because, since Rousseau, the

suspicion had been refined still further that once the bounds of minimal self-
preservation were passed, all that was produced was the weakness whose
protection engenders new weaknesses, for which further helpers and benefactors
continually offer their services. Prometheus could not bring fire into the caves
without producing, together with dependence on the new element, dependence
on experts in continually producing it and on custodians who take care of it, as
well.
At any rate, this is the case if Marx's premises are correct in his description in
the Paris Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 of the function of
redundant needs in the origin and operation of property: "Every person
speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to a fresh
sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode
of gratification and therefore economic ruin. Each tries to establish over the
other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need."
20If Rousseau had still interpreted the process of civilization in accordance with
the schema, already present in ancient thought, of 'enervation' and of the needs
for protection and care that increase exponentially as a result, here the malice is
insinuated that one person's need is the point at which another person can
exercise power over him. That is not read off from the hypothesis of the early
acquisition of fire, but it contains a potential for anthropological generalization
that can easily be projected into the imagined situation of the archaic cave and
hut, after the freedom from need of the Rousseau stage had been left behind:
"The increase in the quantity of objects is accompanied by an extension of the
realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product
represents a new possibility of mutual swindling and mutual plundering."
Prometheus's character as a friend of men has become problematic.
From a great historical distance, from the perspective of the end of history, he
looks more like a malicious demon who had thrown a gift among men on which
they had not onlylike the satyrs of whom Rousseau reminds usburned their
beards but for the first time become subject to the alien coercion of things and
entangled in the net of property. With the establishment of fire a chain reaction
starts that makes each person into the potential potentate of every other, because
needs and the means by which to satisfy them are torn apart. Looking back from
the age of machines, it becomes clear that with the first

 Page 591

force of production, the process of the assimilation of the subject to the objects
had begun: "The machine accommodates itself to the weakness of the human
being in order to make the weak human being into a machine." If one had to
specify an original need that generates no dependency between men, then one
would have to think of air to breathe, rather than of fire. Consequently, air is also
the most extreme and inalienable need, which appears, in the description of the
process of increasing misery, as the criterion of return to the cave: "Even the
need for fresh air ceases for the worker. Man returns to a cave dwelling, which is
now, however, contaminated with the pestilential breath of civiliation. . . . "
Here, now, where the primeval cave appears as perverted by the immanent logic
of the theft of fire, Prometheus's name emerges againin the manner described by
Hegel, though not ''in grateful remembrance" as the name of a distant and
radiant memory: "A dwelling in the light, which Prometheus in Aeschylus
designated as one of the greatest boons, by means of which he made the savage
into a human being, ceases to exist for the worker."
The rhetorical device symmetrically relates the humanization that is
accomplished by the illumination of the cave to the dehumanization at the end of
the history of property: as the unbearableness of the archaic refuge of the cave.
He avoids speaking of the role of fire in the process of alienation, and leaves
Prometheus unimpugned as the bringer of a light that has merely ceased, since
then, to give light to everyone. Prometheus remains a figure of the philosophy of
history, a guidepost of mankind even during its loss of its essence and through
its losses of identity. The fact that one can allude to him is itself still the
minimum of an identity, a Romantic flaring up in a distant past, which cannot be
related to any figure of the century to which this reminder is presented.
Finally, at the climax of Das Kapital, in connection with nothing less than the
"absolute general law of capitalist accumulation," in chapter 23,n we meet the
figure of Prometheus again, in the most incidental and for that very reason most
momentous passing glance: Prometheus has finally become the prefiguration of
the proletariat, chained by a law of nature to the naked rock of capitalist
production. Marx did not invent this identification. He mentions as early as
1846, in the Zirkular gegen Kriege [Circular against Kriege], that Kriege has
applied the mythological image of the bound Prometheus to the proletariat. He
himself had been represented, on a handbill against the prohibition

 Page 592

of the Rheinische Zeitung that was printed in Düsseldorf (and exhibited again in
Berlin in 1972), as a bound Prometheus:o The persecuted chief editor, chained to
the Caucasus of a printing press, and the Prussian eagle, which hacks at his liver
on what is, anatomically, the wrong side (perhaps the heart was intended), and
over all, floating in a cloudy sky, a squirrel instead of Zeus (Eichhorn [Squirrel]
being the name of the Prussian minister of culture and press censor); and beneath
this dominant configuration, prostrate on the ground and raising themselves from
it only with difficulty, the usual naked female figurines: Prometheus's creatures,
which in this case are the subscribersenlightened by Prometheus's lightof the
prohibited newspaper, now demonstrating, in an attitude of lamentation, against
their deprivation of enlightenment. What the chief editor could not have known
then was that at almost the same time a pupil in Berlin had elevated someone
else to the role of Prometheus, and had celebrated him, in a poem (which
remained fragmentary) entided "Sanct Helena," as the saint and martyr of the
epoch: Friedrich Engels, celebrating the Corsican with the "greatest craggy
heart" [Falsenherzen], with which he could rhyme both "Prometheus's
sufferings" [Schmerzen] and the "burnt-out candles'' [Kerzen],
Die Gott, als er die Welt gesetzt zusammen,
Entbrannt, um Licht zu seinem Werk zu flammen. 21

[. . . which God, when he put the world together, lit in order to cast
light on his work.]

Seen from the point of view of "capitalist accumulation," Prometheus on the

Caucasus is no longer the victim of the tyrannical despotism of the father of the
gods, but rather of the inexorability of that "absolute general law," which forces
oppressors and oppressed together into a single historical actionthough, to be
sure, this is only a result of the cunning [Hinterlist] of the reason in this history,
as a means of driving them to the point where their destinies inevitably diverge.
The new law does have the stringency of a law of nature, but it has the character
of a law of history. For its point of departure is precisely its denial that the
relation between the quantity of population and the quantity of nourishment, as
Malthus thought it was regulated, is a law of nature. The development of the
quantity of population now becomes dependent on the absolute variable of the
accumulation of capital. It had been one of the triumphs of the scientific form in

 Page 593

modern thought when Malthus had brought one of the supposedly purely
historical magnitudes under a mathematically formulatable natural law. Now,
with Marx, the dignity of being the determining factor shifts to the side of
history, by virtue of its economic motor. There is never anything but a relative
overpopulation, dependent on capital's immanent need to keep a reservoir of
labor power as a means of regulating the price of labor. That is the way man is
chained to a faceless, gray substance, which calls up the image of Prometheus
bound to the rock of the Caucasus.
The discussion does not pass entirely without a glance at the father of the gods,
who, in the Prometheus image of the preface to the dissertation, had been
rejected by. the Epicurean critique of religion. Only, the critique of religion now
becomes a by-product of the demiurgic self-subjection that man was supposed to
have brought himself to in the history of his needs. The god is not the root of the
power that is exercised; man succumbs to the fiction of his gods in accordance
with the same lawfulness with which he submits to the idol that is his product:
"As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in
capitalistic production he is governed by the products of his own hand." 22From
this one will be justified in inferring that Prometheus had to be named here also
because he was no longer punished (by being chained to the crag) merely on
account of his 'critique-ofreligion' conflict with Zeus, but the 'economic'
consequence of his own action in making men also chained him to the massif of
their needs, independently of any wrathful superior god.
If it is correct that the "reproduction of labor-power" is nothing but an "essential
element of the reproduction of capital itself," then the metaphor of the chain
leads to the connection between [on the one hand] the law of the shared causality
of the available labor power and the expansive power of capital, and [on the
other hand] the mythical configuration of the Prometheus story. It points to the
Olympian blacksmith-god's wedges, with which Prometheus had been fastened
to the crag. If the price of labor rises as a consequence of the accumulation of
capital, this only means, given the way things fit together in Marx's theory, that
''the length and weight of the golden chain that the wage-worker has already
forged for himself allow of a relaxation of the tension of it."23It is then the
communicating combination of the two magnitudes, capital and population, that
brings to mind the comparison

 Page 594

that this law "rivets the laborer more firmly to capital than the wedges of Vulcan
did Prometheus to the rock." 24

Translator's Notes
a. See the text related to note 14 in part 3, chapter 3.
b. Countess Reventlow had a literary salon in Schwabing, the artist and
intellectual quarter of Munich, in the period between the turn of the century and
World War I.
c. Entwandt is an idiosyncratic form that could be taken as the past participle of
either entwinden (which would normally be entwunden) or entwenden
(entwendet).
d. The two editions of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason were published in 1781
and 1787.
e. The seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century "querelle des anciens et des
modernes" [quarrel of the ancients and the moderns] over whether modern
literature (etc.) could equal or surpass the canonical achievements of the
ancients.
f. Karl Moor is the hero of Schiller's famous play Die Räuber (1781). Club-
moss, or lycopodium powder, a highly flammable powder made from the spores
of the plant, was used for lightning flashes in the theater and in fireworks.
g. The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, in Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason, attempts to demonstrate the necessity of certain concepts for the unity of
a consciousness that knows the world through perception and thought. Idealists
like Fichte deduced, from this logical priority of the "subject," its priority in
reality as well, as the "source" of those necessary conditions. This concept then
lent itself to Romantic aestheticization as the idea of a subject that "creates"
reality.
h. Corinthians 1:7.
i. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New York: International
Publishers, 1975- ), vol. 1, p. 31. The quotations in this and the next three
paragraphs are all from pp. 30 31.
j. Spätbürgertich, a term used by German neo-Marxists to describe
contemporary capitalist society.
k. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 491.
l. Ibid., pp. 491-493.
m. Ibid., pp. 80-31.
n. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling
(London, 1887; New York: International Publishers, 1967), chap. 25.
o. The handbill is reproduced opposite p. 374 of the volume cited in note i.

 Page 595

2
On the Rock of Mute Solitude Again
But it would be unfortunate if Swabian poetry should set the fashion. . . .
Where is Prometheus?
Karl Gutzkow, Beiträge zur Geschichte der neuesten Literatur (1836)

If the Enlightenment saw its historical role of procuring light for mankind
against the nature and the will of its old gods prefigured in Prometheus's theft of
fire, then the Enlightenment's miscarriage, up to and including its retrogression,
also had to be capable of being expressed in the language of the Prometheus
myth. The bringer of light winds up in an ambiguous light.
Heine did not succeed, as Goethe did, in delegating his self-conception as
Prometheus to someone else after it miscarried. He too looked toward Napoleon
on the rocky island in the Atlantic and saw, in him, Prometheus bound; but that
did not serve to protect him from suffering Prometheus's fate himself. Napoleon,
the inheritor of the Revolution, becomes the key figure of the failing
Enlightenment, and, as Heine begins to date his doubts, with the eighteenth
Brumaire the bringer of light ceases to satisfy his century.
Although Napoleon had marched into Düsseldorf on a November day in 1811, in
Heine's recollection in 1827 the scene is transformed into a shining summer day.
The emperor's appearance in the avenue of the palace gardens is described in the
blasphemously secularized language of the Epiphany. The vision is
instantaneously conclusive: ". . . written on this face one could read: 'Thou shalt
have no other

 Page 596

gods beside me.' "Now, at the moment of his recollection, the emperor is dead,
and the poet sees his rocky island in the ocean as "the sacred tomb, to which the
peoples of the Orient and the Occident make pilgrimage in gaily beflagged ships,
and strengthen their hearts by great recollections of the deeds of the worldly
savior who suffered under Hudson Lowe, as it is written in the evangelists Las
Cases, O'Meara, and Antommarchi." 1
And here there is also the first fleeting self-comparison, the entry into a
reference triangle with Napoleon and Prometheus, which was written down in
1826 on the island of Norderney: "But now the island is so bleak that I seem to
myself like Napoleon on Saint Helena."2
Then his enthusiasm for Napoleon is restricted, no doubt under Varnhagen's
skeptical influence, to the period before the coup d'etat. The difficulty that
everyone encounters when they have to do with gods is to reconcile the
uniqueness of such a nature"Every inch a god!"with the rapid decay of its
divinity. But how could the man in the Düsseldorf palace gardens in 1811 still be
a visible god when he had ceased, in 1799, to carry out the god's work, the
Enlightenment office of bringing light? Already in 1830, in the fourth part of the
Reisebilder [Travel pictures], what is remembered is darkened by what had been
impending at the time: "This picture never disappears from my memory, I still
see him high on his charger, with his eternal eyes in his marble emperor's face,
looking down with the calmness of fate on the guards who were marching pasthe
was sending them, then, to Russia, and the old Grenadiers looked up at him, so
awesomely loyal, so gravely knowing, so death-proud. . . . "3Two years earlier,
in the Reise von München nach Genua [Journey from Munich to Genoa], Heine
had still extracted himself from the affair thus: "I pray you, dear reader, do not
take me for an unconditional Bonapartist; my homage is not to the man's deeds,
but only to his genius. I love him unconditionally only up until the eighteenth
Brumairethen he betrayed freedom."4The deed, Heine says, is always only the
clothing of the human spirit, so that history, too, is nothing but its "old
wardrobe.'' Everyone who had been present during this piece of history had been
drawn into intoxication along with the one who was intoxicated by the cup of
fame and who was "not able to become sober until Saint Helena."
Doubts about the reality of the experience and mythicization of the image are
interwoven, form two sides of one and the same process.

 Page 597

"Sometimes a secret doubt creeps over me as to whether I really saw him myself,
whether we were really contemporaries, and then it is as though his image, torn
loose from the little frame of the present, recedes, ever more proudly and
imperiously, into the twilight of the past." 5Time, we are told, is incapable of
destroying such an image; it will envelop it in the mist of legend, "and his
amazing story will finally become a myth." Mythicization does not make
historical facts and identities disappear so much as it makes them become one,
and be consumed, in the typical and the figural. In that case Prometheus is no
longer the name with which the enormity of the one who ended on Saint Helena
can be named and apprehended (since it cannot be comprehended). From the
perspective of a distant future, which only seems to put into effect what already
happens to the poet at close range, in his memory, Napoleon and Prometheus
become indistinguishable. Only pedantry can still raise a question about this and
answer it with a thesis: "Perhaps, thousands of years in the future, a hairsplitting
schoolmaster will prove irrefutably, in a deeply learned dissertation, that
Napoleon Bonaparte was completely identical with that other Titan who stole
light from the gods and for this crime was chained to a solitary rock, in the
middle of the sea, exposed to a vulture that daily lacerated his heart."6
This is the irony of a perspectival illusion, which cannot yet be imputed to the
present and the near future, to its memory or its investigation of history. But
here, where he is still the great sufferer, he ceases to be Prometheus the bringer
of light, "who succeeded in throwing the first illuminating torch into the
darkness of the Middle Ages and of the demons of religion, and thus in kindling
a world conflagration in which everything congealed and encrusted is refined
into a new humanity."7No, Heine did not stay with the god on horseback in the
palace gardens, with the unequivocalness of his own memory. He projects the
mythicization into the distance of millenniums. Enough of what is factual must
first have been forgotten so that the contour of the figural can gain sole validity.
Mythicization is not the affair of a near present. Heine's procedure is one of
inversion: After Napoleon had become Prometheus, Prometheus will finally
become Napoleon. It is as though this had been invented as the opposite of
Goethe's procedure with the myth.
The second inversion of the Prometheus story relates to the regime of Louis-
Philippe. Heine ascribes to the "citizen king's" minister, Casimir

 Page 598

Périer, the incredible crime of perverting the theft of light. In the period of the
Restoration this man had been the spokesman of the opposition, and as such had
been a model, Heine says, of conduct and dignity, with the strictest logic and
with rigid a priori arguments. Suddenly, however, he had misjudged his strength
and bowed down before the mighty ones whom he could have destroyedhad
begged from them the peace that he should only have granted by his own mercy.
Now he is called the "Hercules of the age of the juste milieu [golden mean]."
Heine sees this depravation in the nature of a man who had had "much fine
education as a citizen" as corresponding to an inversion of the mythical
proceeding: " . . . an upside-down Prometheus, he steals the light from men in
order to give it back to the gods." 8
Heine still has to wait for the death of the Olympian in Weimar who had
'occupied' [i.e., established a preeminent claim to] the aesthetic identification
with Prometheus and had led it into the resignation of self-experience. The brisk
and cheerful tone of arrogant defiance was no longer possible. Heine had already
tried, in 1825 1826, in the "Song of the Oceanides" in the second North Sea
cycle in the Buch der Lieder [Book of songs], to renew the identification. The
difference is tangible as in a picture. In Aeschylus's tragedy, the Oceanides,
daughters of Oceanus and Thetis, had been the chorus, which had to bewail
Prometheus's suffering, but also his defiance of the gods. Now the poet sits on
the seashore, makes fun of the sea birds, and boasts of his own good fortune, of
the distant beloved who dreams of him. He attempts once more the poet's great
illusion, which comes down to him from Sturm und Drang's heroizing of the
geniusfrom Goethe's "Prometheus." The chorus of Oceanides destroys the
deception, sees through the epigone's hollow self-assurance. At the bottom of his
boasting they see pain.
Then they remember Prometheus, whom they once had to comfort, and they
exhort the man on the seashore to renewed rationality, to honor the gods until the
other Titan, Atlas,
. . . die Geduld verliert
Und die schwere Welt von den Schultern abwirft
In die ewige Nacht.

[loses his patience and casts the heavy world from his shoulders, into
eternal night.]

 Page 599

But he, the man on the seashore, is stubborn, they say, like his ancestor,
. . . der himmlisches Feuer
Den Göttern stahl und den Menschen gab,
Und geiergequälet, felsengefesselt
Olympauftrotzte. . . .

[who stole heavenly fire from the gods and gave it to men, and
vulture-tortured and shackled to a rockdefied Olympus. . . . ]

Only in the last line of the poem does Heine indicate who had been addressed by
the chorus of Oceanides, when he abandons the third person and concludes, in
the first:
Und ich sass noch lange im Dunkeln und weinte.

[And I sat for a long time after that in the dark and cried.]

The poet is no longer the potter of man, in his workshop, who offers Zeus
conflict. He is one who has been sobered by looking back at the aesthetic
subject's self-exaltation, who is now capable only of bitter mockery of nature,
and cannot assert his image of reality against the dark threats and exhortations of
the Oceanides.
Then Goethe is dead, and his Prometheus seems, in retrospect, loquacious and,
even in his defiance, all too hungry for justification. Heine returns to Prometheus
in 1833 1834, when he obeys the invitation of the leader of the Saint-Simonists
in Paris, Prosper Enfantin, to describe the development of ideas in contemporary
Germany for French readers. Heine describes how philosophy, in the form of
Christian Wolff's metaphysics, was drawn into the controversies of Protestant
theology when the orthodox called on it for assistance against the Pietists. This
appeal by religion for help from philosophy had made its downfall inevitable,
Heine says, for when it defended itself it talked itself into its ruin. That makes
him think of the dumbness of myth and of its powers: "Religion, like every
absolutism, must not justify itself. Prometheus is chained to the rock by silent
Force. That's right, Aeschylus does not let the personification of Force speak a
single word. It must be dumb. . . . " 9
The archaica unrepeatability of the chaining to the rock lies in its speechlessness,
which is simultaneously the absence of complaint and the absence of reasons.
Myth is, precisely, not a theology, because the punishing god does not explain
himself and because he rejects every opportunity for a theodicy. Myth tums out
to be distance from

 Page 600

the possibility of a covenant, from any dialogical search for language, as a mark
of mere weakness. Prometheus is the witness of the tremendum [dreadful thing]b
that strikes one dumb and is endured dumbly, and the first triumph over which is
already achieved when it breaks into speech. For Heine, the analogy to politics
comes naturally: As a "reasorting catechism" is to religion, so the moment is to
political absolutism in which it finds itself called upon to publish an "official
state newspaper. For the philosopher, in the latter case as well as in the former,
our triumph is that we have induced our opponent to speak." Myth is not the
preliminary stage of logos, a stage in which one is not yet capable of it, but is
instead the most intolerant exclusion of it. Rhetoric, however despised it may be
and however far removed from the burdens of proof that go with dialogue,
nevertheless does signify an acknowledgment of the expectation that one should
present and represent oneself, that one should present oneself
'physiognomically.'
When Heine's gaze rests unwaveringly on the dumb scene of the Titan's
enchainingthat is, on the 'archaic' essence of the terror of utter dependency, then
this narrow focus is at the same time the exclusion of every allegorical
interpretation associated with a philosophy of history. As Goethe had sought the
static image of the potter of man, in his workshop, so Heine chooses to look at
the suffering Prometheusagain as a scene that has no history. From this
perspective, the unfolded myth that tells stories and has become talkative is
already theodicy in nuce [in essence]. It presses out of the sphere of dumb force.
Before I approach the poet's new identification with Prometheus the sufferer, in
the Wintermärchen,c I must direct a glance at the polemical-satirical
employment of it that immediately preceded this, and that modified the one in
the Französische Zustände.d The "Kirchenrat Prometheus" [Reverend
Prometheus], which was later included in the Neue Gedichten, first appeared on
June 22, 1844, in Vorwörts! How could a clergyman have earned the title of a
Titan?
In 1843 Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus published, under the title Die endlich
offenbar gewordene positive Philosophie der Offenbarungder allgemeinen
Prüfung dargelegt [The finally revealed positive philosophy of
revelationexhibited for everyone to examine], an eight-hundred-page transcript
of Schelling's lectures on the "philosophy of revelation," with commentary that
ranged from critical to polemical in tone. But to be able to be a Prometheus for
Heine it would not have been

 Page 601

enough to present Schelling from the standpoint of a Protestant rationalism. It

went almost without saying that from this source no light could be stolen, even
by the cunning trick of a lecture transcript. So the point of the satirical poem is
that "Sir Paul, the noble robber," had bargained for "Olympus's maximum anger"
in return for merely stealing "Schelling's notebooks" and, instead of
"illuminating mankind," procuring for them only the "antithesis of light, palpable
darkness.'' Why should this duped robber fear the fate of Prometheus, as Heine
counsels him to?
The background of this is the fact that Schelling, as Hegel's successor in Berlin,
had become the Prussian state philosopher, who Heine calls the "court wise
man," and to take the field against whom must provoke the most extreme
vengeance of all. The Prussian Staatszeitung [Official journal] had repeatedly
asserted, against Paulus, Schelling's property right in his lectures. Of course this
was not the question at all, Varnhagen yon Ense writes in his diary on October 9,
1843, but rather "whether Schelling is a charlatan and liar, a bankrupt
philosopher who usurps other people's ideas and accuses those who point out his
borrowings of having stolen them from him!" 10Naturally, Varnhagen could not
deny himself a visit to the Reverend Paulus, in Heidelberg. He found, instead of
a Prometheus, an "ancient, thin little man with senses that are still sharp, an
inquiring gaze, easy speech." He had laughed about the prohibition of his book
and the philosopher's wrath. He would do the same thing again any time, "and if
he succeeded in acquiring a reliable transcript of Schelling's philosophy of
mythology, he would not hesitate to have it printed. He believes, furthermore,
that Schelling is a conscious rogue, that he has always impudently lied and
bragged. . . . "11
Heine did not warn the Heidelberg clergyman against the fate of Prometheus
from the safe position of an onlooker. He saw himself as close to this fate. So at
any rate he dreams of himself on his Wintermärchen journey, when he spends
the night in the Prussian fortress of Minden. At first, in this case, the mythical
reference scene that he replayed was that of Odysseus in the cave of
Polyphemus, with the boulder rolled before the entrance. Like Odysseus to the
Cyclops, the traveling poet identified himself to the corporal at the city gate as
"No One," and gave as his profession that of an eye doctor who operated on
giants for cataracts. After so much impudence toward superior power, its
figuresthe censor and the gendarmesoppress

 Page 602

the dreamer. They drag him out in chains to the rock wall, at which, without any
name having to be mentioned, he recognizes himself as Prometheus. For there is
the vulture, who, with his talons and his black feathers, resembles the Prussian
eagle and devours the liver from his body.
Heine's dream is to have become the Prometheus of the Prussian eagle. Heine is
certainly flirting with a role that is too great for him, but at least no longer with
the role of the blasphemous potter of man. In the end, the trigger for the dream
had only been the dirty tassel on the canopy of his bed in the Minden Inn, as the
morning shows:
Ich lag zu Minden im schwitzenden Bett,
Der Adler ward wieder zum Quaste. 12

[I lay in Minden in a sweat-soaked bed and the eagle became a tassel

again.]

Prometheus in a dreamin a nightmare, at thatthis connection had already been

preformulated in the Harzreise [Journey in the Harz Mountains] in 1824, with a
different, at that time obligatory, direction of reference. "In a pitch-dark night I
arrived in Osterode. I lacked the appetite to eat, and went straight to bed. I was
dog-tired and slept like a god. In my dream I was back in Göttingen. . . . "In his
dream, then, his flight from studying and from his books fails; the dreamer finds
himself in the library of the hall of legal studies, rummaging through old
dissertations. As the clock strikes midnight the Titaness Themis appears, with a
following of jurists, who immediately launch into pedantic disputations and
declamations. Until the goddess loses her patience and cries out "in a tone of
terrible gigantic grief" that she hears "the voice of her beloved Prometheus."
Evidently the comparison of the torrents of the disputing jurists' words to the
ocean surf has awakened an association with Aeschylus's scene with its chorus
of Oceanides, and made it into an image of resignation. All this artificial justice
has to remain helpless in the face of real suffering, since "sneering Power and
silent Force chain the innocent one to his rock of torture, and all your babble and
wrangling cannot relieve his wounds and break his chains!"13Here the dream
becomes an eschatological scene for detested jurisprudence. The goddess breaks
into tears and the whole gathering howls along with her, as though seized by the
fear of death; the ceiling of the hall cracks, the books plunge from the shelvesan
end of the world, in the hall. The dreamer flees into

 Page 603

another room, into the collection of antique works of art, to the images of Apollo
and Venus. It is the libretto, in a dream, of the transformation of the law student
into a poet.
When, however, in the second French edition of the Harzreise, in 1858, even the
Prometheus of this dream is already related to Napoleonwhen (by a tiny
extension) the German "Marterfelsen" ["rock of torture"] is turned into a "rocher
dans l'océan" ["rock in the ocean"], which would have an unmistakable meaning
for any French readerthis is a favor-courting falsification of the original
connection of ideas, in which the disproportion between pedantic jurisprudence
and the superior force of the injustice that the Titan has to suffer had made up
the pattern.
So Prometheus's dream position in the Wintermärchen had been made ready for
two decades. In the intervening period, the poet himself, in an indissoluble
mixture of wish fulfillment and nightmare, had ascended the Titan's rock. As an
attitude, this did not escape the observation or the doubts of his contemporaries.
In the Telegraph für Deutschland, in 1838, Ludwig Wihl wrote about Heine in
Paris: "The deep Weltschmerz that he claims seems to me to be a poetic
invention; I have not perceived much of it in Heine. When Prometheus
complains that a vulture eviscerates his breast, then Heine has coaxed the vulture
to himself so as to be able to complain interestingly. . . . " What is disputed in
Heine's case is granted to Börne:e "Promethean suffering burned in Börne. . . . "
14
But in waking hours, too, and in the most terrible reality, Heine was not spared
identification with Prometheuswhen he again had a god, so as, "in the excess of
my suffering, to allow myself a few blasphemous curses."15,f Now it was no
longer the Zeus of the myth, and was certainly not the "good-natured and
amiable god" that Heine had seen himself as in his youth, "by the grace of
Hegel." It was the god of whom he writes, terribly, to Laube: "The hand of this
great torturer of animals lies heavily upon me."16Here the idea turns, as though
of its own accord, into the icon of the myth, which, like a not-understood
prophecy that now revealed its meaning, had been so close to Heine all his life:
"I suffer incredibly, I endure truly Promethean agonies, as a result of the
vengefulness of the gods, who bear me ill will because I gave men a few little
night lamps, a few penny candles. I say 'the gods' because I don't want to say
anything about God. I know his vultures now and have great respect for
them.''17

 Page 604

The alternation of language in these sentences is striking. Heine pictures himself,

in an Enlightenment idyll, as a bringer of light: Such a little enlightenment was
enough to cause him to he struck down so harshly. But he is supposed to be
talking about the mythical godsonly to revert, immediately afterward, to "his
vultures," with the singular pronoun, and thus to make the new God into the old
Zeus after all, by assigning the tormenting emissaries to him alone. In Minden, it
had still been the eagle of the Prussian state; in the final use of the myth as an
image of the shabby humiliation of the sufferer, close to death, the carrion bird
serves the purpose. Impotence in the face of pain is the counterblow in response
to the Enlightenment's self-empowerment; the suffering of the individual is a
martyrdom for its failure. That is why the myth could be entirely detached,
again, from the poet's identification, and projected onto mankind, which is
punished, in history, on the rock of its planet, for its rebellion: "The earth is the
great rock on which mankind, the true Prometheus, is fettered and is torn to
pieces by the vulture (of doubt)it stole light and suffers torment. . . . " 18
Heine, if one may put it this way, gave himself courage, with flippant singing, to
pass by the old problem of justifying God. Nietzsche tries to remain standing in
front of it, so as not to see it. In his early period he perceived it and overcame it,
as Kant overcame the dialecticg of pure reason, by means of the concept of
appearance: What, as reality, could not be justified could nevertheless become
lightly tolerable as a beautiful appearance with the "artistic meaning behind all
events." So he himself saw it in retrospect when, in 1886, he wrote the foreword
to the new edition of The Birth of Tragedy. As a total work of art,h the world
could be defended. The ultimate seriousness that had once been bound up with
everything that was supposed to be reality could be ignored. This was the last
form of theodicy before the death of God.
From Descartes's failure to overcome his most abysmal doubt, that all
knowledge could fall victim to a more powerful deceiver, Nietzsche drew a new
conclusion: If the Dieu trompeur [deceiver God] could not be refuted, he could
become the God of an artists' metaphysics. If the truthfulness of the world
ground could have been saved, then art would have had to remain, and to be
definitively, a lie.19The failure of the Cartesian theory of knowledge and of its
successors allowed one to revalue it into an aesthetics of the world that, on
account of its lack of relation to truth, has for the first time become accessible

 Page 605

for enjoyment. The attitude of the onlooker makes cheerfulness possible, even
before the scene of tragedyor especially before it.
Nevertheless, this sort of God, who is not a deceiver any more, but an unthinking
artiste, deserves the Wagnerian fate of the "twilight of the gods." It turns out that
the "death of God," in Nietzsche's proclamation, is precisely an event in a
tragedy, which history itself has become. As early as 1870, in the preliminary
work for The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had written: "I believe in the primeval
Germanic saying: All gods must die.'' 20In the sketches for the drama
Empedokles, from the same period, "The great Pan is dead!" stands for what, in
the fifth act, was to become the work of the philosopher. Although it is
constructed on the dynastic principle, Greek myth always has difficulty making
its fallen gods disappear; they are not permitted to die, because the Greeks could
think of nothing better to connect with the concept of a god than immortality.
But the idea of generations contradicts this attribute. Immortality is not
originally at home in myth; more nearly so would be the restoration of one who
has been dismembered, or of the Phoenix from its ashes. It is quite logical when
a mythicization of history includes the death of the gods who have ruled history's
epochs. In his 'rectification' of the Prometheus story, Nietzsche will attempt to
maintain this against the tradition.
The fact that Prometheus is only able to save himself by employing the prophecy
of a coming, more powerful son of Zeus as a means by which to blackmail the
lover who is already infatuated with Thetis must have been out of place in
Nietzsche's conception. For it is precisely in the gods' downfall that man's
ultimate opportunity lies. Because he is just as good as he is stupid, he can only
become happy when the gods "have entered their final twilight." This at any rate
is the way the path "to a German paganism," made present in Wagner's art, is
conceived at the end of the seventies.21If Prometheus knows of the downfall of
the gods, he must guard this knowledge, so that Zeus is not warned against
begetting one who will conquer him. The god's fall is the condition of the
possibility of man's ascent.
Nietzsche's view of the myth for the first time makes it compelling that the
rivalry between Zeus and Prometheus is not a dynastic affair. Zeus is fatally
provoked because the world can succeed as a total work of art
[Gesamtkunstwerk] only if only one hand is at work in it. Nietzsche's interest in
this myth lacks any moralizing tendency; he has before him the rivalry of two
total artists [Gesamtkunstwerker], two "deceivers" in

 Page 606

the sense of that "amoral artist-god" who stages his total conception of the
world. If all his sympathy is with Prometheus, then that is because Prometheus
had already demonstrated, with the deceptive sacrifice, what tricks of art he was
capable of.
Nietzsche had in mind what Richard Wagner's eye would fall on when he had
placed on the title page of The Birth of Tragedy the vignette, done by the
sculptor Rau, of the liberated Prometheus who places one foot on the eagle,
which has been struck by Hercules's arrow, and who still bears on his arms, in
their gesture of defiance, the broken chains. In the preface the author pictures the
moment in which the addressee of the dedication would catch sight of this
reference, and would associate with the author's name the realization that in
everything that he had written in this book he had been conscious of his
counterpart [Wagner] as the embodiment of art as "the highest task and the truly
metaphysical activity of this life."i
The theory of the origin of tragedy is based on a more general thesis about the
essence of culture, according to which the height of its accomplishments
presupposes the depth of the underlying stratum of hostility to man above which
it rises. The Prometheus story thus becomes the myth not so much of how Zeus's
hostility to man is overcome, by the sufferer on the Caucasus, as of how it is
neutralized and counterbalanced. The Greeks, we are told, had never entirely
succeeded in forgetting what the apparent clarity and cheerfulness of their
culture rested on: "Culture [Bildung], which is above all a true need for art, rests
on a frightful foundation: But this foundation makes itself known in the dawning
perception of shame." 22The familiar Prometheus image adapts itself to this
fundamental idea. The cruel-sounding truth about the nexus between culture and
suffering does not cause any doubt to arise regarding the value of existence; it is
"the vulture that gnaws at the liver of the Promethean furtherer of culture."
If one asks what is the concrete content of this image, it turns out that
Prometheus's suffering combines with the deed whose punishment it is: By
bringing fire, he created the preconditions of human work, and especially of its
slavish forms, which subject the mass to service to the life form of the few. For
Nietzsche's fundamental schema is explicated by the assertion, gathered from the
Greek case, that slavery is part of the essence of a culture. The "misery of men
who struggle to live" must indeed even be intensified, in order "to make
possible,

 Page 607

for the tiny number of Olympian humans, the production of the world of art."
Even though Nietzsche did not take this literary fixation of a historical fact into a
norm over from the sketch into the published text, nevertheless it makes possible
the unique reflection on the Prometheus story that its point cannot be
Prometheus's being unchained, as it is shown in the vignette on the title page.
The immanent tendency of the myth is seen in the fact that it intensifies even
further the suffering of the friend of man as a result of his establishment of
culture. A sketch for the second part of the Tragedy book, which was supposed
to deal with "the means used by the Hellenic will in order to reach its goal, the
genius," speaks of this.
Nietzsche admits that his postulate of what underlies culture contains the "source
of the rage" that communists, socialists, and liberals had always nursed against
the arts, as well as against classical antiquity. The only means by which they
could hope to remove that tension was the [literally] "iconoclastic abolition of
the claims of art." He is not able, with this theory, to answer the question why,
then, the despising of culture and "glorification of the poverty of the spirit'' could
not triumph. He appeals vaguely to "inescapable powers . . . that are a law and a
limit to the individual," and which thus protect the privilege of culture with
sanctions. Otherwise it would be "the cry of compassion that would tear down
the walls of culture." Prometheus may be a name for those ["inescapable"]
powers if he symbolizes not only the disproportion, which is immanent in
culture, between its greatness and its humanity but also the agency that
guarantees it: As long as he remains chained to the rock of the Caucasus, the
enclosure surrounding the sacred precinct cannot be stormed. At the same time,
though, he remains the embodiment of consciousness of that implication of
culturehe prevents us from forgetting how the Greeks kept the pressure of the
necessities of existence, and of dealing with them, at a distance from themselves.
Prometheus is the antitype to the slave as the "blind mole of culture" 23: He
endures its preconditions knowingly.
Such knowledge about the antihuman foundation of culture is potentially a threat
to its permanence. Therefore Nietzsche makes the state into its guarantor; it is
the realized will of those who by being relieved of slave labor and able to benefit
from it are able to produce and to enjoy art. At the same time, this state is an
aggregate embodiment not only of instances of the exercise of coercion but also
of the production of delusions, which prevent its function from being

 Page 608

laid bare and are "far more powerful than the rational realization that one is
deceived." 24One sees that Nietzsche has learned from Plato what Sophism is,
but does not go along with the negative evaluation of it. He would prefer to be
the new Gorgias, the personification of a good conscience in the will to deceive.
This is the original basis of his hostility toward Socrates, the apostate from
Sophism, and toward Plato, the systematizer of this apostasy. Nietzsche did not
see Sophism as a phenomenon of decline. For him, it is the feat of strength that
had become possible and necessary as a result of the decline of the polls, that is,
as a result of the wearing out of what Plato 'saved' by transferring it into the
transcendence of the Ideas. If Descartes's wicked demon could not be refuted,
then the only thing left to do was to become this demon oneselfthrough the "will
to power."
What Nietzsche did not accept from antiquity's self-understanding is the link
between knowledge and eudaemonia. He calls it his "confession of faith" that
"every deeper instance of knowledge is terrible."25Nothing of what presents
itself as pleasant can stand up to a thorough examination as to its veracity;
knowledge makes itself perceptible only by the fact that it gives rise to terror and
pain. This finding does not present a mere contingent, supplementary
circumstance of the human constitution; on the contrary, nature itself, "where it
strains to create what is most beautiful, is something frightful."26That is only a
different formulation of the statement that for man, it would be better not to have
been born;j through his ability to create culture, he justifies the fact that he was,
nevertheless, born. Nietzsche describes the situation with the aid of the thematic
framework of the Iliad: All the terrible expenditure of men's lives in the Trojan
War is because of the beauty of Helen.27Beauty is not truth, but it justifies man
in avoiding the terror of truth, so as at least to endure his suffering for something
that makes it worthwhile.
Thus "the Olympian magic mountain opens, as it were, before us, and shows us
its roots." Precisely because, in tragedy, the question of the reason for being
[Seinsgrundfrage] has been answered negatively, something that is not obvious
is needed "in order to be able to live at all." Nietzsche describes what places
itself before the abyss [Abgrund] of groundlessness [Grundlosigkeit]namely, the
mythical web of the gods' relations to and against one anotheras the "radiant
dream-birth of the Olympians." Here too everything is governed by the idea that
although, in myth, the old is overthrown, it is survived by an

 Page 609

"overwhelming mistrust of the Titanic powers of nature." 28Although

Prometheus himself is a Titan, he is not mentioned when Nietzsche connects this
mistrust with names; instead, we hear of "the vulture of the great friend of
mankind," together with the terrible fate of Oedipus, the curse of the Atridae,
and the entire "philosophy of the sylvan god." There is cheerful serenity only on
this side of the terrors. But how does consciousness make sure of its being "on
this side''? Everything presses toward myth's telling its story as a story of a final
[i.e., unrepeatable] past. But does it not remind us of it as of something that is
still present? What had been dynastic succession and pushing aside in timeeven
if in an entirely indefinite timeis [now] arranged in layers, as a system of
suppression and forcible forgetting. The culture that Nietzsche calls "Apollinian"
must "always first overthrow an empire of Titans and slay monsters."
The Birth of Tragedy is a utopian book. Its subject is not the past but the future.
It deals with the future with the aid of an argument that Nietzsche did not carry
over into the book from his January 1870 lecture on the Greek musical drama,
but which he had placed at the end, there: What was real is possible in the future.
This is not yet the recurrence of the same, but it is one of its anticipatory
formulations. The guarantee of what is still, or again, possible is itself mythical,
contrary to a linear concept of history as a sequence of singular phenomena, of
unrepeatable things that endure only for memory. The metahistorical freight of
the "questionable book" is concentrated in the sentence of that lecture that says:
"What we hope for from the future, that was already a reality once
before. . . . "29
At the end of his intellectual path, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche thought that the title
of his early work could have been "Hellenism and Pessimism." In that case its
"practical application to Wagnerism" would not have been so much bound up
with the suggestion that the latter was a "symptom of ascent."30All of this is
rectification: Their tragedies, we are told, are precisely not proof that the Greeks
were pessimists. Schopenhauer went wrong at this point, as he went wrong
everywhere. But the retraction of apparent implications itself turns out to be
apparent [vordergründig "foreground," not affecting fundamentals]; by wanting
to see the "hopes attached to the name of Wagner" excised from the work and
forgotten, Nietzsche raises the justification of the future by the "past perfect"
[Vorvergangenheit] into a dimension that is just as overlarge as it is undefined.
"A tremendous hope speaks out of this

 Page 610

essay"but toward what "Dionysian future of music" can it still be directed? No

other, to be sure, but the unwritten one of the opera, Zarathustra. One need not
hesitate, he says, to put down his name or the word Zarathusthra where The
Birth of Tragedy has Wagner's name: "The entire picture of the dithyrambic
artist is a picture of the preexistent poet of Zarathustra. . . . Wagner himself had
some notion of that; he did not recognize himself in this essay." 31
The young Wilamowitz opposed Nietzsche's conception of myth in a sensational
polemic. He denies, he says, a reign of the Titans, having a determining
importance for an entire age, "in which the dark forces of nature rule, before the
appearance of their conquerors, the powers of nature that are friendly to
man."32Healthy common sense teaches this, and so (of course) does the
investigation of myth. But whatever the former and the latter may teach, one can
discern the philologian's desire to reject the idea of an original darkness of ruling
powers that were replaced by a dynasty having more amiable physiognomies
only as progress was made in the diminution of anxiety. He is anxious about the
reputation of those who had invented myth's 'stories' if the totality of these
stories should also betray 'the story' [i.e., the history] of myth itself.
It is not a question of the value to be attached. For Nietzsche, too, the priority
given to the Dionysian was not based on the fact that it was supposed to be the
absolutely 'archaic.' Otherwise nothing could be gathered from it in regard to the
future. But what had to be abandoned, if one accepted Nietzsche's thesis, was the
comfortable preconception according to which a predisposition toward cheerful
serenity and beautiful greatness had been bound up from the beginning, and
constitutively, with the temper of the Greeks. Instead, such a character now had
to appear as a short epilogue after the protracted process of bringing light into a
gloomy heritageas an episode, shortly before the gods' decline into allegory, or
their succumbing to philosophy or even to satire.
What was at stake here was not of secondary importance for the philologian. The
young Wilamowitz's basic question had to be the question, From what prior
givens had the Greeks taken or created their gods? Was that a gradual process of
the transformation of grotesque animal, demonic, or at any rate inhuman
horrors? Should the Greeks not have been able to do what the Christian God,
after them, and the aesthetic genius, after him, would be able to donamely, to

 Page 611

create something out of nothing, or almost nothing? Wilamowitz, at any rate,

credited the Greek spirit with making human-formed and humanly sensitive gods
arise from formless natural powers such as the Hellenes had brought with them
from their ancestral homes. That would then be an artistic act of putting into an
imagewithout any transitional phaseswhat had hitherto been amorphous. Only in
this way had Greek art, too, become the "pure emanation of the Greek spirit,"
which created for itself no Indian or Egyptian monsters, no Semitic fetishes, but
"gave the images of superterrestrial beings divinity only in the form of a
humanity that is raised to the level of eternal beautywhich we too can approach
only worshipfully."
The original formlessness of those old powers of nature, with which the Hellenes
were supposed to have had to do in the region where they originated, enabled
them to transport their gods faithfully during their migration. They behaved like
good philologians, and managed nevertheless, or precisely on the strength of
that, to become creative. So the genealogies of the gods in myth have nothing to
do with their real origin. They are, in the end, a systematically harmonizing
compilation by Hesiod. Myth does not tell its own history. It does not exhibit the
toil by which it converted itself from the ritual to the rhapsodic form and worked
its way all the way through to a frivolous fluency. For Wilamowitz, the gods'
becoming human is not a subject for the history of religion. If it were, then
Greek art, in Praxiteles, would not have been able to carry out the work of giving
images, over against the amorphousness of what in the meantime was only
known by names.
Nietzsche had done nothing less than to call in question the heritage of German
Classicism, in the philology that it had begotten. Wilamowitz's whole
indignation is directed at this: "Here I saw what millenniums had unfolded,
denied; here the revelations of philosophy and religion were effaced so that a
washed-out pessimism could pull its bittersweet faces in the desert; here the
images of the gods, with which poetry and the plastic arts had peopled our
heaven, were smashed to pieces so that one could worship the idol, Richard
Wagner, in their dust; here the edifice of a thousandfold assiduity, of shining
genius, was demolished so that a drunken dreamer could take an unpleasantly
deep look into the Dionysian depths; this I did not tolerate. . . . " What is more
tolerable for the philologian is if, while the pure exemplification of those finest
talents of the Greeks is found in

 Page 612

the Homeric morning, this decays later on, and much later on, into lower forms
that are unpleasant and uninteresting. What is fascinating in the Greeks should
have been an expression of what they were originally, not a result of their
mastery of themselves and their struggle to achieve distance. Only what is
original can represent what is valid.
Incidentally, academically accredited classical philology was not unanimously
opposed, with Wilamowitz, to Nietzsche's Tragedy book. Perhaps too little
noticed is the fact that a man who had as decisive an impact on the theory of
ancient tragedy as Jacob Bernays had declared that Nietzsche advocatedalbeit in
an exaggerated mannerviews that he himself had developed in his treatise on
Aristotle's theory of tragedy. Bernays had published his Grundzüge der
verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristoteles über Wirkung der Tragödie [Main
features of Aristotle's lost treatise on the effect of tragedy] in 1857. Cosima
Wagner reports the remark to Nietzsche in her letter of December 4, 1872;
Nietzsche replies that this is "divinely impudent on the part of this cultivated and
clever Jew," but at the same time "an amusing indication that the shrewd ones
among us already have some idea of what's up, after all." 33Even later,
Nietzsche did not dispute the correctness of Bernays's thesis about Aristotle,
though he certainly denied the correctness of Aristotle's theory itself: "Not in
order to get rid of terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous
affect by its vehement dischargeAristotle misunderstood it that waybut in order
to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity that joy
which includes even joy in destroying."34
This side glance at one of the great polemics of the century makes clearer what
Prometheus's solitudenot only among gods but between worlds of godshad
meant for Nietzsche. Prometheus preserves the affinity between Titans and men
into the epoch of the Olympians, with their indifference to man, who had already
been there when they arrived and whose right to exist had become doubtful as a
result of the dynastic change. In the way Nietzsche wants to see the Titan, his
partiality for man is barbaric, and his easing of their life situation, by
establishing culture, is not unambiguously a favor, because it does not
unambiguously enhance their power. Nietzsche lays on the Titan even more, in
relation to men, than the myth that is handed down: "Because of his Titanic love
for man, Prometheus must be torn to pieces by vultures. . . . "35The way he
alludes, linguistically, to the one who was torn in piecesthe boy, Dionysus, who
was dismembered

 Page 613

by Titansbetrays, by its exaggeration, the mythologist's disappointment at the

way past terrors become pale. In any case, Nietzsche is not satisfied with the
way the Titanic figure belongs, in Aeschylus's play, to a former age. This is not
altered by the fact that in any case, for him, the Dionysian and the Apollinian do
not stand in a unique and unambiguous relationship in which one succeeds the
other, but rather, "in new births ever following and mutually augmenting one
another, [they] controlled the Hellenic genius."
Of course Aeschylus comes closest to what Nietzsche takes to be the original
schema of tragedy: The chorus was supposed to accompany the god's
appearance, both physically and musically, and just as it had first commented on
the vision of the suffering and revived Dionysus, so now it commented on that of
the bound and finally liberated Prometheus. Except that the suffering hero is no
longer only imagined [vorgetellt] but portrayed [dargestellt], on one level of
reality with the chorus, because of the dialogue, which is suspect as being
Socratic.
Instructive in regard to Nietzsche's conception is the fact that; and the way in
which, he quotes Goethe's "Prometheus" ode, without noting its epochal distance
from the myth, because it is important to him to prevent an ongoing awareness
of the fact that the suffering god is precisely not "man, rising to Titanic stature,"
who gains culture by his own efforts and forces the gods "to enter into an
alliance with him." If this was supposed to be the "veritable hymn of impiety,''
there is in any case no talk of it in the tragedy. The background of the latter is
the pitiable condition of man left to his own devices, who needs a godand
certainly not an Olympian god, who considers his existence a mistake.
The tragedy "did not exhaust the astounding depth of the myth's terror," not
even, indeed especially not by means of the "cheerfulness" (which is only
reflected back onto it with the help of Goethe) "of artistic creation that defies all
misfortune." 36Nietzsche has ready a foil against which to contrast this. If one
ignores the attendant bit of race metaphysics, which deepens the gulf between
the Bible and myth, we are left with the typified distinction between sin and
sacrilege. It is supposed to exclude any similarity between ancient hubris and the
biblical Fall. Prometheus's theft of fire, Nietzsche says, is a sacrilege, by which
man does not 'fall,' but instead for the first time raises himself to certainty of
himself. But what happens to the comparison to the Fall? Does man, then,
commit sacrilege? Is it not committed

 Page 614

on his behalf?. That is why Nietzsche vacillates between merely making

Dionysus and Prometheus interchangeable, in their position in tragedy, or
making the Titan and man interchangeable as well; but that deprives him of any
claim still to comprehend something in Aeschylus, who presents the story of a
god in relation to men, and not of men in relation to themselves. The tragedy can
contain the story of a sacrilege, in the proud sense that Nietzsche intends, only if
Prometheus belongs to the genealogy of the gods, where he may also be a mask
of Dionysus, but not an allegory of man.
For in Aeschylus, the Prometheus story is a drama among godswith the sole
exception of the figure of Io, who however certainly does not embody sacrilege
against the gods, but rather a pitiable enduring of their caprice and persecution.
In fact the "necessity of sacrilege imposed upon the Titanically striving
individual" only becomes the "innermost kernel of the Prometheus story"
because the one who commits sacrilege is immortal and can dare to challenge
the new god by favoring man. In this case, the statement that the Greeks only
invented tragedy at all on account of"their need to invent some dignity for and to
incorporate it in sacrilege" 37must be read in a properly qualified sense.
Nietzsche missed the heart of the difference between sacrilege and sin. In
contrast to an offense against absolute majesty, such as Christian theology
imputes to sin, sacrilege has its greatness and its longevity only in the fact that
the god who is affected by it is not unconditionally in the right and, still more
importantly, cannot do everything. In the system of the division of powers, the
idea does not arise that only the complete degradation of the sinner satisfies
insulted majesty. The chaining of Prometheus to the Caucasus and the
suppression of his vital energy by the eagle that eats his liver are not, initially,
humiliation, but deprivation of power. The one who could make men
independent of the goodwill of the new gods, or even alienated from them, is
made ineffectual. This is the prudence of the power-holder, not the illogic of
offended majesty. Zeus changes his attitude at the moment when the danger
from another direction becomes evident to him. The sinner who confronts a God
who cannot be injured in any way except by offending his honor, because
everything else is subject to his power, is not lost in the same way as myth's
committer of sacrilege. The combined imagination of centuries of theologians
was necessary in

 Page 615

order to contrive, as 'satisfaction,' what only the theologians' God himself was
supposed to be able to supply.
To Nietzsche, the biblical Fall is too feminine. Only the seducer's lucrative
promise brings about the violation of the divine command. But the Prometheus
story, too, is not one in which a spontaneous abandonment of his position leads
to his proud self-comparison with the Olympian ruler. The Titan who commits
sacrilege is provoked by Zeus's contempt for his creatures and by his tyrannical
withholding of their elementary necessities of life. One can even reverse
Nietzsche's evaluation. In the biblical story of the Fall, everything with which
the tempter entices is the unknown magnitude of an excess beyond what is
useful in lifeis dazzling equality to Godwhereas Zeus does not withhold from
man the food of the gods, nectar and ambrosia, but rather the cook's, the smith's,
the baker's, the potter's fire. True, the biblical God also withholds something
from the human beings in Paradise, but it is a knowledge that is of questionable
value for them and that is also superfluous under the conditions of Paradise.
Nothing allows us to infer that the lord of the garden is a tyrant. The spontaneity
of curiosity about what is of no use at all in life is entirely attributable to man. So
there is nothing exclusive in the "glory of activity" that Nietzsche ascribes to
Promethean sacrilege; the story is too much one of help in distress for that. And
in the end Nietzsche did not place too high a value on the kind and the effect of
Prometheus's help for mankind: "Man represents no progress over the animal:
The civilized tenderfoot is an abortion. . . . " 38
The fault here lies in the metaphysically false liberation of Prometheus. It
destroys the unity of pain and pleasure as the sustaining structure in human
history. In Nietzsche's view of myth the decisive thing is that the surmounting of
or at least coming to terms with the underlying stratum of terror and suffering
both is necessary, in order to be able to exist at all, and must never be definitive,
so that man can still remain capable of feeling the power of life. That is why the
world of the Olympians is only a "middle world of art"; it does not ever manage
to be the higher and superior world [Oberwelt und Überwelt] that comes in with
Platonism and whose disastrously consistent form will be Christianity.
Prometheus is not supposed to be a mediating figure. He himselfand not only his
vulturesbelongs to that underlying stratum of the "terror and horror of
existence." His "Titanic love for man" also violates Apollinian measure,
embodying ''over-

 Page 616

weening pride and excess . . . as the truly hostile demons of the non-Apollinian
sphere." He embodies in every way the antithesis of the "Socratism of morality,"
of the "frugality and cheerfulness of the theoretical man"the antithesis, to put it
in a nutshell, of everything "of which tragedy died." 39
As far as mankind is concerned, Nietzsche basically is on the side of Zeus when
the latter denies that men deserve to live. To let them live nevertheless is not an
answer to the question of the reason for their existence, but a kind of illegitimate
favoritism. Ultimately it is impotence against a conspiracy of "outcasts."k
Therefore we must relate it not only to the protagonist of the tragedy but also to
the right of the species to exist when Nietzsche retells the old story of King
Midas's hunting of the wise centaur Silenus, whom the king, when he caught
him, questioned regarding the wisdom that he had learned when he was in
Dionysus's train. Midas wants to know what is good for man. At first the
Dionysian is silent, only finally, pressed by the king, breaking out in laughter at
the human species. Since he is compelled to say what it would be best for
anyone not to hear, he reveals what is, in any case, beyond their reach: The best
thing of all would be the privilege not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.40
This book, which its author himself described as "image-mad and image-
confused," sees tragedy in a backward extrapolation from its downfall, which
Euripides seals. Here most of what Nietzsche has to say about the Dionysian
derives from Euripides's Bacchae. But that has only the excessive clarity of
something that has been delayed. In Euripides, Socrates appears disguised as a
dramatist, as the author of the epic that is brought onto the stage, the novel of
dialogue. Delusion, which prevents one from knowing what actions mean and
why the sufferer suffers, is brought to an end when Socrates defines virtue as
knowledge and considers it possible to know, through and through, what one
does and why one does it. That is why Socrates is the hero in the Platonic
dialogue-drama, in which what is at stake is victory in argumentation, rather that
the superior power of fate. The dramatic form in which tragedy ends is
distinguished by the primacy of dialogue over the chorus, and thus by the
pressing forward of an optimistic dialectics that breaks through the solitude of
the sufferer. Loquacity [Redseligkeit], in the literal sense [i.e., "happiness in
talking"], takes the place of the solitary dumbness of the single protagonist.

 Page 617

Nietzsche's "questionable book" is sustained by antibourgeois affect. It opposes

a "comfortable" style of existence, for which the tragic appears as an exotic
extravagance. That is why Prometheus must be the wanton and dream-dancing
committer of sacrilege, the barbarian who loves men without rhyme or reason.
What is overlooked here is the fact that by his deceptive sacrifice and his theft of
fire he provides and guarantees, for the others for whom he stands up, precisely
and only the normal state of existence, at its lowest limit. The exceptional
situationl secures only the normal situation; it permits, and practically requires,
the despised "yearning for the idyllic." 41The antibourgeois affect produces the
bourgeois mode of life. The Titan compels the others to be what he
magnanimously disdainsnot only Zeus, as Nietzsche sees him, but also his
Prometheus has, for men, little more than indulgence, in view of the principle of
insufficient reasonm that governs their existence. Men are, when considered
strictly, only the cue for Prometheus's appearance among the actors in tragedy. If
he had been allowed to keep silent, as in the myth, then everything would have
remained concentrated on the gesture of his suffering.
Nietzsche's history of tragedy is a history of decadence, but by no means a
resigned history, written in the embittered consciousness of irremediable futility.
For the history is reversible: from Alexandria, by way of Socrates, to
Aeschylus.42Its reversal is opera without recitative, as disdain for all demands
for 'intelligibility': opera as the vicarious representative of the unbearable. The
"birth of tragedy" is only the prelude to the rebirth of the tragic, to the aesthetic
'exceptional situation,' to contempt for virtue as knowledge, for consciousness as
morality. Richard Wagner repeats what Hercules had done for Prometheus, and
in doing so fills the myth "with a new and most profound significance."43He
answers the question how Prometheus could be freed, without transforming it
into a paltry denouement, close to the bourgeois contentment of his creatures.
"What power was it that freed Prometheus from his vultures and transformed the
myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It is the Herculean power of
music. . . . " Nietzsche will have been aware that Hercules kills the death bird but
does not remove the chains, does not alleviate the deeper pain of the immortal's
longing for deathcontradicting the vignette that Nietzsche put on the title page
for Wagner to see. Music protects myth from allegorization, from the
transformation of what had after all been a "juvenile dream'' into something
more amiable, into a "historico-pragmatical

 Page 618

juvenile history." Was there a power comparable to Wagner's music that could
prevent Prometheus from returning home to the comfortable situation of the
Attic potters' god in the grove of Academic Apollo?
But the reversibility of history does not lead to the mere symmetry of its very
early and its very late parts. The eschatology ["last things"] of opera has the
equipment with which to surpass the protology ["first things"] of tragedy.
Nietzsche thinks that Aeschylus did not get to the root of myth. In that case it
was natural to imagine that Nietzsche did this. 44Not to have gotten to the root
of mythfor Nietzsche in about 1874 that meant: not to have narrated the myth to
its end. The liberation of Prometheus by Hercules was suspected of representing
a flirtation with the deus ex machina, which was produced by the decadence of
tragedy. Nietzsche avoids it in his own sketch, which he begins with the
information that Prometheus and his vulture were ''forgotten" when the ancient
world of the gods perished. To be forgottenthat was a final possible tragedy for
an immortal, since after all Nietzsche himself will be the first to show the gods
the mercy of not having to survive, their twilight in history.
So the sketch belongs to the literary category of the rectification of myth:
Prometheus did not surrender to Zeus his mother's secret about the change in the
world regime, and Zeus fell into fate's trap and "was ruined by his son." The art
myth becomes the history of myth, insofar as one cannot doubt that the son on
whom the highest god is wrecked is Christ. Prometheus let fate take its course;
but he himself was moved into the 'past perfect' by Zeus's downfall, and was
forgotten, along with all the gods, as the ancient world came to an end. There is
no longer any Hercules who could come to free him. Only men could do it, for in
the meantime they are making history.
The new son of the god saved them from destruction in a different way from the
way in which Prometheus had meant to. Zeus had wanted to destroy men by
means of Greek culture itself. It was to spoil life for all who came later, through
the burden of imitation and through envy. The son protects them from this by
"hatred for what is Greek," by stupidity and fear of deathin a word, by the
Middle Ages. Seen from the perspective of the primary constituents of the
Prometheus story, this epoch is a repetition: What results, for men, after the
destruction of the gods and under the new dominion of the son, can now only be
"compared to the conditions before Prometheus's deed, when he gave them fire."
But the new master, too, wants to

 Page 619

destroy human beings; we are not told how, but no doubt it is by means of
aversion to life.
Long before the idea of eternal recurrence seized Nietzsche, by the lake of
Silvaplana, he sketches its basic mythical pattern. The gods' sequence of
generations is not prehistoric, but manifests itself in the epochs of history as a
process of the replacement of the ruling gods, which always occurs at the
expense of men. Thus the Renaissance too becomes a mythical event:
Prometheus sends his brother, Epimetheus, who renews the history and
remembrance of the Greeks by means of Pandora (whose significance is always
ambiguous). "And mankind actually is revived again, and Zeus with themthe
latter from a fable embodied in myth." But this Hellenism renewed by philology
deludes men with false friendliness to life, until one comes and points to the
underlying stratum: "Its foundation is recognized as being terrible and
inimitable."
Here we see the author introducing himself into his myth. Nietzsche made
himself into a figure who is the Titan's opponent, because Prometheus had
"prevented men from seeing death." The sketch makes Epimetheus reproach his
brother with this, and thus bring him to approve of his punishment: He had made
death invisible for men under the veil of culture. Thus it becomes theatrically
fitting to make Prometheus suffer precisely from being an immortal. Even the
vulture becomes weary of inexhaustibleness; the liver of his victim grows back
too quickly for him. That too would have been a possible end for the myth: the
satiation of the tormentor (who for Nietzsche is always a vulture, never an
eagle). Now even the most avid one no longer devours, and lets 'life' proliferate.
What an exquisite torture for one who had wanted to try his strength against the
abyss.
For this Prometheus vision Nietzsche had, in the short time since the Tragedy
book, set aside his aversion to bourgeois denouements. Everything ends with the
dialogue that he had formerly scorned so much. Zeus, the unnamed son, and
Prometheus talk with one another. They even reach one of those detestable
compromises that had been at the root of Socratism. It is this: The new Zeus sets
Prometheus free and Prometheus pulverizes his clay figures, so as to remake
them. To prevent these creatures from noticing how they are made into material
for the "individual of the future," Zeus's son grants them the metaphysical
consolation of music. Thus the desires 'of both parties are fulfilled:
Prometheus's, that human beings should continue to exist,

 Page 620

and Zeus's, that first they must perish. Even the vulture is allowed to say
something: "Alas, a bird of misfortune,n I have become a myth."
What we are not told is whether Prometheus's reconstruction of mankind is
successful. It would have had to avoid the contradiction contained in the first
Promethean generation, that "man's strength and knowledge are separated in
time," that all wisdom is coupled with the weakness of age, and deeds and
understanding lie at opposite ends of the course of life. If he could eliminate this
antagonism, he would come close to the superman. The latter is the goal, but the
justification of the conceded destruction of the first mankind is as problematic as
"new men" have always been. And in fact the sketch ends with the fragment of a
sentence: "Prometheus despairs. . . . ''
Why then had he agreed to the compromise with Zeus and the son, if it was not
clear how the new creation could eliminate the original congenital defect? The
answer is given, I think, by a comparison to the aesthetic genius as conceived by
German Classicism: Prometheus turns out to be capable of being tempted by the
opportunity, which he is offered, to return once again to the primeval creative
situation. The pattern of the barbarian blends with that of the artist. Prometheus
is one of those "natures who search for a material to mold." 45Zeus tempts him
with the idea of pulverizing men back into the original pulp, and
Christ/Dionysus makes it easy for him to allow himself to be tempted by
contributing music, which makes the destruction tolerable through ecstasy. This
"prometheus" rivals the 'total work of art.'o Nietzsche had said of Wagner, at
about the same time, that he was "the tragic poet at the conclusion of all
religions, of the 'twilight of the gods,'" and that he had "made use of all of
history."46That is also the idea in Nietzsche's fragment of a Prometheus story: to
narrate the mythin manifestly unsurpassable formfrom the perspective of its end,
and to make himself the last thing of which he speaks.
Here one can easily see the connection to an idea that Nietzsche connected with
the name of Prometheus only years later, in The Gay Science: The Titan is the
prototypical figure for the self-discovery of the divinity of man. All religion
would then be only exercise and prologue with a view to individual human
beings one day being able "to enjoy the whole self-sufficiency of a god, and his
whole power of self-redemption." Man would not have known anything about
this possibility. The new interpretation of Prometheus flows from this: "Did

 Page 621

Prometheus have to fancy first that he had stolen the light and then pay for
thatbefore he finally discovered that he had created the light by coveting the
light and that not only man but also the god was the work of his own hands and
had been mere clay in his hands? All mere images of the makerno less than the
fancy, the theft, the Caucasus, the vulture, and the whole tragic Prometheia
[Prometheus story] of all seekers after knowledge?" 47Ultimately, Nietzsche's
tragic hero becomes the "ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-
affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along
with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into
all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo [from the beginning]not only to himself
but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to
him who needs precisely this spectacleand who makes it necessary because
again and again he needs himself and makes himself necessary What? And this
wouldn't becirculus vitiosus deus [a vicious circle god]?"48
This 'reoccupation' makes what was formerly the fundamental pattern of myth
itself into the promoter of eternal recurrence. But does it still correspond to the
figure that had represented myth for Nietzsche? Can Prometheus be imagined as
one who ever cried "da capo"? The idea of eternal recurrence is indeed one myth
as the form of myth as such; but precisely because the mere form is set off
against the mythical matter, this myth loses its original capacity to carry names
and to have stories, instead of one unique 'history.' It is true that the idea of
eternal recurrence is involved in Nietzsche's Prometheus story; but in the
moment when it is articulated, it destroys every myth from which it could be
derived. The myths are definitively swallowed up, in favor of the one myth of
the eternal recurrence of the same. During the years of the sketches on
"revaluation" [Umwertung], Nietzsche wrote: "One may hope that man will rise
so high that what to him were previously the highest things, for example faith in
God, appear childlike, childish, and touching, indeed so that he does what he has
done with all myths, that is, transforms them into children's stories and fairy
tales."49But that is just what once was not supposed to be permitted to the Greek
enlightenment and was supposed to have constituted the wantonness of every
later enlightenment.
According to Freud's Autobiographical Study of 1925, the "philosopher whose
guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious
findings of psychoanalysis was for a long time

 Page 622

avoided by me on that very account."p Freud does not mention Nietzsche even
where such mention is more than due. But Nietzsche's identity myth also, the
myth of Prometheus, is obstinately passed over by Freud, precisely where citing
it is inescapably natural: in his use of the institutionalization of the possession of
fire as an example for his theory of the origin of culture. What Freud offers,
without mentioning it, here, is actually a countermyth to Prometheus.
The remains of fire places are accepted as reliable indications of the hominid
character of the fossils associated with them. Fire is related to the definition of
man as a toolmaker. Fire places are already places of interaction with the
element in its domesticated form. There is a difference between this and the
traces of the first stone implements that were found handy or were crudely
shaped. Stone is a passive substratum on which culture operates, the use of
which as a tool was discovered through the activity of throwing. Fire is a power
of nature, one of the threats to early human existence. The taming and protection
of fire are stages in a process that was not originally directed.
No doubt it was this fact that restrained Freud from admitting Prometheus's
name, too, into psychoanalysis's calendar of saints. The fire that Prometheus
snatches from heaven is a culture fire: the fire of the hearth and the forge. The
prehistory of this fire, a history of fear and warding off, is omitted here.
Prometheus brings men culture by eliminating a terrible lack on their part, not by
protecting them against devastating powers of nature. Also not by protecting
them against powers in their own nature.
In his late treatise of 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud imagined the
hypothetical myth of the origin of culture as a process of renunciation. Cultureq
means, according to his definition, "the whole sum of the achievements and the
regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and
which serve two purposesnamely to protect men against nature and to adjust
their mutual relations."r Among the achievements that are directed against
nature, the taming of fire stands out "as a quite extraordinary and unexampled
achievement."
Only in a footnote to this passage does a "conjecture about the origin of this
human feat" enter the mythical horizon of originsa conjecture based on
psychoanalytic material that [Freud says] is incomplete and not susceptible to
reliable interpretation. The fundamental achievement of the origin of culture can
only be one involving

 Page 623

the renunciation of gaining pleasure. For it to be possible to introduce the

renunciation, a more original defensive action has to have pleasure attached to it.
Freud sees this in the extinguishing of naturally generated fire by means of a
stream of urine. The gain of pleasure that is associated with this is explained by
the aboriginal perceptionpre-supposed by Freud, on the basis of mythical
material, as undoubtedof the flame as a phallic image. As soon as we accept this
explanation of the gain of pleasure through the defensive action, sparing the fire
turns into a collision between the pleasure principle and the reality principle,
which leads to a self-imposed restriction to the protection and useful
employment of fire. "The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire
was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down
the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire."
Freud's unnamed Prometheus is not a figure of defiant pretension, but of
protective renunciation. The relation between pretension and renunciation that is
so extremely clear in the origin of modern science would then reach back to the
roots of human civilization.
The next step, then, is to explain that the anatomical difference between the
sexes programs woman's aptitude for the role of guardian of the hearth fire and
the temple fire. For her, the temptation to reverse the endangered process of
becoming human, to surrender the gain of culture again in return for the gain of
pleasure, does not exist. The male cannot guarantee the irreversibility of the
process. What he mustunreliablybind himself not to do, shereliablycannot do at
all.
That may not yet have been sufficient. The gods are connected to those early
renunciations in such a way as to punish infringements against them and to favor
observance of them. The mythical gods, having arisen perhaps from anxiety in
the face of the unknown and from giving names to it, become divine protectors
of civilization, which consists only of what is known to man because he made it.
They remain this as long as man is not able to secure the totality of his original
renunciations with the aid of institutions and sanctions. By having usurped this
delegated capacity, he has "almost become a god himself." This formula has lost
almost all of its former grandeur when Freud adds that man here is, "as it were, a
kind of prosthetic god."
When man himself carries out the protection of the renunciation that is at the
root of all culture, this makes that renunciationas

 Page 624

Freud's blasphemous formula for man makes plaininto a contestable, revocable

action. To give a name to a renunciation that was previously unrecognized
already meanspotentiallyto break with it. That may not, cannot, have been in
Freud's mind when, in spite of his exposure and depreciation of the "prosthetic
god," he sketched a fanciful prospect of the future of the successful protector of
fire: "Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great
advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still
more"though he does not pass over the fact that "present-day man does not feel
happy in his Godlike character."
To be a god still continues to be distinguished by the quality of autarky; but it is
an autarky that is inseparably coupled to renouncing eudaemonia with a rigor
that was as yet unknown in the ancient world. Prometheus, as the establisher of
culture, could be the bringer of happiness whose plan was spoiled only by
Pandora; that has become impossible when human culture is subjected to the
most staggering demands for renunciation. Jung claims to have objected, to
Freud, that this hypothesis, if it is thought through to the end, leads to a
devastating annihilating judgment upon culture, which appears "as a mere farce,
the morbid consequence of repressed sexuality." Freud agreed: " . . . so it is, and
that is just a curse of fate against which we are powerless to contend." 50
Suddenly it becomes evident why, in Freud's text on the origin of culture,
Prometheus appears only insofar as one is left to comprehend the fact that the
Titan's name cannot be mentioned. Fire could not be brought to man; the curse
laid on the god who had been connected with the theft of fire cannot be paid and
endured in the distant Caucasus. It is present in every act of culture. The
preconditions of a blasphemous action have been eliminated. The gods' interim
function can only be that of protecting fire; if it were extinguishedif man
returned to the gain of pleasurethey would immediately lose their title to
existence.
Freud's imagined account is, every step of the way, the countermyth to the myth
of Prometheus. If renunciation is the root of culture, then such a myth can only
be told if it reports the negation of an action. Prometheus had stolen fire from the
gods; Freud's primeval man must merely give up pissing in the fire. The role of
woman in the process by which man becomes civilized is based on one of her
most incidental incapacities. But to natureif indeed nature functions as an
abstract

 Page 625

subjectit is always safer if a species cannot do something than if it merely does

not want to.
One of the final transformations of a myth turns out to be its unmistakable
suppression. It is brought to an end when even its unnamed outlines are given
out as being a pretended recollection that disguises an insurmountable
renunciation. When Freud, two years after Civilization and Its Discontents,
becomes involved in a controversy over just this "incidental" footnote, he has to
mention the Titan by name after all.
In the reply, "On the Acquisition of Fire," he does gratefully acknowledge aid in
the form of the "Mongolian law against 'pissing on ashes,'" but he engages in a
noteworthy contortion in order to find confirmation of his renunciation variant in
the Prometheus myth. There, evidently, "resistance" had been at work, and had
brought about ''the distortions which must be expected to occur in the transition
from facts to the contents of a myth." They are familiar to the analyst, "of the
same sort as, and no worse than, those which we acknowledge every day,"s
which occur on the way from childhood experience to dreams.

Translator's Notes
a. By archaic one should understand, in accordance with the Greek, not only
"ancient" but also "associated with the beginnings" (the archai).
b. One of Rudolf Otto's characterizations of "the numinous."
c. Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen [Germany: A Winter's Tale] (1844). See
note 12 to this chapter.
d. See the text related to note 8 in this chapter.
e. Ludwig Börne (1786 1837) was another German Jewish writer who spent the
later years of his life in Paris.
f. In his last years Heine reverted to an (at least ironical) theism. He was
bedridden from 1848 until his death in 1856 as a result of an "apparently
venereal disease" (Encyclopedia Brittannica) that affected his spine.
g. The Transcendental Dialectic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is concerned
with the illusions that reason falls prey to when it is not aware of its own limits,
especially of its restriction to "phenomena," to things as they appear.
h. Gesamtkunstwerh, a concept that was developed by Richard Wagner.

 Page 626

i. Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House,

1966), pp. 31 32.
j. The famous statement of the Chorus of Elders in Sophocles's Oedipus at
Colonus, line 1225, which Nietzsche quotes in the section of The Birth of
Tragedy that is discussed in the next paragraph. (See also the text to note 40.)
This dictum is a central citation in Blumenberg's important chapter "The Cosmos
and Tragedy," in Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1975), p. 16.
k. This word is in English in the original.
l. Ausnahmezustand "exceptional situation" is also translated as "state of
emergency" in political contexts: a situation in which exceptional measures must
be taken.
m. See note t to the Translator's Introduction.
n. Unglücksvogel is a colloquial byword for someone who is continually
engaged in lamentation.
o. See note h.
p. S. Freud, Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-),
vol. 20, p. 60.
q. Kultur. Consistent with Freud's remark that "I scorn to distinguish between
culture and civilization" (The Future of an Illusion, in Complete Psychological
Works, vol. 21, p. 6), Kultur is often rendered as "civilization" in the standard
translations, but I have stock to "culture," where possible, so as not to confuse
the reader by contradicting common and dictionary usage.
r. Freud, Complete Psychological Works, vol. 21, p. 89. The quotations in the
next four paragraphs are from pp. 90 92 of the same volume.
s. Ibid., vol. 22, p. 187.

 Page 627

3
To Bring to an End, If Not Myth, Then at Least One Myth
It is awful that one is, oneself, both the eagle and Prometheus; both in one
person, the one who lacerates and the one who is lacerated.
Picasso

It is not by chance that the nineteenth century, which claimed to have recognized
itself in so many ways in Prometheus, came to an end with a deformation of the
myth into the grotesque. André Gide's Prométhée mal enchaîné [Prometheus
misbound] appears in 1899. By an act of violence, it pushes the configuration to
the point of absurdity, as one can presume to do only when familiarity with its
eidetic content is still guaranteed, but no longer needs to be taken seriously.
Anyone who had entered into Nietzsche's intense feeling for [Prometheus as] the
Dionysian emblem, scarcely three decades earlier, had to feel that he was being
made fun ofand he was meant to feel that. An end is sought, with this figurean
end that has to mark another end. For this century acquiesced in the fact of its
running out, as emphatically as though by that means alone unknown and
unlimited possibilities of new beginnings were unlocked.
Even before Freud will reveal to their contemporaries what this sort of thing
means, Gide makes the myth end with a totem meal: Prometheus ends by giving
a dinner party for his friends, at which he sets before them, roasted, the cannibal
bird, which has been fed up from a carrion bird into an eagle and fattened on his
conscience [conscience, consciousness]. The torment of its feeding on him,
which has

 Page 628

continued since primeval times, is canceled out in the brief moment of a culinary
enjoyment that runs in the opposite direction. The pointthat only the aesthetic
can be the essence of all tormentsis pushed a step further yet: The book that
preserves the story of Prometheus's conscience and consciousness is written with
the quills of the eaglenow eatenwho had become that conscience and
consciousness. The myth has not only been entirely dissolved into poetry, it
contributes to the poetry's production in the most banal manner: technically.
It is inevitable that, for his grotesque, Prometheus has come to Paris. He is not
the "Unbound," in any elevated sense of this wordno one who, as the guarantor
of a warning and illumination that he sacrilegiously conveyed to man, would
have had to extricate himself from the irate grasp of another. As though the
verdict had long since been untenable and forgotten, the unchaining took place
like the most casual matter of course. "When, on the summit of the Caucasus,
Prometheus had become fully aware that his chains, fetters, strait-waistcoats,
prison walls and other scruples, taking them all in all, were giving him pins and
needles, in order to change his posture he rose on his left side, stretched out his
right arm, and, between four and five o'clock on an autumn afternoon, walked
down the boulevard which leads from the Madaleine to the Opera." 1This is a
pure representation of Gide's aesthetic central idea, of the acte gratuit [free,
gratuitous act], a descendant of the theological concept of God's un-earnable and
rationally inexplicable act of grace, and here the structural principle of the
grotesque (sotie), of its constant demonstrative resistance to any inquiry as to its
motive and what it is 'doing.' One may say that it is no exhaustion of the myth's
potential, but on the contrary a final defiance of the myth, for which a Hercules
would be necessary. But the casualness with which Prometheus frees himself
does nevertheless have the pointed meaning that one no longer knows at all what
the issue was.
Part of this is the fact that Zeus has long since left his [former] office. He
exercises authority in an up-to-date manner, as a banker, and this gives him,
more than ever, the means to put his author's acte gratuit into effect. What, in the
myth, had been the great ambiguity of the withholding of firewas it ill will
toward the despised creatures of another god, or was it the protection of heaven's
property against the grasp of those who were unworthy?has become the mere
caricature in the idea of the groundless will. Zeus entangles men in a story that

 Page 629

they cannot comprehend, which is presented on the level of whim, and whose
unexplained beginning spins itself out in unexplained actions and undeserved
consequences of these actions.a It is the early realization of what Gide, almost
three decades later, in The Counterfeiters, makes Edouard record in his diary as
a saying of old La Pérouse: "Dieu se moque de moi. Il s'amuse. Je crois qu'il
joue avec nous comme un chat avec une souris" [God makes fun of me. He
amuses himself. I think he plays with us like a cat with a mouse]. For the
meaning of this is, in the end, simply that when it is viewed from outside, the
acte gratuite cannot be accepted aesthetically, because it cannot be born,
morally. Even for the aesthetic attitude, morality is taken for granted, because it
would make that attitude impossible if it were not. Only where there is no need
for any action at all, or where action is a travesty of a natural event, is there
nothing that would have to be taken for granted.
To bring myth to an end was once supposed to have been the work of logos. This
consciousness of itself on the part of philosophyor better, of the historians of
philosophyis contradicted by the fact that work aimed at putting an end to myth
is again and again accomplished in the form of a metaphor of myth. To make the
principle of insufficient reason,b in the acte gratuit, into the central idea of
aesthetics means to mythicize aesthetics exactly as it had been mythicized by,
for example, the idea of "genius." The world itself must become the most
groundless thing in the world so that it can tolerate groundless worlds alongside
it, in it, in opposition to it. Only in a universe that is completely free of
compelling reasons is the aesthetic object able to be a match for everything else.
The world's naked contingency, the ultimate impossibility of giving reasons for
it, unexpectedly makes everything equal in the face of the claim to enjoyment. If
it would have taken so little to prevent there being anything at all, then the fact
that there is not nothing is, after all, already something. In another passage in
The Counterfeiters, Gide makes his character Armand say: "Un tout petit peu
moins: le non-être. Dieu n'aurait pas créé le monde. Rien n'eût été . . . " [A very
little bit less: Nonexistence. God would not have created the world. Nothing
would have existed . . . ]. The "beautiful," or whatever may be given out as such
at any given time, is not only the improbable in the mechanism of nature but
already the improbability, itself, that there is anything at all and that anything at
all occurs. Therefore one may

 Page 630

'understate': The sheer minimum of anything-at-all must appear. Prometheus

must change his position just a little. . . .
Only where sufficiency is lacking does the point exist at which what is still too
little suddenly becomes just enough. It is on this borderline that the grotesque
makes its home; it makes absurdity into under-statement. Myth can no longer
take place, because 'too little' happens, although it is not the case that nothing
happens. The grotesque shows how much is necessary to enable the end to take
placeto enable the absence of events to become an event. The form that Gide
gave to the myth of Prometheus, in order to advertise its end, is that of the roman
pur ["pure novel"], even if, in the first edition of 1899, there is as yet no
declaration of its genre. The waiter in the Paris restaurant introduces Prometheus
to Mr. Codes and Mr. Damocles, who have become entangled in the chain of
events that was caused by Zeus. "'Prometheus,' resumed Damocles. 'Excuse me,
sir, but it seems to me that this name has already. . . . ' 'Oh!' interrupted
Prometheus immediately, 'that is of no importance whatsoever.'"
But why, precisely, Prometheus? One could say that the disappearance of the
mythical figure in the modern metropolis, as the eschaton of myth [its 'last
thing,' as in eschatology], could only be exhibited in the example where its
intensity is greatest, and that to ascertain this one only needs to ask Nietzsche,
whom Gide begins to appropriate in these years. Perhaps one can nevertheless
begin an answer thus: If myth has something to do with the nameless being
given names, the formless receiving form, the bestiary becoming human, and
that which is already human in form being humanized, then the center of the
pantheon must lie precisely where what is at issue is the origin and the
continuance of the figure that is man. Even when this focus is fading away,
something of the perils of the beginning would still have to be perceptible.
Prometheus, the potter of man, is again involved, at this end of his myth too (the
end that Gide intended for him), in man's becoming man. This is because the
casual character of the acre gratuit is also a 'datum' of anthropology: It makes
the creature who does not intend to do anything 'for nothing' into a human
creature. The characteristic quality of the God of hidden decisions of grace, of
the terror of 'justification,' unexpectedly becomes the manifestation of self-
exemption from interhuman calculation, from reference to utility and from the
seriousness of getting results. Zeus, the banker, who starts the action

 Page 631

with the five-hundred-franc note, is not retarded in regard to the process of

humanization, but hypertrophiche is a caricature of Nietzsche's superman.
Zeus's game is not only a game of power; it presupposes that those who are
ensnared in it allow themselves to be played with. The acre gratuit lives by the
fact that the others are on the lookout for the accident that it represents for them.
Here, too, Prometheus is still the antipode of Zeus, because for him this ability to
become involved is only the initial condition of the process of becoming human.
Becoming capable even of the acre gratuit frees one from seeing it only in its
external aspect, as the whim of another. The waiter confirms this for
Prometheus; he had long thought that it was this that distinguished man from the
beasts. But his experience taught him the reverse. Man is the only creature that is
incapable of doing something grafts. Prometheus becomes the 'hermeneut'
[interpreter] of his own history when he understands it as the history of self-
consciousness. Groundless action is the test of this: the test of the subject's pure
capacity not to be consumed in his action but to be an onlooker at it. In the
language of the myth, to achieve consciousness is to recognize one's eagle and to
enter into the 'either-or' of being eaten or eating. The totem meal that
Prometheus arranges is the sacrament of no longer being eaten.
The story of the two people whom Zeus entangles in his 'action' is like a thought
experiment in regard to the convergence of the groundlessness of the act with the
improbability of being affected by it, that is, the convergence of distance from
the moral realm with proximity to the aesthetic. Codes, who picks up Zeus's
handkerchief from the street, knows nothing about his parents, nothing about the
reason for his existence, and was looking for nothing but "some reason for
continuing to live." He went into the street, he says, in order to find some kind of
determining influence there. "I thought my destiny would depend on the first
thing that happened to me; for I was not my own maker. . . . " That one was not
one's own maker defines the deficiency of self-consciousness, which (as always)
derives from the epistemological axiom that we possess insight, ultimately, only
into what we have made, ourselves. Here, the idea of the self-creation of the
essentia [essences] by the existentia [existences] is still remote; in Sartre's drama
it brings Orestes and Zeus to the point of complete mutual indifference. What
binds Codes to Zeus is the tiny deflection, by the accident, that

 Page 632

his undetermined existence requires in order to be relieved of continuing to

search for its justification.
The difficulty of not being able to have made oneself, which drives men into
Zeus's snares, preestablishes the sense of what Prometheus, as the mythical
maker of men, can mean by his offer, to his creatures, to make 'men' of them.
Only since his martyrdom on the Caucasus has he become capable not only of
making human-formed creatures from day but also of making these into 'men.'
The logic of what he had begun, in the myth, coincides with the ritual of ending
the myth: The totem meal becomes an action signaling the alliance of them for
whom it is only by the end of the myth that they can give their boundlessness a
self-consciousness that is no longer in search of Zeus's acte gratuit, but has itself
become capable of such an act.
Thus Prometheus, the potter of man, becomes the awakeher of his creatures'
consciousness, the one who gives the memorial meal for myth. This feature
illuminates, for the first time, the subtle turning at the end, in which Prometheus
writes down his storyas a story that has been concludedwith a quill from his
eagle. Myth is made completely aesthetic, for the first time, when a work of art
results from it in a way that is (deviously) 'realistic.' The aesthetic enjoyment
consists in the distance that is displayed, vis-à-vis that which, as something that
has become impossible, lies behind it.
Has myth been brought to an end when, and because, it has been made into a
burlesqueor, more accurately, when it has become possible for it to be one? The
fact that something has come to an end derives its importance, as a threat or a
comfort, exclusively from what it was that succumbed to this treatment. The
evidence that the end has already taken place cannot always be produced by
pointing out the vacant place where what was previously present could be
displayed. Work on myth contains the suspicion that its success at the same time
implies the loss of a certainty. There is no modality of remembering myth other
than that of work on it; but neither is there any success in this work other than
that of exhibiting the ultimate possible way of dealing with [the] mythwhich runs
the inescapable risk of being refuted, of being convicted of implying a still-
unfulfilled claim, by [the appearance off yet another possible way.
In contrast to all history, in which the epochs take over from one another with
the consciousness that now, finally, matters are getting serious, that, after so
much frivolous squandering of man's best po-

 Page 633

tential, now, finally, everything is at stakein contrast to this, every step of work
on myth is a dismantling of the old seriousness; even the art myths of the end of
art or of the death of God are made this way. What comes after such an end and
such a death, the myth does not go on to promise. Does it leave this to the
philosophers, who are confident that only then something better would certainly
occur to them? Work on myth knows no Sabbath ["seventh day"] on which it
would confirm, retrospectively, that the god of the myths is dead. It knows that
the Christianized exclamation that the great Pan is deadc was itself a myth, a
piece of work on myth, furnishing the mythical counterpart of a dogma that lays
claim to absolute realismlike the falling silent of the ancient oracles. There is no
end of myth, although aesthetic feats of strength aimed at bringing it to an end
occur again and again. We have something comparable as an aesthetic event
when we are dealing with a traditional pattern: The assertion that a theatrical
production attempts something unsurpassable, that it furnishes an "Endgame,"
has become an everyday phrase. It is even part of the onlooker's experience that
he has to ask himself, What would still be possible after this?
Kafka's 'rectifications' of the Prometheus myth, 2from the year 1918, are part of
its eschatology. That is why the dazed reader of this short text, which does not
even fill up a page, asks himself, and is meant to ask: What would still be left to
do? It almost goes without saying that the reader feels that he is present at an
action. The old phrase that what is at stake is not just words is exemplified by
this, which is not meant to be just one text among others, but, in relation to its
archetype, something ultimate. If one thinks back to Nietzsche's 'rectification,' it
makes the myth into something that reproduces history, and thus at the same
time into something that integrates history into itself as its own episode. Kafka
makes the pluralism of interpretations, as a simulation of historicism and its
relativization of how it really was, in fact,d into the ironical form of his
'rectification.' His retractionse seem merely to stand side by side, as though they
were offered for the reader to choose between, as though to test his affinity for
each variant in turn. But the irony of plurality, in turn, sets the relativism aside,
overcomes it by means of the evidence of completeness: What could still be said
in addition, what could be added to these 'versions'?
When Kafka begins by saying that four legends inform us about Prometheus,
these are not arbitrarily interchangeable; instead, they

 Page 634

are a sequence that exhibits the process, in its form, all the way to the end. The
interpretations do not stand side by side; they surpass one another. It is not by
accident that everything ends with the words to end. On the one hand, the
simulation of philological painstakingness is part of the publicly displaced
multiplicity of meaning that presents itself as historicist; on the other hand, no
version is supposed to deny or to have lost its derivation from a "ground of
truth." The four legends "inform us" [berichten] about Prometheus, and this
word, standing at the beginning, is not modified in any way. The reality is not
guaranteed by the agreement of those who inform us about it, that is, by the
exclusion of their subjectivity, but rather precisely by the fact that even such
widely differing reports undeniably have the same purport [dasselbe meinen],
without saying the same thing. This multiplicity of meaning is directed against
the ideal of scientific objectivity and does not reduce reality's compelling power
to its contents, which can be systematically registered.f.
The first of the four legends corresponds more or less to the traditional myth,
though it is intensified by the statement that Prometheus was chained to the
Caucasus "for betraying the gods to men." No individual god is mentioned as the
specific one who was betrayed; indeed, the fact that Prometheus himself is a god
does not seem to be taken into account, either. So it is also the anonymous
"gods" who send the eaglesin the plural, like thisto feed on Prometheus's liver.
In the second version only these birds remain on the scene, and they afflict
Prometheus so much that he presses himself deeper and deeper into the rock, to
escape their tearing beaks "until he became one with it." The ultimate freedom
from being affected, which no longer seems to be ensured by the immortality of
a god, still lies in merging with the rock, which cannot be affected by any pain
but is, again, the pure unfeelingness of nature.
The third version contains an element that is also found in Nietzsche's fragment,
in which the change of gods, from the father to the son, caused the culture-
founder, on the Caucasus, to be forgotten. Kafka, too, makes Prometheus be
forgotten, in a sequence that intensifies the forgottenness in such a way that at
the end of time, as a result of the mere passage of time, there is again a form of
absolute freedom from being affected. First, his deed, the betrayal, was
forgotten, and then: "the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot."
Nonidentity

 Page 635

as autoamnesia is a pure representation of being beyond the reach of persecution.

The fourth version resembles the third one, but instead of the process of
forgetting, it uses that of growing weary. This is explained as a result of
groundlessness: That which becomes groundless does not persist in
consciousness. And again, there is the passage up the scale, from the punishing
gods to the figure of the one who is punished: ''The gods grew weary, the eagles
grew weary, the wound closed wearily." What remains, here too, is the stone,
because it is ground [Grund, "earth"] and therefore needs no ground [Grund,
"reason"]: Not needing explanation is the ground of its incontestability. The
metaphor of an original stratum underlying all events, which itself no longer
requires justificationno longer requires a theodicyextends from Goethe's
"granite" to Kafka's "inexplicable mass of rock." Kafka's rectification of the
myth concludes with two sentences that retrospectively amplify its beginning,
insofar as they make the mere factual statement that there are four legends into
the expression of an effort, which is explicitly characterized as an explanatory
effort and the difficulty of which is defined as that of explaining the
inexplicable: "The legend tries to explain the inexplicable. As it comes out of a
ground of truth, it has to end in the inexplicable again."
One can regard Kafka's ostensibly traditional versions of the story as a formal
parody of a philological collation. But in their content they are in fact closer to
what Nietzsche attempted in his amplification of the Prometheus myth: to embed
history into make it merge intothe nonhistorical. Kafka makes the 'action'
disappear in nature, in its simply unmoved, indestructible, unhistorical form as
the mass of rock. Since one can scarcely assume that Kafka's third version was
derived in any way from Nietzsche's sketch, it becomes still more instructive in
regard to what work remains to be done on this myth: not the antithesis of myth
and logos, of prehistory and history, of barbarism and culture, but the return of
what had been a unique, futile, and, as it were, disconcerted movement, on the
part of nature, to its congealment, to the hieratic gesture of definitive refusal.
Only the non-organic outlasts history. It does so at the cost of being the
inexplicablefor which, admittedly, no one is there any longer to demand an
explanation.
If one looks for analogous statements from other sources besides this
magnificent and relentless imagination, one encounters the ar-

 Page 636

gument, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, between optimism about
progress and the antithetical principle, in physics, of heat deaththe second law of
thermodynamics, the great model to which Sigmund Freud still related and
subordinated the organic and the psychic realms when, in 1920, he inserted the
death instinct into his system (which was always drawing nearer to the
mythical).
Kafka's text is not one reception of the myth, nor is it the sum of its receptions
during a traceable stretch of time; instead, it is a mythicization of this reception
history itself, and in that respect it is again very close to what Nietzsche had
already attempted. We are no longer told what precedes the statuesque scene in
the Caucasus. Everything that went before has been absorbed in that scene,
under the mere rubric of betrayal of the gods to men. The reception has worked
up the story as though it had never existed. It is the epitome of mythical
circumstantiality itselfof a circumstantiality that is not narrated in the myth but
carried out on it. We are no longer supposed to be able to perceive any of the
formal freedom to vary the myth, or of the ease of dealing with it, as material,
that an attitude that acknowledged itself to be free and creative would permit.
The evidence of a density that leaves no latitude for anythingthe density that the
rock possessesis 'manufactured.'g Only a temporal reversal would still be
thinkable: Prometheus steps forth from the rock again and presents himself
afresh to his tormentors. The eschatological melancholy that lies over the whole
forbids one to give way, even for a moment, to this imaginative license. Why
should the world have to continue in existence if there is nothing more to say?
But what if there were still something to say, after all?

Translator's Notes
a. In the first 'scene' of Prometheus Misbound, Zeus, the banker, drops his
handkerchief in a crowded boulevard; he asks the person who happens to pick it
up and return it to him to address (to anyone he wishes) an envelope, which
contains a five-hundred-franc note; and then he slaps the person's cheek. The
consequences of these acts constitute a large part of the remainder of the story.
b. See note t to the Translator's Introduction.
c. Plutarch reports that during the reign of Tiberius ( 14 37), passengers on a
A.D.
ship passing near the Isle of Paxos heard a loud voice calling out that the great
god Pan was dead. Christians have interpreted this to mean that Christ's advent
put the pagan gods out of circulation.

 Page 637

d. Wie es denn wirklich gewesen sei, a reminder of Leopold von Ranke's famous
statement that the purpose of historiography is to describe wie es eigentlich
gewesenwhat the past was really like.
e. As will be seen in the paraphrases that follow, in the text, Kafka's versions all
involve various kinds of (what might be called) retraction, or shrinkage.
f. Protokolliert: collected, like "observations" or "sense-data"in what the Vienna
Circle positivists called Protokollsätze.
g. Erzetugt, that is, not self-generated.

 Page 639

NOTES

Part I
Chapter 2
1. Herodotus, Histories II 50 53, trans. A.D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1934). It is
not accidental that in this context 'gods' and 'cosmos' are juxtaposed: The
Pelasgians, he says, had called them theoi ["gods"] because they established
(thentes) everything "in conformity with order" (kosmo *). Friedrich August
Wolf discussed this passage from Herodotus in his lectures "On the Archaeology
of the Greeks" in the winter semester of 1812 1813 in Berlin, as we know from
Schopenhauer's transcript: Handschriftlicher Nachlass, ed. A. Hübscher
(Frankfurt: W. Kramer, 1966- ), vol. 2, p, 234. Schopenhauer himself comments
in this connection that ''in the beginning and for a long time" the Greeks would
have had only "the Muses in general," and only later would have given them
individual names. The postscript marked "Ego 1839" shows that this subject
interested him in relation to his philosophical theme of individuation: The gods
are initially there as something universal; only then are they equipped with
individual names. That is something that always suggests itself to the study of
religion, and Usener's merit was precisely the linkage of the original experience
with the finding of names: Hermann Usener, Götternamen. Versuch einer Lehre
von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn, 1896). Wilamowitz advised Usener
early on of his disagreement with the idea of the fundamental function of the
names of the gods, because he suspected it of being "the foundation pillar of a
great edifice" and did not want to value words so highly, but in fact saw in the
pluralism of gods the disintegration of a great original idea of the Hellenic spirit,
a disintegration that could never be allowed to be the original state: "The path
that you pursue, proceeding from what is most individual of all to what is
universal, is a path that must also be traveled: But God is not younger than the
gods, and I want to try once, if he allows me, to take him as my starting point."
Letter dated November 7, 1895, in Usener und Wilamowitz. Ein Briefwechsel
1870 1905 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1934), pp. 55 56.
2. Gerschom Scholem, Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 107. The mysticism of the Cabala first appears around 1200
in southern France and Spain, and has its flowering around 1300: G. Scholem,
Die jüdische Mystik in ihren Hauptströmungen [Major trends in Jewish
mysticism], 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 128.

 Page 640

3. Walter Benjamin, "On Language, and on the Language of Man," in

Reflections, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p.
323. Original: "Über Sprache überhaupt und über die sprache des Menschen," in
Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972 1982), vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 148.
4. A. Gundert, Marie Hesse. Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern
(Stuttgart, 1934; 2d ed., Frankfurt: Insel, 1977), p. 158.
5. G. Simmel, Fragmente und Aufsätze. Aus dem Nachlass und
Veröffentlichungen der letzten Jahre (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1923; rptd.
Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1967), p. 73.
6. H. L. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum neuen Testament aus Talmud
und Midrasch (Munich: Beck, 1922 1961), vol. 1, pp. 15 18; G. Kittel,
"Thamar," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. Kittel, trans.
G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964 1976), vol. 3, pp. 1 3;
henceforth cited as Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Kittel;
original: Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, G. Kittel (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1932 1979), vol. 3, pp. 1 3. [The paging of articles in the
translation of this work is so close to that in the original that i will henceforth
omit references to the original.]
7. W. Marg, in his commentary on his translation of Hesiod's Sämtliche
Gedichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1970), pp. 148 144. Namelessness also appears
elsewhere in Hesiod as a means by which to let old terrors still show through (p.
169, on Theogony 333 336).
8. J. Chelhod, Les structures du sacré chez les Arabes (Paris: Maisonneuve et
Larose, 1964), p. 98; German translation in C. Colpe (ed.), Die Diskussion um
das 'Heilige' (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977), p. 206.
Islamic mysticism, Chelhod says, is "not certain whether Allah is God's real
name"; it believes that of God's hundred names, ninety-nine are surnames and
only the hundredth is his real name, known only to a few initiates, which confers
knowledge of and power over nature and death: Les structures du sacré . . . , p.
99; Die Diskussion um das 'Heilige,' p. 207.
9. M. Grosser, The Discovery of Neptune (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1962), pp. 123 127.
10. Plato, Cratylus 401 B.
11. Heine, Aufzeichnungen, in Sämtliche Schriften, ed. K. Briegleb (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968- ), vol. 6, pt. 1, p. 627.
12. J. Presser, Napoleon. Historic en Legende (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1946), p.
87; in German: Napoleon. Das Leben und die Legende (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Verlagsanstalt, 1977), pp. 91 92.
13. Presser, Napoleon. Historie en Legende, pp. 47 55 [quote on p. 55]; in
German translation, pp. 58 61.
14. The Novices of Sais, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Curt Valentin, 19490, p,
113. Original: Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, in Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhohn and R.
Samuel, 2d ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960 1975), vol 1, p. 106.
15. Hermann Cohen, Introduction to F. A. Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus
(with a critical postscript to the ninth edition, 1914), in Hermann Cohen,
Schriften zur Philosophie und Zeitgeschichte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1928),
vol. 2, pp. 197 198. With regard to the problem of differentiating myth from
science, Cohen took the easy way out. "That is the difference between myth and
science: that science deals with matter, where myth saw consciousness": Das
Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode und seine Geschichte. Ein Kapitel zur
Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin, 1883; 2d ed., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1968), p. 229.

 Page 641

16. The culture-circle concept was constructed by Leo Frobenius in 1897 but
later given up again. Its implications of diffusion and overlapping go back to
Friedrich Ratzel's Völkerkunde (Leipzig, 1886 1888). Fritz Graebner picked up
the culture concept again in 1911 in his Methode der Ethnologie (Heidelberg: C.
Winter, 1911). The potential for speculation that is inherent in an ideal-typical
form of theory that proceeds without attention to what can be documented is
something that W. Schmidt and W. Koppers began to exploit in 1924 in their
prelude to a universal history of mankind: Völker und Kulturen (Regensburg:J.
Habbel, 1924).(Only volume 1 appeared.)
17. Voltaire, La Princesse de Babylon XI: "Tout ce qu'on savait, c'est que la ville
et l'étoile étaient fort anciennes, est c'est tout ce qu'on peut savoir de I'origine des
choses, de quelque natures qu'elles puissent être." Voltaire regarded Aesop's
fables, too, as myths, whose origin is lost in an antiquity "whose depths cannot
be plumbed": Le Philosophe Ignorant (1766), sec. 47.
18. S. Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis, ed. M. Bonaparte, A. Freud, and E.
Kris (New York: Basic Books, 1954), p. 253 (henceforth cited as The Origins of
Psychoanalysis). Original: Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse. Briefe an
Wilhelm Fliess . . . (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1962), p. 217 (henceforth cited as Aus
den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse), Compare The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900 1901), in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London:
Hogarth Press, 1953- ), vol. 5, pp. 463ff. (henceforth cited as Freud, Complete
Psychological Works). Original: Gesammelte Werke (London and Frankfurt:
Imago/S. Fischer, 1940- ), vol. 2/3, pp. 466ff. (henceforth cited as Gesammelte
Werke).
19. Freud to Fliess, Vienna, December 12, 1897, in The Origins of
Psychoanalysis, p. 237; Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse, p. 204.
20. "Entwurf ether Psychologie" (1895), in Aus den Anfängen der
Psychoanalyse, pp. 305 384; "Project for a Scientific Psychology," in The
Origins of Psychoanalysis, pp. 347 445.
21. M. Schur, Sigmund Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International
Universities Press, 1972), p. 487.

Chapter 3
1. Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter's "School for Aesthetics," trans. Margaret
R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), pp. 48 and 57 58.
Original: Vorschule der Ästhetik I 4 s. 17; I 5 s.21.
2. Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, trans. Ernest Behler and Roman Struc
(University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), p. 58.
Original: Gespräch über die Poesie, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe
(Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958- ), vol. 2, p. 290.
3. Schlegel, "Talk on Mythology," in Dialogue on Poetry, p. 82; Kritische
Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 2, p. 313.
4. Friedrich Schlegel, Prosaische Jugendschriften, ed. J. Minor (Vienna, 1882),
vol. 1, p. 237.
5. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenology of
Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1957), p. 90. Original: Philosophic der symbolischen Formen, second ed.
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1954), vol. 3, p. 106. quoting J.
Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer in Süd-Togo (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1911), pp. 7 8.
6. W. Marg's comments on his translation of Hesiod's Theogony, in Hesiod:
Sämtliche Gedichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1970), p. 155.

 Page 642

7. E. Rothacker, Philosophische Anthropologie (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1964), pp.

95 96.
8. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and E. Mayer (New York:
Pantheon, 1962), p. 500. Original in Gedenkausgabe der Werke, ed. E. Beutler
(Munich: Artemis, 1949- ), vol. 11, p. 281 (henceforth cited as Werke, ed.
Beutler).
9. Karl August Böttiger, Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen (Leipzig, 1838;
rptd. Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 42 46.
10. Goethe, Kampagne in Frankreich 1792, "Münster, November 1792"; Werke,
ed. Beutler, vol. 12, pp. 418 420.
11. Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 500 (translation slightly revised). Original: "Aus
den Papieren zur ltalienischen Reise," Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, pp. 962 966.
12. G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby
(London, Henley and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 67. Original:
Die Philosophie des Geldes, 3d ed. (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1920), p.
13.
13. Seneca, De Constantia Sapientis 2.
14. P. Hadot, "Le Mythe de Narcisse et son interprétation par Plotin," Nouvelle
Revue de Psychanalyse 13 (1976): 81 108.
15. Plotinus, Enneads I 6, 8, trans. S. MacKenna (London: Faber & Faber,
1956). On Odysseus as typifying the metaphysical home-comer in Neo-
Platonism: W. Beierwaltes, "Das Problem der Erkenntnis bei Proklos," in De
Jamblique à Proclus, Entretiens sur l'Antiquité Classique 21 (Vandoeuvres:
Fondation Hardt, 1975), p. 161 n.2.
16. W. Bröcker, Platonismus ohne Sokrates (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1966), p.
23.
17. H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1983), pp. 338 341. Original: Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1966), pp. 333 336, and Der Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde,
suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 24 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973) (the
revised edition of part 3 of Die Legitimität), pp. 138 142.
18. K. A. Böttiger (cited in note 9), vol. 1, pp. 73 75.
19. Letter to Carlo Linati, September 21, 1920, in Letters of James Joyce, ed.
Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957), pp. 146 147 (henceforth cited as
Letters, vol. 1).
20. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, July 20, 1919, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 204.
21. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, February 25, 1919, in Letters of James
Joyce, vol. 2, ed. R. Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 437.
22. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, December 6, 1921, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 178.
23. W. Iser, "Der Archetyp als Leerform. Erzählschablonen und Kommunikation
in Joyce's Ulysses," in Terror und Speil, Poetik und Hermeneutik 4 (Munich:
Fink, 1971), pp. 369 408; idem, "Patterns of Communication in Joyce's Ulysses,"
in The Implied Reader (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1974). Original: Der implizite Leser (Munich: W. Fink, 1972). Whatever Joyce's
"implied reader'' may have been, in one explicit case Joyce's anticipations were
frustrated: His wife Nora did not read the book, although that seems to have
been an almost erotic experimentum crucis for him: "O my dearest, if you would
only turn to me even now and read that terrible book. . . . " [Letter dated April
1922, in Letters of James Joyce, vol. 3,

 Page 643

ed. R. Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 63]. "If Ulysses isn't fit to
read . . . life isn't fit to live" was Joyce's reply to the report that his Aunt
Josephine had said that the book was not fit to read. Quoted by R. Ellmann,
James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 551.
24. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964), p. 215.
25. Quoted by J. Gross, Joyce (London: Fontana/Collins, 1971), p. 29.
26. H. Deku, "Selbstbestrafung," Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 21 (1977): 42 58.
On the Oedipus model of the self-wormdiscovery of previously unknown guilt
in the medieval legend of Judas, Gregorius, and Albanus, see F. Ohly, Der
Verfluchte und der Erwühlte. Vom Leben mit der Schuld (Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1976). The story of Judas's life, especially, 'explains,' on
the basis of the apostle's early Oedipus-type history, how he could (if he didn't in
fact have to) become the biblical betrayer of Jesus, although he had been chosen
as "the penitent."
27. Freud, "The Uncanny," in Complete Psychological Works, vol. 17, p. 237;
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, p. 249.
28. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 7, p. 226n; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, p. 127.
29. Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, October 15, 1897, in The Origins of
Psychoanalysis, pp. 223 224; Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse, p. 193. At
the end of the letter Freud applies the discovery to Hamlet, which also has the
fundamental cyclical pattern of a perpetrator who seeks his own punishment. On
this, see Karl Abraham, Dreams and Myths (New York: Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1913). Original: Traum und Mythus (1909), in
Psychoanalytische Studien (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969), pp. 261 323. Freud
encountered the Oedipus material early on, as we know from his
"Autobiographical Study" of 1925; in his Abitur [examination on graduating
from the Gymnasium] he was given thirty-three verses from Sophocles's
Oedipus Rex to translate, and he had already read the play on his own.
30. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Complete Psychological Works,
vol. 18, p. 38 [quotations in the next four paragraphs for which no source is
given are from this and the following page]; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13, pp.
40 41. Claude Bernard, who made physiology central to biology, summarized
the views advanced in his Définition de la vie (1875) in the paradox, "La vie,
c'est la mort"here also already recognizing the equivalence of the great myth of
the Minotaur: "La vie est un minotaure elle dévore l'organisme." La science
expérimentale, 7th ed. (Paris: Baillière, 1925).
31. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. H. Diels und W. Kranz (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1934 1954), 22 B 36 and 77. Commentary in W. Bröcker, Die
Geschichte der Philosophie vor Sokrates (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1965), p. 39.
32. Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," in Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 17, p. 54; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, p. 131.
33. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Complete Psychological Works,
vol. 18, p. 38; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13, p. 40.
34. P. Roazen, Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk (New York:
Knopf, 1969), p. 127. Freud's student, Hans Sachs, reports Freud's reaction to
the news of a suicideperhaps it was that of the death of Tausk"I saw him [Freud]
when the news came that someone with whom he had been on friendly terms for
years had committed suicide. I found him strangely unmoved by such a tragic
event": ibid,, p. 141. Roazen also tells of the close association in time between
the death of Tausk and the writing of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Freud, he
says, gave the manuscript to friends as early as September 1919.

 Page 644

35. H. U. Instinsky, Das Jahr der Geburt Jesu. Eine geisteswissenschaftliche

Studie (Munich: Kösel, 1957).
36. Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica I 5, 2 4. Commentary in E. Peterson, "Der
Monotheismus als politisches Problem" (1935), in Theologische Traktate
(Munich: Kösel, 1951), pp. 86ff.
37. R. Hennig, "Die Gleichzeitigkeitsfabel. Eine wichtige psychologische
Fehlerquelle," Zeitschrift für Psychologie 151 (1942): 289 302.
38. A. Demandt, "Verformungstendenzen in der Überlieferung antiker Sonnen-
und Mondfinsternisse," Abhandlungen der Akademie zu Mainz (Geistes- und
sozialwiss. Kl.), 1970, no. 7. Also, M. Kudleck and E. H. Mickler, Solar and
Lunar Eclipses of the Ancient Near East from 3000 to 0 with Maps, Alter
B.C.

Orient and Altes Testament, Sonderreihe 1, 1971 (Kevalaer: Butzon & Bercker,
1971).
39. B. Fontenelle, L'Histoire des Oracles, ed. L. Maigron (Paris: Cornély, 1908):
"Il y a je ne scay quoy de si hereux dans cette pensée, que je ne m'étonne pas
qu'elle ait eu beaucoup de cours. . . . "
40. R. Musil, Tagebücher, ed. A. Frisé (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), vol. 1, p.
754.
41. Oehlenschläger to Goethe, September 4, 1808, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. K. R.
Mandelkow (Hamburg: Wegner, 1965 1969), vol. 1, p. 547.
42. J. G. Droysen, Grundriss der Historik, sec. 45, in Droysen, Historik, ed. R.
Hübner (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1937), p. 345.
43. W. Rathenau, Briefe (Dresden: Reissner, 1926), vol. 2, p. 348.
44. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 120. Original: Sein und Zeit, sec. 18, 7th ed.
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), p. 87.

Chapter 4
1. U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Zukunftsphilologie! Zweites Stück. Eine
Erwiderung (Berlin, 1873), p. 9. Reprinted in K. Gründer (ed.), Der Streit um
Nietzsches "Geburt der Tragödie" (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1969), p. 120.
2. "Catalogues of Women and Eoiae," in Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, and
Homerica, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), pp. 199 201. [Translation slightly
revised, following the author's authority: W. Marg, Hesiod: Sämtliche Gedichte
(Zurich: Artemis, 1970), p. 491.] The "Catalogues of Women" must be seen as
closely related to the Iliad, but there is no hint there of the shared oath of Helen's
suitors as the motive for the expedition.
3. The material on Phobus and Deimus has been collected by S. Jäkel in Archiv
für Begriffsgeschichte 16 (1972): 141 165.
4. R. Bilz, "Der Vagus-Tod," in Die unbewältigte Vergangenheit des
Menschengeschlechts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 244. Later: R. Bilz,
Paläoanthropologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), pp. 418 425, 442 447.
5. R. Merz, Die numinose Mischgestalt. Methodenkritische Untersuchungen zu
tiermenschlichen Erscheinungen Altägyptens, der Eiszeit und der Aranda in
Australien, Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 36 (Berlin:
DeGruyter, 1978).

 Page 645

6. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press, 1953 1957), vol. 2, p. 195. Original: Philosophie der
symbolischen Formen (Berlin, 1923 1929; 2d ed., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft; Oxford: B. Cassirer, 1953), vol. 2, pp. 233 234.
7. J. Bernays, Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristoteles über
Wirkung der Tragödie (Breslau, 1857; rptd. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1970). On the
role of the observer as prototypical for theory, see B. Snell, The Discovery of the
Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1953), p. 4. Original: Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Studien zur
Entstehung europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen (Hamburg: Claassen &
Gowerts, 1946), p. 18. Theorein was not originally a verb, but derived from the
noun, theoros; "its basic meaning is 'to be a spectator.'" Distance as an aesthetic
category was comprehensively discussed in the third volume of the Poetik und
Hermeneutik series: Die nicht mehr schönen Künste, ed. H. R. Jauss (Munich:
Fink, 1968).
8. H. Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer
Daseinsmetapher, suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 289 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 28 31.
9. Herodotus, Histories VIII 55.
10. Iliad XXI 385 390; The Iliad of Homer, trans. Ennis Rees (New York:
Random House, 1963), p. 435.
11. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik III 3; Horn of Oberon:Jean Paul Richter's
"School for Aesthetics," trans. Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1973), p. 307.
12. Plato, Republic III 3; 388 E; The Republic of Plato, trans. F. M. Cornford
(New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 78: "Again, our
Guardians ought not to be overmuch given to laughter. Violent laughter tends to
provoke an equally violent reaction (metabole *). . . . still less should Homer
speak of the gods giving way to 'unquenchable laughter.' . . . "
13. J. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III 2; Gesammelte Werke
(Berlin: Rütten und Loening, 1955- ), vol. 6, p. 112 (henceforth cited as
Griechische Kulturgeschichte).
14. Leiden Papyrus J. 395, quoted from H. Schwabl, "Weltschöpfung," in Paulys
Realencyklopädie der classichen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1958), pp. 126 127.
15. H. Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und
Ruprecht, 1934), p. 370.
16. Empedocles fr. B. 115, in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. H. Diels and
W. Kranz (Berlin: Weidmann, 1934 1954), vol. 1, pp. 357 358.
17. H. Diller and F. Schalk, "Studien zur Periodisierung," Abhandlungen der
Akademie zu Mainz (Geistes- und sozialwiss. Kl.), 1972, no. 4, p. 6.
18. O. Liebmann, Die Klimax der Theorien (Strassburg, 1884), pp. 28 30.
19. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon, 1961), p.
340; Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken (Zurich: Rascher, 1962), p. 343.
20. U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Der Glaube der Hellenen (1931 1932; 2d
ed., Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1955), vol. 1, p. 18 (henceforth cited as Der
Glaube der Hellenen).
21. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, p. 48; Philosophic
der symbolischen Formen, 2d ed., vol. 2, pp. 62 63.

 Page 646

22. Schopenhauer, Handschriftlicher Nachlass, ed. A. Hübscher (Frankfurt: W.

Kramer, 1966- ), vol. 1, p. 151.
23. Hans Jonas, "Neue Texte zur Gnosis," supplement to the third edition of his
Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1964),
vol. 1, pp. 385 390.
24. Odyssey IV 351 586, from the translation by W. Shewring (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980), pp. 44 45, revised to follow the translation by W.
Schadewalt (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1958), used by the author.
25. Benjamin Hederich, Gründliches Mythologisches Lexikon (1724; 2d ed.,
1770; rptd. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), col. 2110.
26. Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII 731 737.
27. Hesiod, fragment 209, following W. Marg's commentary in his Hesiod
(Zurich: Artemis, 1970), pp. 522 523. This fragment is also in Hesiod, Homeric
Hymns, and Homerica, p. 185.
28. A. Gehlen, Urmensch und spätkultur (Bonn: Athenäum, 1956), p. 275.
29. F. Dirlmeier, "Die Vogelgestalt homerischer Götter," Abhandlungen der
Akademie zu Heidelberg (Phil.-hist. Kl.), 1967, no. 2.
30. Wilamowitz, Der Glaube der Hellenen, vol. 1, p. 141.
31. Ibid., p. 22.
32. Iliad XIII 68 72.
33. O. Goldberg, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer. Einleitung in das System des
Pentateuch (Berlin: David, 1925), pp. 280 282.
34. Exodus 32:19.
35. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), p. 137: "A
further important peculiarity arises from the quality of the god as guardian of the
confederate law and as war god accepted through a special contract: the god was
and continued to be, in spite of all anthropomorphism, unmarried and, hence,
childless. . . . With Yahwe, however, this circumstance from the beginning
contributed substantially to his appearance as something unique and more
removed from this world, in contrast to the other divine figures. This, above all,
blocked the formation of true myths, which is always 'theogony.'" Original:
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 3, Das antike Judentum
(Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1921), p. 148. Thomas Mann made use of this
passagelike the other that describes Yahwe's lack of a theogony as an
"accomplishment typical of priests" (Ancient Judaism, p. 226; Das antike
Judentum, p. 241)in composing his Joseph, as a means of bringing out the
contrast to the freedom of myth. See H. Lehnert, ''Thomas Manns Josephstudien
1927 1939," Jahrbuch der Schillergesellschaft 10 (1966): 512 513.
36. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6,
p. 114.
37. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6,
p. 119.
38. Kierkegaard, On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates,
trans. L. M. Capel (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1965),
p. 103n.

 Page 647

Part II
Chapter 1
1. Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, in Sämmtliche Werke
(Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1856; rptd. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1957), vol. 1, p. 482.
2. According to E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871; rptd. New York: Harper,
1958), vol. 1, p. 16, "survivals are processes, customs, opinions and so forth,
which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different
from that in which they had their original home. . . . " On the concept, see J.
Stagl, Kulturanthropologie und Gesellschaft (Munich: List, 1974), p. 41.
3. Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, October 15, 1897, in The Origins of Psychoanalysis,
pp. 225 224; Aus den Anfangen der Psychoanalyse, p. 193. This passage was
already quoted in context, in relation to the production of 'significance,' in part 1,
chapter 3, text related to note 29.
4. Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones II 10, 5: "De hac hominis fictione poetae
quoque, quamvis corrupte, tamen non aliter tradiderunt. Namque, hominem de
luto a Prometheo factum esse, dixerunt. Res eos non fefellit, sed nomen
artificis."
5. Ibid. II 10, 6: "Nullas enim litteras veritatis attigerant . . . veritas a vulgo solet
veriis sermonibus dissipata corrumpi, nullo non addente aliquid ad id, quod
audierant, carminibus suis comprehenderunt."
6. Tacitus, Germania 2, 2: "Celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos
memoriae et annalium genus est, Tuistonem deum terra editum et filium
Mannum originem gentis conditoresque. . . . "
7. Wilhelm Grimm to Goethe, Cassel, June 18, 1811, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. K.
R. Mandelkow (Hamburg: Wegner, 1965 1969), vol. 2, p. 88.
8. Odyssey XI 373 376; The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Ennis Rees (New York:
Random House, 1960), p. 185.
9. Odyssey XXIII 306 809, Rees, p. 388.
10. Johann Heinrich Voss to his wife Ernestine, Weimar, June 5, 1794, in Briefe,
ed. Abraham Voss (Halberstadt, 1829 1882), vol. 2, pp. 882 383.
11. Voss to his wife, Weimar, June 6, 1794, in Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 386 387.
Goethe's library contained only the second (1802) and the fourth (1804) edition
of Voss's Homer.
12. Voss to Friedrich August Wolf, Eutin, November 17, 1795, in Briefe, vol. 2,
pp. 229 230.
13. Voss to his brother-in-law, Heinrich Christian Bole, October 8, 1779, in
Briefe, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 145 146.
14. Voss to his son, Heinrich Christian, March 1780, in Briefe, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp.
147 148.
15. Voss to Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Eutin, September 26, 1791, in
Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 297 298.
16. W. Schadewalt, Die Legende von Homer, dem fahrenden Sänger. Ein
altgriechisches Volkabuch (Leipzig: Köhler und Amelang, 1942), pp. 16, 20,
and 44. [Quotations in this and the next

 Page 648

paragraph. The corresponding pages in the Artemis edition (Zurich and

Stuttgart, 1959) are 12, 15, and 33.] "How potent was fame in those days!"
the translator exclaims in his commentary, where he is explaining the mode of
existence of these bards, and continues: "These singers and rhapsodists . . .
sang, in the regular and prescribed manner, material from the store of songs
and epics that passed from master to student down through the generations."
The great lords and kings, he says, provided themselves with resident
rhapsodists, and communities 'called' them from abroad, "as was done only
with the respected professions: seers, doctors, and master builders":
Scbadewalt, Die Legende, p. 53; Artemis edition, p. 40.
17. Even if Nietzsche's ascription of the "Contest between Homer and Hesiod" to
Sophism, in the person of Alcidamas, the student of GorgiasGesammelte Werke
(Munich: Musarion, 1920), vol. 2, pp. 160 181should not be correct, it remains a
stroke of brilliance that is instructive in relation to the young (1871)
philologian's future view of the world. This is especially the case because the
Greeks' dictum, containing the tenor of tragedy, that for mortals it would be
better not to be born [Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1211; see H. Blumenberg,
Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 16 17]
plays a role in the agon [contest] as Homer's answer to a question set for him by
Hesiod (see Schadewalt, Die Legende, p. 46)and may have been the deciding
factor, when one considers how little that sort of thing may have seemed to the
king of Aulis to suit the festive surroundings. But wouldn't this dictum be
enough to make the whole appear heterogeneous to the sphere of the Homeric
materials? Seen from the perspective of myth, the dictum agrees with Zeus's
judgment that the creature called "man" does not deserve to live; but it passes
over Prometheus's opposition to this verdict, an opposition that triumphs in the
end. But it would fit Gorgias's nihilism"Nothing exists, and if anything did
exist . . . "like a school example. But could Homer, as the patriarch of Sophism
and its arts of extemporizing, then be allowed to be the loser? Or would that be a
final sneer at the victor's homely commonplaceness, which pleased a king but
not his audience? That would have had to be the way the student of Gorgias
meant it, if indeed he was the one who said it.
18. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1953 1957), vol. 2, p. 105. Original: Philosophie der
symbolischen Formen (Berlin, 1923 1929; 2d. ed., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft; Oxford: B. Cassirer, 1953), vol. 2, pp. 130 131.
19. Ernst Jünger's nice formula that prehistory is always the history that hits
closest to home [uns am nächsten liegt], and that its tendency is "to represent life
in its timeless meaning" Gärten und Strassen (Berlin: Mittler, 1942), pp. 78 79
[January 14, 1940]is also based on the unnoticed confusion between not being
affected by time and being timeless. We possess stories that we take for
prehistory, but we don't possess any part of prehistory itself; and these stories are
neither close to us nor distant in any way that can be compared to historical
material. The former cannot be played off against the latter in any antithesis,
because what remains of those stories is itself, in datable items of testimony, a
constituent part of history: as work on myth.
20. E. Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities (New Haven, Conn., and London:
Yale University Press, 1960), p. 94. Original: Zur Logik der
Kulturwissenschaften. Fünf Studien (Göteborg, 1942; 2d. ed., Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), p. 40.
21. The irony contained in the tide of Cassirer's last work, The Myth of the State
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1946), is not without bitterness.
22. The reception aspect is also missing from Cassirer's important refinements of
the myth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (which first appeared in
1923): Language and Myth (New York: Harper, 1946). Original: Sprache und
Mythos. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen, Studien der Bibliothek
Warburg 6 (Leipzig, 1925). A second edition appeared in his Wesen und
Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1956).

 Page 649

23. Reflexionen no. 932, Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Preussische

Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900 1942), vol. 15, pt. 1, p. 413.
24. H. R. Jauss, Alterität und Modernität der mittelalterlichen Literatur
(Munich: Fink, 1977), p. 17. His first discussion of this subject was in his
Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Tierdichtung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1959).

Chapter 2
1. H. Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1960),
pp. 85 87; rptd. from Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 6 (1960).
2. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 767. Original in Gosammelte
Werke (Munich: Musarion, 1920), vol. 21, p. 264. Did the editor really read
correctly, when Ecce Homo was first published (by Insel Verlag in 1908),
putting "on every seventh day" ["an jedem siebenten Tag"], which admittedly
sounds more philosophically pretentious than "on that seventh day" [''an jenem
siebenten Tag"], though that is all that is in question here? [Kaufmann's
translation assumes such an amendment.]
3. I find Max Kommerell's poem "Sagt jemand: ein Nu . . . " in Hans-Georg
Gadamer's Philosophische Lehrjahre (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), p. 104.
Untitled, the poem is the first item in the volume of selections entitled Rückkehr
zum Anfang (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1956). The extent to which the dogmatics
of the Incarnation works toward a hitherto unknown realism can be seen from
the way in which Harnack defends Marcion's 'docetism' against consequences
such as were still unknown to the ancient world: Marcion, he says, had to keep
his Christ free of participation in evil matter and from the ignominy of the
reproductive process, invented by the demiurge; Christ could give himself
human feelings even without the substance of flesh: A. von Harnack, Marcion.
Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1924), pp.
124 125 (henceforth cited as Harnack, Marcion). But this very avoidance of the
ignominious and of a limit of suffering not determined by himself makes clear
what the stigmata of the realism of an incarnation will beof an incarnation that
had to be a forgoing of a 'purity' undiluted by matter if it was to be 'taken
seriously' as a definitive decision in favor of salvation. The reality that Tertullian
had summarized in the formula, "satis erat ei (sc. Christus) conscientia sua" (De
carne 8), simply wasn't sufficient. If Harnack, now, emphasizes the temporal
relativity of the acceptance of docetism as a means of achieving distance from
the world god, then he cannot at the same time justify docetism as an expression
of the exemption of the "nova documenta dei novi" from conformity to their
time: "Docetism at that time [Zeit] was also an expression of the fact that Christ
is not a product of his age [Zeit] and that what is gifted with genius and is divine
does not evolve out of nature." That is sheer 'spirit of the age' [Zeitgeist]
nonsense and betrays by its language alone ("gifted with genius"! "evolve"!)
what age we should then understand as being expressed. One can see by this
what the dogmatic defense of the Incarnation, seen in a long-term perspective,
'accomplished'even if it were only preparing the formulability of Nietzsche's
contradiction.
4. H. Jonas, Ghosts und spätantiker Geist, vol. 2, pt. 1, "Von der Mythologie zur
mystischen Philosophie" (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1954), p. 1.
Signatures 2 through 7 of the first edition of this part are still printed on the same
paper as the first edition (1934) of the first volume, whereas the first signature is
printed on different postwar paper: evidence not only of the fortunes of the work
but also for dating the methodological introduction on the "problem of
objectification and its change of form," from which the definition of
"fundamental myth" is cited, in immediate proximity to the introductory volume
and thus to Jonas's early formulation of the concept of an epoch.
5. Clement of Alexandria, Excerpta ex Theodoto 78.

 Page 650

6. H. Jonas, Gnosis, vol. 1, p. 261, describes the instructive content of the

formula from Theodotus as follows: "The first two pairs of subjects refer to the
downward movement, the last two pairs refer to the turning back and the
movement upward, and their correspondence shows the soteriological
'conclusiveness' of the whole. The fact that they are, in each case, pairs reflects
the dualistic tension, the polarity and thus the necessary dynamism of the
Gnostic view of existence. In each of the four concept-pairs the succession of the
correlated elements in an event, which the myth has to unfold, is exposed."
7. Harnack, Marcion, pp. 94, 118.
8. G. Delling, "archon * [etc.]," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,
ed. G. Kittel, trans. G. W. Bromilley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
1964 1976), vol. 1, pp. 478 489. The thesis that Marcion exaggerated Paul's idea
of the "pernicious government of the world by antidivine angelic and spiritual
powers . . . into the doctrine of two gods, while the Church's theology sought to
blunt it," can be found in M. Werner's Die Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas,
2d. ed. (Bern: P. Haupt, 1953), p. 211 n. 60. [This note is omitted from the
English translation, The Formation of Christian Dogma (New York: Harper,
1957), but the corresponding text is on p. 82.]
9. The Formation of Christian Dogma, p. 95: "The appearance of the Heavenly
Christ in the ordinary form of a man signified thus a disguise of his own proper
being, by which the angelic powers were deceived" [or "tricked"; the original
text, on p. 238, has "getäuscht, überlistet wurden"]. Further citations where
Christ is described as disguised are given in The Formation, p. 97; Die
Entstehung, pp. 244 245.
10. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen
Verehrer Gottes II 3.3 section 16, ed. G. Alexander (Frankfurt: Insel, 1972), vol.
2, p. 247. Similarly, in II 3.2 section 7 (vol. 2, p. 202): "Was that a situation in
which he had to conceal himself, live incognito and travel incognito to heaven so
that all of posterity would remain eternally in uncertainty regarding his
Resurrection, or all its faith would be in vain?"
11. Ausgewählte Schriften der armenischen Kirchenväter, ed. Simon Weber
(Munich: Kösel & Pustet, 1927), vol. 1, pp. 152 180. I cite Eznik after Wilhelm
Dilthey, "Die Gnosis. Marcion und seine Schule," in Gesammelte Schriften
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1914 1982), vol. 15, p. 290. Harnack, Marcion, p. 171, tells it
as follows: The world creator, having fallen into the power of death, himself
proposed to Jesus to exchange the faithful for his life. But that won't work,
because the faithful had already been set free, so that it can only have been a
question of the 'consequences' of the fact that the price of their redemption was
not adhered to.
12. Harnack, Marcion, pp. 4* 5*, on Irenaeus, Adversus haereses II, 3,4, and
Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica IV 14, 7.
13. Foreword to the first edition of Marcion (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1921).
14. Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1974), p. 285; Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 3d ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 377 424 ("Neue Texte zur Gnosis," supplement
dated 1963); W. C. Till, Die gnostischen Schriften des koptischen Papyrus
Berolinensis 8502, 2d ed. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1972) (henceforth cited as
Berolinensis Gnosticus); M. Krause and P. Labib, Die drei Versionen des
Apokryphon des Johannes (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1962) (henceforth cited
as Apokryphon des Johannes). [An accessible English translation of one
versionthat of Codex IIof the Apocryphon of John is in The Nag Hammadi
Library: In English, translated by members of the Coptic Gnostic Library
Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, James M. Robinson,
Director (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 99 116. When this
translation agrees with Krause and Labib's, I have used its English, but when
they disagree I have followed Krause and Labib, as the author's authority. Rather
than multiplying page references to modern editions, I have given only those the
author gives (to Till's Berolinensis Gnosticus and Krause and Labib's
Apokryphon des Johannes), inserting

 Page 651

in brackets after the codex number the page and line numbers, in the original
papyri, of the passages being cited.] In his description of the text, Walter C.
Till gives a sharply defined example of the popular conception of the relation
between question and answer in myth: "The world picture that is unfolded in
the Apocryphon of John is meant to answer two great questions: How did evil
come into the world? And how can man free himself from it? This
formulation of questions is not immediately contained in the text, but it
constitutes the unexpressed basis on which the world picture is developed":
Berolinensis Gnosticus, p. 85.
15. P. Hadot, "Le Mythe de Narcisse et son interprétation par Plotin," Nouvelle
Revue de Psychanalyse 13 (1976): 81 108. In the version of Codex II [page 4,
lines 19 24] (Apokryphon des Johannes, pp. 119 120): "For he is the only one
who sees him in his light, which surrounds himthat is the spring of the water of
life. And he produces all the eons and in every form. He knows his image when
he sees it in the well of the spirit."
16. Apocryphon of John, Codex II [page 11, lines 11151; Apokryphon des
Johannes, p. 140.
17. Berolinensis Gnosticus [page 37 to page 39, line 10], pp. 115 119. Ialdabaoth
is, 'once again,' animal-faced, having the typos [mark, figure] of snake and lion.
The seven kings of heaven and five rulers of the underworld (chaos) that
emanate from him and are empowered by him are, in turn, almost exclusively
animal-faced: lion, donkey, hyena, snake, dragon, ape; Sabbataios is a "glowing
flame face." Ialdabaoth himself is also capable of changing his form (morphe *)
at will: ibid. (page 42, lines 10 13], p. 125, lines 10 18.
18. Apokryphon des Johannes, Codex IV [page 19, lines 12 14], p. 215.
Berolinensis Gnosticus [page 48, line 8], p. 127: "They arose through his
speaking."
19. Berolinensis Gnosticus [page 48, line 2, to page 44, line 18], pp. 127 129.
The excerpt given by Irenaeus of Lyons ends with this occupation of the
'position' of the Old Testament God by Ialdabaoth.
20. Apocryphon of John, Codex II [page 11, line 20]; Apokryphon des Johannes,
p. 140.
21. Apocryphon of John, Codex III [page 22, lines 4 15]; Apokryphon des
Johannes, pp. 76 77. The text of the Berolinensis Gnosticus corresponds to this.
"Let us create a man according to the image (eikon*) and appearance of God":
Berolinensis Gnosticus [page 48, lines 11 14], p. 187. The variant in Codex II is
important in this connection because it connects with the initial light metaphors
and makes man into the source of light for the lower world. The first archon
(here: "Ialtabaoth") speaks to the powers (exousiai) that are with him: "Come, let
us create a man according to the image (eikon) of God and our own image, so
that his image (eikon) may become light for us": Apokryphon des Johannes
[page 15, lines 2 4], p. 150. This reference to the light image is repeated at the
'christening': "Let us call him 'Adam,' so that his name may become a power of
light for us'' [page 15, lines 11 13]. In connection with the production of his
body, a catalog is given of the names of the powers that are each responsible for
an organ. There follows, as a further list, that of the 'demons' responsible for
organ functions: Apokryphon des Johannes [pages 15 18], pp. 198 199. This
litany must have a magical-medical background, but as a totality it is an
anthropology made of names, belonging to a type of thought that does not want
to 'explain,' but merely wants to make sure there is a competence for everything.
The integration is completed by means of a cosmological point when we are told
that the number of those involved in creating man was 365.
22. Apocryphon of John, Codex II [page 19, line 21, to page 28, line 9];
Apokryphon des Johannes, pp. 169 173.
23. Apocryphon of John, Codex III [page 31, lines 19 21]; Apokryphon des
Johannes, p. 92.
24. Apocryphon of John, Codex II [page 23, line 87, to page 24, line 3];
Apokryphon des Johannes, pp. 174 175.

 Page 652

25. Bewlinensis Gnosticus [page 58], p. 157: The production of anaisthesia

[insensibility], in Gnosticism, is based, like other material, on the biblical text
about the anesthetizing sleep that God causes to fall on Adam in order to remove
from him the rib from which he makes Eve: "And the Lord God caused a deep
sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept. . . . " The Apocryphon transforms this
insignificant surgical episode into the decisive imposition of the incapacity for
knowledge: " . . . he enveloped his senses with a veil and burdened him with
inability to know."
26. Apocryphon of John, Codex II [page 28, lines 5 11, and page 23, lines
27 88]; Apokryphon des Johannes, pp. 174 175 and 188 189. Codex IV does not
contain any variants, in relation to Codex II, that are of comparable importance
to the divergences of Codex II from Codex III, especially not in the biblical
allusions from the mouth of Ialdabaoth.
27. Apocryphon of John, Codex II [page 31, lines 3 6]; Apokryphon des
Johannes, pp. 198 199.
28. Ludwig Feuerbach, "Der Schriftsteller und der Mensch" (1834), in Sämtliche
Werke, ed. W. Bolin and F. Jodl (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1960 1964),
vol. 1, p. 276.
29. L. Curtius, Deutsche und antike Welt (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt,
1950), pp. 375 376.
30. M. Scheler, Späte Schriften, in Gesammelte Werke (Bern: Francke, 1976),
vol. 9, p. 161. Translated in Max Scheler, Philosophical Perspectives (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 114 115.
31. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebücher, ed. Ludmilla Assing
(Leipzig, 1861 1870), vol. 2, p. 25.

Chapter 3
1. Jacob Bernays to Paul Heyse, March 21, 1853, in Jacob Bernays. Ein
Lebensbild in Briefen, ed. Michael Bernays (Breslau: Marcus, 1932), pp. 62 63.
See also H. I. Bach, Jacob Bernays (Tübingen: Mohr, 1974), pp. 90 91.
Monotheism is entirely undramatic, Goethe said to Schopenhauer (according to
the latter's report), "because one can't do anything with one person": Werke, ed.
Beutler, vol. 22, p. 744.
2. A. G. Kästner, "Des Pluto Helm," in Gesammelte poetische und prosaische
schönwissenschaftliche Werke, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1841), p. 121. Kästner is referring
to Bernard de Montfaucon, Antiquité expliquée (Paris, 1719- ), vol. 1, pt. 2,
chap. 9.
3. J. Burckhardt to R. Grüninger, Parma, August 28, 1878, in Briefe, ed. M.
Burckhardt (Basel: Schwabe, 1949- ), vol. 6, pp. 283, 286. Compare
Burckhardt's Cicerone, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, pp. 305ff.
4. Exodus rabba 41, 3, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed.
Kittel, vol. 2, p. 374.
5. Thus G. von Rad, "eikon *," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,
ed. Kittel, vol. 2, p. 381.
6. G. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (Glencoe,
Ill.: Free Press, 1950), p. 143 [translation slightly revised]. Original: Réflexions
sur la violence (1906; Paris: Rivière, 1946), pp. 177 178.
7. M. Kartagener, "Zur Struktur der Hebräischen Sprache," Studium Generale 15
(1962): 31 39; citations from pp. 35 36.
8. Heine, "Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen" (1838), in Sämtliche Schriften,
ed. K. Briegleb, vol. 4, pp. 264 265. Heine, in Venice, looks for clues to
Shylock, visiting on the same day the

 Page 653

lunatic asylum of San Carlo and the synagogue, which leads him to the
'discovery' that there was in the gaze of the Jews "the same fatalistic, half-
staring and half-restless, half-sly and half-stupid gleam" as in the gaze of the
madmen, which is supposed to testify to the "supremacy of a fixed idea":
"Has the belief in that extraworldly thunder-god that Moses articulated
become the 'fixed idea' of an entire people . . .?''
9. G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971), p.
35. Subsequent quotations are from the same page. Original in Über einige
Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 166 167.
10. Entry for August 5, 1934, in T. Mann, Diaries 1918 1939, trans. R. Winston
and C. Winston (New York: Abrams, 1982), p. 222. Original: Tagebücher
1933 1934, ed. P. de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1977), p. 497.
11. Thomas Mann to Karl Kerényi, September 7, 1941, in Mythology and
Humanism: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerényi, trans. A.
Gelley (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 103. Original in
Gespräch in Briefen, 2d ed. (Munich: Rhein Verlag, 1967), p. 107. The formula
of a combination of myth and psychology is much older, going back to the
beginnings of the Joseph series: In a letter to Jakob Horwitz of June 11, 1927, he
says that his purpose is to motivate the renewed actualization of timeless myth
psychologically: Briefe I. 1889 1936 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1962), pp. 270 273.
[See Letters of Thomas Man n 1889 1955 (New York: Knopf, 1911), p. 159.]
Then in 1934, in the "Voyage with Don Quixote," the defense of the specific
rationality of myth against the fashionable irrationalisms that are linked with that
title has become his program. "As a teller of tales I have arrived at mythbut I
would humanize it, would seek, in my unlimited contempt for the merely
sentimentally and willfully barbaric, a rapprochement between humanity and
myth. For I find more hope for the future of humanity in that than in a one-sided
struggle against the spirit, a struggle that is bound to the moment and seeks to
ingratiate itself to its time by zealously trampling on reason and civilization":
Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades (New York: Knopf, 1948), pp. 455 456
(translation slightly revised).
12. T. Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, trans. R.
Winston and C. Winston (New York: Knopf, 1961), p. 55. Original: Die
Entstehung des Doktor Faustus. Roman eines Romans (Amsterdam: Bermann-
Fischer, 1949), p. 52.
13. Voltaire, Le Philosophe Ignorant (1766), question XXIX.
14. Ibid., question XXXII.
15. Ibid., question XLVIII. [The next quotation is from the same 'question.']
16. Ibid., question IL.
17. Voltaire, Remarques sur les Pensées de Pascal (1738; probably partly
written as early as 1728), and Dernières Remarques (1778). see J. R. Carré,
Réflexions sur l'Anti-Pascal de Voltaire (Paris: Alcan, 1935). Regarding the
importance of Voltaire's critique of Pascal, I quote only Jean Paul's "Komischer
Anhang zum Titan," where he says that Voltaire "criticized Pascal in a way that
is and will forever remain the model for all critiques of works of genius."
18. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III, 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6,
p. 29.
19. H. Blumenberg, "Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos,"
in Terror und Spiel, ed. M. Fuhrmann, Poetik und Hermeneutik 4 (Munich:
Fink, 1971), pp. 11 66.
20. Hesiod, Theogony 940 943. See W. Marg's commentary in Hesiod:
Sämtliche Gedichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1970), pp. 291 292.

 Page 654

21. Ovid, Metamorphoses III 253 290. Hederich, Goethe's counselor on mythical
subjects, formulated the story cautiously. "But he had scarcely appeared with the
lightning bolt when Semele was so terrified that she entered labor prematurely
with Bacchus and, when everything around them began to bum, actually lost her
life": Gründliches Mythologisches Lexikon, 2d ed. (Leipzig, 1770; rptd.
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), cols. 2184 2186. I have
harmonized the differences between the Greek and Latin names, except in
quotations, so as not to make the discussion confusing.
22. G. von Rad and G. Kittel, "doxa," in Theological Dictionary of the New
Testament, vol. 2, pp. 235 258: The rendering of the Hebrew chabod by the
Greek doxa "initiated a linguistic change of far-reaching significance, redefining
the Greek term in the most radical manner imaginable" (p. 245 [translation
revised]). The author sees the change in the fact that the term for subjective
opinion becomes that of the "absolutely objective, i.e., the reality of God." A
longer-range examination, extending as far as gloria, will probably have to see it
the other way around.
23. Codex Theodosianus XVI, 1 2, quoted in Harnack, Marcion, pp. 366* 367*.
But in Decree XVI, 5, of A.D. 412, the heretics' groups of adherents are still
designated as "ecclesiae."
24. H. Denzinger and J. Umberg, Enchiridion Symbolorum (Freiburg: Herder,
1922), no. 225: Second Council of Constantinople, 553.
A.D.

25. M. Elze, "Der Begriff des Dogmas in der Alten Kirche," Zeitschrift fûr
Theologie und Kirche 61 (1964): 421 438.
26. Nietzsche, "Vorarbeiten zu einer Schrift über den Philosophen" (1872), in
Werke (Musarion ed.), vol. 6, p. 31.
27. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III, 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6,
pp. 31 33.
28. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte I, 1; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, p.
80.
29. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III, 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6,
pp. 44 45.
30. Nietzsche, "Vorarbeiten zu einer Schrift über den Philosophen," in Werke
(Musarion ed.), vol. 6, p. 29.
31. William of Ockham, Commentary on the Sentences I q.42 F: "Deus potest
facere per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora." Seen from this point of view,
ubiquity is the purest expression of the dogmatic principle. Ockham considers
the question whether God could also execute all his effects immediately [i.e.,
without the help of intervening 'secondary causes'] to be rationally undecidable,
that is, a question whose answer is not derivable from the concept of the potentia
absoluta. On the importance of this principle in excluding a medieval
geocentrism, see H. Blumenberg, Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt
(Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 149 199.
32. Franz Rosenzweig to Gertrud Oppenheim, May 80, 1917, in Briefe, ed. E.
Rosenzweig (Berlin: Schocken, 1935), p. 210.
33. Anselm of Canterbury, Cur deus homo Book I, chapter 16, ed. F. S. Schmitt
(Munich: Kösel, 1956), p. 50.
34. D. Henrich, Der ontologische Gottesbeweis. Sein Problem und seine
Geschichte in der Neuzeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960).
35. Ariselm, Cur deus homo, "Praefatio": "Ac necesse esse ut hoc fiat de homine
propter quod factus est, sed non nisi pere hominem-deum; atque ex necessitate
omnia quae de Christo credimus fieri oportere." The principle of equivalence
that is involved in his doctrine of the

 Page 655

"humana restauratio" is explicitly understood as aesthetic symmetry too, as

the "inenarrabilis nostrae redemptionis pulchritudo" (I,3). The marked
aesthetic component, in the metaphors as well, is a constitutive contribution
to the defense of the mythical quality of the great model that Anselm sets
against the questions asked by Boso in the dialogue, questions that could be
reduced to the brief formula: Why so circumstantial, when it could also be
done simply? Or: "Quomodo ergo indigebat deus, ut ad vincendum diabolum
de caelo descenderet?" (I,6). That mythical document of the Letter to the
Colossians (2:14), which was nullified by Christ's death, no longer means the
contract transferring the title to man to the diabolus, as something he gained
as a result of Original Sin, but rather God's decree concerning the sinner:
''Decretum enim illud non erst diaboli, sed dei" (I,7). So tersely can Anselm
declare his reoccupation of the fundamental myth.
36. M. Dibelius, "Paulus auf dem Areopag," Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger
Akademie der Wissenschaften (Phil.-hist. Kl.), 1938 1939, no. 2.
37. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem I,9; and Ad nationes II,9, 3 4: "Sed et
Romanorum deos Varro trifariam disposuit (in certos), incertos et electos.
Tantam vanitatem! Quid enim erat illis cum incertis, si certos habebant? Nisi si
Attico stupore recipere voluerunt: ham et Athenis ara est incripta: 'ignotis deis.'
Colit ergo quis, quod ignorat?" Pausanias records the plural as being used on
altars to unknown gods in the harbor of Phaleron (Graeciae descriptio I 1,4) and
in Olympia (V 14,8), and Minucius Felix in Rome as well (Octavius VI 2). But
what is amazing is that Hieronymus explicitly corrects Acts and suggests that
Paul made the change to suit his own dogmatic needs. "Inscriptio autem arae non
ita erat, ut Paulus asseruit 'ignoto deo,' sed ira: 'Diis Asiae et Europae et Africae,
diis ignotis et peregrinis.' Verum quia Paulus non pluribus diis indigebat ignotis,
sed uno tantum ignoto deo, singulari verbo usus est": Ad Titum I 12. On the
antiquity of this inscription, see O. Weinreich, De dis ignotis (Halle, 1914), p.
27. On the text from Tertullian, see M. Haidenthaller (ed. and trans.), Tertullians
Zweites Buch 'Ad nationes' und 'De Testimonio Animae' (Paderborn, 1942).
38. F. Th. Vischer, Ausgewählte Werke (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1918),
vol. 3, p. 23. The quotation is, to a certain extent, typical of nineteenth-century
German autobiographical sketches.
39. I have proposed this reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans 5:12, in
Philosophische Rundschau 2 (1955): 129.
40. Hippolytus, Refutatio omnium haeresium VII, 21, Lines 7 9, in his Werke,
vol. 3 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916), p. 197. [The author cites a version given by W.
Völker, Quellen zur Geschichte der christlichen Gnosis (Tübingen: Mohr,
1932), p. 47, which differs from this one in unimportant respects. My translation
is based on that in Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, trans. J. H. MacMahon
(Edinburgh, 1868), p. 275.]
41. E. Stauffer, "theos," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed.
Kittel, vol. 3, p. 110. The basis of this idea could be the rabbinical exegesis of
the two biblical names for God, "Elohim" (of which the root El means "power")
being interpreted as relating to justice and "Jahwe" as relating to God's mercy:
ibid., p. 90 n. 113.

Chapter 4
1. Fontenelle, L'Origine des Fables (1724), ed. J. R. Carré (Paris: Alcan, 1932),
p. 35: "La religion et le bon sens nous ont désabusés des fables des Grecs; mais
alles se maintiennent encore parmis nous par le moyen de la poésie et de la
peinture, aux-quelles il semble qu'elles aient trouvé le secret de se rendre
nécessaires." If one wanted to designate the date of the most resolute
contradiction of Fontenelle's treatise on the myths, one would have to name,
besides Vico's almost simultaneous Scienza nuova, above all Herder's travel
journal of 1769: "Altogether

 Page 656

one cannot do too much to destroy what is merely fabulous in mythology; in

that light, rattled off as superstition, falsehood, prejudice, it is intolerable. But
as poetry, as art, as a people's mode of thought, as a phenomenon of the
human spirit: there it is great, divine, instructive!" To this, to be sure, we must
still add Schiller's opposition to Herder's preference for the Nordic mythology
over the Hellenic, an opposition that points to the "predominance of prose in
our condition, taken as a whole," and demands "strictest separation" for the
poetic spirit, and as a prerequisite for this that ''it forms its own world, and
remains, with the aid of the Greek myths, the relative of a distant, foreign and
ideal age": Schiller to Herder, November 4, 1795.
2. One who came very close to the idea of 'reoccupation' is J. R. Carré, in La
Philosophie de Fontenelle ou le Sourire de la Raison (Paris: Alcan, 1932), p.
674: "Fontenelle a compris que les préjugés, détruits par la critique, renaissent
irrésistiblement, si rien ne vient remplir la place, assurer la fonction vitale, qui
était la leur, en dépit de leur stupidité. Il s'est donc employé de son mieux à
substituer un équivalent de sa façon à toutes les idées qu'il prétendait ruiner."
3. Fontenelle, L'Histoire des Oracles (1686), ed. L. Maigron (Paris: Cornély,
1908), pp. f-g.
4. Goethe to Riemer, beginning of August 1809, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22,
p. 566.
5. Schiller to Goethe, October 28, 1794, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. K. R.
Mandelkow (Hamburg: Wegner, 1965 1969), vol. 1, p. 172 [henceforth cited as
Briefe an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow]. Schiller adds: "By this logic he could really
have declared his divinity, as we recently expected him to do."
6. Schopenhauer, Handschriftlicher Nachlass, ed. A. Höbscher (Frankfurt: W.
Kramer, 1966- ), vol. 2, p. 60 [henceforth cited as Handschriftlicher Nachlass].
7. Ibid., p. 85.
8. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 209.
9. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931 1934, ed. G. Stuhlmann (New York: Swallow
Press and Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 272.
10. Anthropologie Structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958). In English: Structural
Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books,
1963), pp. 213 215. The fundamental idea that what is important about myth is
neither the construction of an 'original myth' nor a comparison between myths,
but rather the "sum total of the various versions and interpretations" of a myth,
was expressed by Kurt von Fritz in his essay, "Pandora, Prometheus, and the
Myth of the Ages," Review of Religion 11 (1946 1947): 227 260 (the quote is
from p. 258).
11. Weimarisches Hoftheater (1802), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 14, pp. 66 67.
12. Regeln für den Schauspieler (1803), section 27; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 14,
p. 80.
13. Michel Butor, Votre Faust, in Let Cahiers du Centre d'Études et de
Recherches Marxistes, no. 62 (1968): (g).
14. A. W. Schlegel to A. Hayward, December 31, 1832. The story is discussed
in E. R. Curtius, "Goethe's Aktenführung," Neue Rundschau (1951): 110 111,
where the Sturm und Drang gesture of the scene is domesticated in the
perspective of his later technique of preserving his papers.
15. Lessing im Gespräch, ed. R. Daunicht (Munich: Fink, 1971), no. 623.
16. Ibid., no. 668.

 Page 657

17. Heine to Goethe, Weimar, October 1, 1824, in Briefe an Goethe, ed.

Mandelkow, vol. 2, p. 399.
18. Heine to Rudolf Christiani, Göttingen, May 16, 1825, in Briefe, ed. F. Hirth
(Mainz: Kupferberg, 1950 1951), vol. 1, p. 210. In the letter to Moses Moser of
July 1, 1825, Heine defines the contrast of Goethe's nature to his own as that of a
"man of the world" [Lebemensch] to an "enthusiast" [Schwärmer]: Briefe, ed.
Hirth, vol. 1, pp. 216 217. In 1836, at the end of the first part of the Romantische
Schule, Heine will confess that it was envy that set him against Goethe.
19. Gespräche mit Heine, ed. H. H. Houben (Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening,
1926), pp. 90 91.
20. Ibid., pp. 74 75.
21. Goethe, Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 156.
22. Lessing, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1777 1780), sections
90 100, in Lessing' s Theological Writings, sel. and trans. H. Chadwick (London:
A. & C. Black, 1956), pp. 97 98.
23. H. R. Jauss, "Goethes und Valérys 'Faust': Zur Hermeneutik von Frage und
Antwort," Comparative Literature 28 (1976): 201 232. To Jauss's thesis that the
monologue of the garden scenewith its serial antitheses to the Cogitois stylized
after Descartes's dream, we should append what Valéry wrote to Gide as early as
August 25, 1894. "J'ai relu Le Discours de la Méthode tantôt, c'est bien le roman
moderne, comme il pourrait être fait": André GidePaul Valéry. Correspondance,
1890 1942 (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 213.
24. Schopenhauer, Handschriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1, p. 479from 1817.
25. Feuerbach, Todesgedanken, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. W. Bolin and F. Jodl
(Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 1960 1964), vol. 1, pp. 47 48.
26. "Immortality and the Modern Temper" (The Ingersoll Lecture, 1961),
Harvard Theological Review 55 (1962): 1 20; quotations are from pp. 13, 14, 15,
and 20 [forms of verbs slightly altered in the last two cases to fit the new
context]. German version in Organismus und Freiheit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1973), pp. 331 338.
27. The exchange of letters between Bultmann and Jonas appears in H. Jonas,
Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), pp.
68 72.
28. Schopenhauer, Handschriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1, p. 440.
29. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Part IV, section 63, trans. R. B.
Haldane and J. Kemp (London, 1891), pp. 459 460.
30. "Über Tod, Unsterblichkeit, Fortdauer. Ein Gespräch mit Siegfried Unseld,"
in E. Bloch, Tendenz-Latenz-Utopie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), pp. 308 336.
31. Schopenhauer, Handschriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1, p. 479.

Part III
Chapter 3
1. Tertullian, Apologeticum 18, 2.
2. Lactantius, Diviniae Institutiones II 9, 25.

 Page 658

3. Ibid. II 10, 6 7.
4. Ibid.: "Nullas enim literas veritatis attegerant . . . ut veritas a vulgo solet variis
sermonibus dissipata corrumpi, nullo non addente aliquid ad id, quod audierat."
5. Ibid.: " . . . de diis autem ilium non fuisse, poena eius in Caucaso monte
declarat."
6. Divinae Institutiones II 1, 15.
7. Lactantius, De ira dei 7, 5.
8. Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones II 10, 10 11: "Si ergo cataclysmus ideo
factus est, ut malitia, quae per nimiam multitudinem increverat, perderetur:
quomodo fictor hominis Prometheus fuit? cuius filium Deucalionem iidem ipsi
(sc. poetae scriptoresque) ob iustitiam solum esse dicunt servatum."
9. Ibid. II 10, 12: " . . . ab eoque natam primo artem et statuas et simulacra
fingendi. . . . "
10. Lactantius, Epitome Divinarum Institutionum XX 11 12.
11. Ibid. XX 15: "Sic illecti pulchritudine, ac verae maiestatis obliti, insensibilia
sentientes, irrationabilia rationabiles, exanima viventes colenda sibi ac
veneranda duxerunt." The Enlightenment produced a counterthesis to this.
According to it, the images of the gods led to the impoverishment of myth's
faculty of imagination, since their excessive definiteness made the god identical
with his image: Wieland, Agathodämon (1799) IV, 4.
12. Giordano Bruno, Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo I; Opere italiane, ed. P.
deLagarde (Göttingen, 1888), p. 582.
13. E. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy,
trans. M. Domandi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), p.
95. Original: Individuum und Cosmos in der Philosophic der Renaissance, 2d
ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), p. 101. The passage
from Boccaccio, De geneologia deorum IV 4, as given there: "Verum qui natura
producti sunt rudes et ignari veniunt, immo ni instruantur, lutei agrestes et
beluae. Circa quos secundus Prometheus insurgit, id est doctus homo et eos
tanquam lapideos suscipiens quasi de novo creat, docet et instruit et
demonstrationibus suis ex naturalibus hominibus civiles facit moribus, scientia
et virtute insignes, adeo ut liquide pateat alios produxisse naturam et alios
reformasse doctrinam." On this passage see A. Buck, "Über einige Deutungen
des Prometheus-Mythos in der Literature der Renaissance," in Romanica:
Festschrift für Gerhard Rohlfs, ed. H. Lausberg and H. Weinrich (Halle:
Niemeyer, 1958), pp. 86 96. Both interpreters overlook the fact that with his
doubled Prometheus, Boccaccio links up with Ovid's double creation of man, by
allegorizing the picking up of stones by Deucalion and Pyrrha after the great
flood as pointing to the second Prometheus. What else could the ''eos tanquam
lapideos suscipiens" mean? In Ovid the softening of the stones and their taking
on form was also the turning point: " . . . ponere duritiem coepere suumque
rigorem / mollirique mora mollitaque ducere formam": Metamorphoses I
400 403. All that remains of this origin is "inde genus durum sumus. . . . "
14. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6,
pp. 97 98.
15. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte V; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, p.
352.
16. Marsilio Ficino, Epistolarium II n. 1: Quaestiones quinque de mente; Opera
(Basel, 1576), vol. 1, p. 678: "Contra naturam ipsam rationemque principii est,
ab alio semper principio ad aliud ascendere sine principio. Contra rationem finis
est a fine deinceps in finem descendere sine fine."
17. Ficino, In Protagoram Epitome; Opera, vol. 2, p. 1298: "Ab his igitur
omnibus Prometheus rationalis animae gubernator in hominem traiecit artis
industriam. Quoniam vero divinum id

 Page 659

extitit donum, statim ob ipsam cum superis cognationem, horn veneratus est
Deum ante quem loqueretur, vel artes aliquas exerceret; quippe cure divinum
munus ob mirificam eius potentiam prius erigat in divina, quam porrigat per
humana. Prometheum veto ob id munus dolore affectum, significat
daemonicum ipsum curatorem nostrum, in quo et affectus esse possunt,
misericordia quadam erga nos affici, considerantem nos ob ipsum rationis
munus ab eo vel datum, vel potius excitatum, tanto miserabiliorem vitam in
terris quam bestias agere, quanto magis sollicitam atque explebilem . . .
Paenitet me fecisse hominem."
18. Loc. cit.: "Quod autem traditur Prometheum civilem virtutem saluti
hominum penitus necessariam largiri non potuisse, propterea quod virtus
eiusmodi penes Iovem sit, quo Prometheo non licet ascendere, ea ratione
intelligendum est, quia civilis virtutis officium est non solum rebus humanis, sed
etiam artibus imperare, singulasque cure singulis ordinate, cunctas denique in
communem omnium formam dirigere."
19. Plotinus, Enneads IV 3, 14.
20. Ficino's translation is reprinted in F. Creuzer and G. H. Moser's edition of
the Enneads (Paris: 1855), p. 208: "Ligatus autem eat formator ille, quoniam
opus suum quodammodo videtur attingere: sed ejusmodi vinculum fit
extrinsecus, et ab Hercule solvitur: quoniam ei facultas inest, per quam etiam
quodammodo sit solutus." Noteworthy is the importance that the metaphor of
touch, which elsewhere belongs to the mystical experience of the highest One, is
given here as a mode of experience directed toward the other extreme side, that
of the hyle * [matter].
21. Erasmus, Epistolae, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), vol. l,
pp. 268ff.
22. Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis sctentiarum III 4; Works, ed. J. Spedding,
R. L Ellis, and D. D. Heath (London, 1857 1874), vol. 1, p. 552 (henceforth
cited as Works): "Certe Astronomia talem offert humano intellectui victimam
qualem Prometheus olim, cum fraudem Jovi fecit." English version: vol. 4, pp.
347 348.
23. Bacon, De dignitate III 4; Works, vol. 1, p. 553: "Eae autem ostendunt
quomodo haec omnia ingeniose concinnari et extricari possint, non quomodo
vere in natura subsistere; et motus tantum apparentes, et machinam ipsorum
fictitiam et ad placitum dispositam, non causas ipsas et veritatem rerum
indicant."
24. Bacon, De dignitate V 2; Works, vol, 1, p. 618: " . . . Prometheum ad ignis
invenionem . . . casu in illud incidisse, etque (ut aiunt) furtum Jovi fecisse." A
Prometheus of the new Indies, of America, would have had to discover fire in a
different way from that of the European Prometheus, because flint is not so
plentiful there: Cogitata et visa, in Work, vol. 3, p. 614.
25. Bacon, De sapientia veterum XXVI; Works, vol. 6, pp. 668 676.
26. Hobbes, De cive 10, 3 4. A different construction of the story, dominated by
the figure of the eagle of concern for the future, appears in Leviathan I 12.
27. J. Brucker, Kurtze Fragen aus der Philosophischen Historic (Ulm,
1731 1736) 1 2 c. 1 q. 4 (paragraphs 227 229).

Chapter 4
1. F. Fellmann, Das Vico-Axiom: Der Mensch macht die Geschichte
(Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1976), pp. 53 82.
2. Vico, Scienza Nuova (1744) II 1, 2.

 Page 660

3. Ibid. II 3, 1.
4. Ibid. II 4, 1.
5. Plutarch, De capienda ex inimicis utilitate, in Moralia VI, 86 EF; ed. H.
Gärtner, vol. 1, p. 173. The thesis of the treatise contains a roundabout teleology:
Not everything in the world is friendly to man, but he knows how to make use
even of what is unfriendly.
6. Wieland, Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1857), vol. 19, pp. 203 239.
7. H. Blumenberg, "Der Start des Protophilosophen. Zur Komik der reinen
Theorie, anhand ether Rezeptionsgeschichte der Thales-Anekdote," in W.
Preisendanz and R. Warning (eds.), Das Komische, Poetik und Hermeneutik 7
(Munich: Fink, 1976), pp. 11 64.
8. Wieland, Göttergespräche XII; Ausgewählte Werke, ed. F. Beissner (Munich:
Winkler, 1964 1965), vol. 3, pp. 727 741.
9. Herder, Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877 1913), vol.
28, p. 563.
10. Herder, Der entfesselte Prometheus. Scenen, first published in Adrastea
(1802) IV, 1; Sämtliche Werke, ed. Suphan, vol. 28, pp. 329 368; the divergent
draft is on pp. 352ff.

Part IV
Chapter 1
1. "Josef Haydns Schöpfung. Aufgeführt an dessen Geburtstage den 31. März
1826," in Über Kunst und Altertum. Fünften Bandes drittes Heft 1826, in Werke,
ed. Beutler, vol. 14, pp. 135 136.
2. To Ernst Theodor Langer, January 17, 1769, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p.
113.
3. To Langer, November 24, 1768, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 108.
4. Georg Forster to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, December 1778, in A. Leitzmann,
Georg und Therese Forster und die Brüder Humboldt (Bonn: Rührscheid, 1936),
pp. 194 195.
5. Briefe an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow, vol. 1, p. 41.
6. To Jacobi, about the first half of April 1775, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p.
265.
7. Jacobi to Goethe, December 13, 1785, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow,
vol. 1, p. 89.
8. It was Wieland who used the event as a short example of the historical
criticism of attested events. He was not present when the book was punished, he
writes to Sophie La Roche, but in Weimar he immediately heard so many
detailed reports from people who had not been there either that a few days later
when he went for a walk in the forest near the Ettersburg he was on the lookout
for traces of the deed. "I finally caught sight of a booklet bound in blue paper
that was nailed to an oak tree, pretty much as people are accustomed to nail birds
of prey to the great door of a tenant farm or a gentleman's country house. What
kind of a booklet it might be, no one wanted to tell me; they left it to the acuity
of my telescope or my intellect to find it out for myself." Up to this point
everything is directed at solid verification and at confirmation by seeing for
oneself. But now Wieland takes a turning that is worthy of the critical historian
and that one may suspect contains one of the Enlightener's side glances

 Page 661

at the one document on which his distrust focuses: "If I say, now, that I
conjectured that it was Woldemar's letters, I would say by that as much as
nothing, because conjecture in such matters is nothing; I can say nothing for
certain, because I could not see what sort of book it was." To Sophie La
Roche, September 21, 1779, in Aus F. H. Jacobis Nachlass. Ungedruckte
Briefe von und an Jacobi, ed. R. Zoeppritz (Leipzig, 1889), vol. 2, pp.
175 176.
9. Goethe to Lavater, May 7, 1781, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 587.
10. Jacobi to Goethe, September 15, 1779, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow,
vol. 1, p. 63. Johanna Schlosser reports to Jacobi that Goethe told her that "he
simply could not bear what one might call the odor of this book (he knew no
other way to express what he meant)." To Jacobi, October 31, 1779, in Goethe
als Persönlichkeit, ed. H. Amelung (Munich: Müller, 1914 1925), vol. 1, p. 388.
Jacobi's Eduard Allwill (1775), though it grew out of the impression made on
Jacobi by his first encounter with Goethe, had already challenged him by
criticizing the Sturm und Drang cult of genius. Since that time their
correspondence had broken off, and it is evident that Goethe's action, in
mishandling Woldemar in the summer of 1779, was not a bolt from the blue.
11. Lessing, Gesammelte Werke, ed. P. Rilla (Berlin: Aufbau, 1954 1958), vol.
8, p. 649.
12. Ibid., vol. 9, p. 862.
13. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 616.
14. Goethe to Charlotte von Stein, February 20, 1781, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol.
18, p. 570.
15. Lessing im Gospräch, ed. R. Daunicht (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 345 346.
16. Aus F. H. Jacobis Nachlass, ed. Zoeppritz, vol. 1, pp. 66 67.
17. Lessing im Gespräch, ed. Daunicht, p. 543. Dilthey, in his essay on
Schleiermacher, in 1859, already designated the date of the dispute about
Lessing's final truth as the "visible point of departure of a powerful
philosophical change," and in doing so alluded once again to the
Enlightenment's metaphor of light. "In the bright day of critical rationalism the
shadow of Spinoza, the great pantheist, began to circulate": Dilthey, Gesammelte
Schriften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1914- ), vol. 15, pp. 22 23.
18. An die Freunde Lessings (Berlin, 1786), in Heinrich Scholz (ed.), Die
Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn
(Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1916), p. 285.
19. "Erinnerungen an Herrn Jacobi," an addition to Mendelssohn's letter to
Jacobi of August 1, 1784, in Scholz (ed.), Die Hauptschriften, pp, 117 118.
20. Kästner to Nicolai, October 22, 1786, in A. G. Kästner, Briefe aus sechs
Jahrzehnten (Berlin: B. Behr, 1912), pp. 154 155.
21. Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 68 (1786), second part, in Scholz (ed.), Die
Hauptschriften, p. LXXXII.
22. F. Stolberg, "Die Dichterlinge," in Deutsches Museum (Leipzig, 1783), pt. 3,
p. 195; Lessing im Gespräch, ed. Daunicht, p. 542.
23. An die Freunde Lessings, in Scholz (ed.), Die Hauptschriften, p. 299.
24. F. H. Jacobi, Werke, ed. F. Roth and F. Köppen (Leipzig, 1812 1825), vol. 4,
pt. 2, p. 215.
25. Jacobi to Goethe, December 28, 1812, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow,
vol. 2, pp. 131 132.

 Page 662

26. Biographische Einzelheiten, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 12, p. 634. But
Goethe writes to Jacobi's niece, Auguste Jacobi, in 1824, that "around your
name . . . the most beautiful and most important memories of my life gather":
Werke, vol. 21, p. 593.
27. Goethe, Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 376.
28. Heinrich Meyer, Goethe. Das Leben im Werk (Stuttgart: Günther, 1967), p.
531.
29. Voss und Stolberg, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 12, p. 647. Johann Heinrich
Voss's "Wie ward Fritz Stolberg ein Unfreier?" [How did Fritz Stolberg become
an unfree person?] had appeared in 1819 in the third issue of Sophronizon.
30. H. Meyer, Goethe, p. 175.
31. To Zelter, May 11, 1820, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 21, p. 393. Word of this
"poetical work gone astray" first came from a doctor in Revel [now Tallin,
capital of Estonia], Bernhard Gottlob Wettersrand, in June 1819; the letter had
been conveyed by the Berlin Academy member, Thomas Johann Seebeck, to
Goethe, who at first only conjectured: "It can only be two actsthe 'Prometheus'
monologue, which through Jacobi's imprudence caused such an uproar, was
actually part of this, but cannot be contained in the manuscript that was found
among Lenz's things." To Seebeck, June 5, 1819, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 21,
p. 336. When he writes to Seebeck again he already has the fragment in his
hands, but mentions it only quite incidentally, at the end of the long letter: ''The
'Prometheus' makes a sufficiently peculiar impression; I hardly dare to let it be
printed, its sentiments are so modern sans-culottish." To Seebeck, December 30,
1819, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 21, p. 372. When in 1822, his secretary,
Kräuter, reorganizes the ParalipomenaGoethe's tag for material kept under lock
and keyand makes up a "Repertorium über die Goethesche Repositur" [Index to
Goethe's files], we find noted, among rubrics such as Occasionals, Politics,
Erotica, Priapeia, lnvectiven, and Moralia, also "Prometheus (doppelt)"
[Prometheus (two)]. Goethes Werke (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1887 1919),
Abtheilung III, II, vol. 8, pp. 371 372.
32. Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen in Schilderungen aus K. A. Böttigers
handschriftlichem Nachlass, ed. K. W. Böttiger (Leipzig, 1838; rptd. Frankfurt:
Athenäum, 1972], vol. 1, pp. 51ff. Lichtenberg's letter to Ramberg is in Schriften
und Briefe, ed. W. Promies (Munich: Hanser, 1972 ), vol. 4, pp. 678 680.
33. Goethe to Charlotte von Stein, April 6, 1782, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18,
p. 653.
34. Lichtenberg to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, February 6, 1793, in Schriften und
Briefe, ed. Promies, vol. 4, pp. 842 843.
35. To Jacobi, January 12, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 834.
36. To Charlotte von Stein, September 11, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18,
p. 871.
37. To Jacobi, September 26, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 875.
38. Scholz (ed.), Die Hauptschriften, Notes, p. 12*.
39. H. Blumenberg, "Approccio antropologico all'attualità della retorica," Il
Verri. Rivista di Letteratura 35/36 (1971): 49 72; also available as
"Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik," in H.
Blumenberg, Wirklichkeiten in denen wit leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), pp.
104 136.

Chapter 2
1. Bettina von Arnim, Goethes Briefwectsel mit einem Kinde (Berlin, 1835).
This is not subject to Bettina's wish-possessed untrnthfulness about Goethe,
which should have reached its zenith

 Page 663

in her avowal to Varnhagen: "And he did it! that's just what he did!":
Varnhagen von Ense, entry for July 10, 1857, Tagebücher, ed. L. Assing
(Leipzig: Brockhaus 1861 1905), vol. 13, pp. 418 419. [Translator's note:
Bettina was responding to Varnhagen's question about what people would
have thought if Goethe had "responded to a young maiden's passionate
affection for him, had taken advantage of it, had returned her caresses. . . . "]
But Goethe himself did not entirely trust his mother's delight in inventing
stories, either. On October 25, 1810, he writes to Bettina: "Now you have
spent a fine time with my dear mother, you have repeatedly heard her fairy
tales and anecdotes, and you carry and protect everything in your fresh, vivid
memory." In Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 621.
2. To Eckermann, May 2, 1824, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 115.
3. To Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, January 6, 1813, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19,
p. 689. More familiar is the short formulation in Maxims and Reflections, no.
807. How little one should picture this as a list of attitudes that exist side by side
can be seen from the confession in Dichtung und Wahrheit [ed. Scheibe, vol. 1,
p. 527] that "with my character and my way of thinking, one tendency always
swallowed up and repelled all others."
4. Labores Juveniles: Colloquium Pater et Filius, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 15,
pp. 20 27.
5. If my assumption is correct, that the father is giving his authentic recollection
of the child's answer, then the son translated his own dictum: "Cogito mecum et
opto, ut iste haud prius, quam cum mundi ipsius interitu universali de loco suo
moveatur." The keystone recurs as a metaphor, "the keystone to man," in
Goethe's communication to Herder of his discovery of the "os intermaxillare":
March 27, 1784, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 761.
6. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, November 13, 1823; Werke, ed. Beutler,
vol. 24, pp. 69 71. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff reports a case of
seismic telepathy in his Erinnerungen 1848 1914 (Leipzig: Koehler, n.d.;
foreword dated 1915), p. 152: The astronomer Schmidt was awakened from
sleep by extremely gentle vibrations of the earth, which he noted down and
compared with the recorded data.
7. H. Beck, Alexander von Humboldt (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1959 1961), vol. 1,
pp. 23 24, 41 42; vol. 2, pp. 247 248. Ludwig Feuerbach evaluated the outcome
of the long dispute, in 1839, entirely from the perspective of Vulcanism's
aesthetic "nobility": "What a shame that we could not be present at the spectacle;
but if we had been there, our sensorium would certainly have been shocked in an
extremely unharmonious and extraordinary manner. Why do you demand of the
image what the original cannot provide?" Christian Kapp und seine
Literarischen Leistungen, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. W. Bolin and F. Jodl
(Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1960 1964), vol. 2, pp. 153ff.
8. To Charlotte von Stein, November 7, 1780, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p.
549.
9. Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen aus K. A. Böttigers handschriftlichem
Nachlass, ed. K. W. Böttiger (Leipzig, 1838; rptd. Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972),
vol. 1, p. 22. Böttiger sees the granite cult merely as a fad, which had arisen
from Goethe's renewed interest in the mining in Ilmenauone of the "most
ridiculous 'genius' periods" in the whole of Sturm und Drang: "There man was
nothing whatever, and stone was everything."
10. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 3, chapter 15, ed. Scheibe, p. 526.
11. In Werther, too, there is an argument that borders closely on Spinoza's
perseveratio: "No, Lotte, nohow can I perish, how can you perish; after all, we
exist!" But the abstract principle of rationality does not stand alone: "'Perish'!
What does it mean? It is just another wordan empty sound, without feeling for
my heart": Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 4, p. 373. In the second version, dating from
1783 1786, this remained unchanged, with the exception of punctuation: Werke,
vol. 4, p. 502.

 Page 664

12. To Lavater, June 22, 1781, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 601.
13. To Karl August, November 26, 1784, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 815.
14. Briefe an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow, vol. 1, p. 107.
15. Des Epimenides Erwachen II, 3; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 6, p. 468.
16. To Karl yon Knebel, October 25, 1788, in Werke, ed. Bentler, vol. 19, p.
124.
17. Tag- und Jahreshefte (1789), in Werke, ed. Bender, vol. 11, p. 622.
18. H. Meyer, Goethe. Dos leben im Werk (Stuttgart: Günther, 1967), p. 330.
19. "Aus meinem Leben. Fragmentarisches," in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 12, p.
623.
20. To Riemer, July 29, 1810, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 597.
21. Der Gross-Cophta (1791), IV, 8; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 6, p. 650.
22. Tag- und Jahreshefte (1793), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, p. 631. On
Goethe's shipwreck metaphors, see H. Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zusehauer.
Paradigms ether Daseinsmetapher, suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 289
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 20 21, 47 57.
23. Die natürliche Tochter V, 7; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 6, pp. 401 402.
24. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book III, chapter 14, ed. Scheibe, p. 505.
25. To Zelter, December 26, 1806, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 506.
Connected with Epimenides is the more daring self-comparison with Epicurus's
gods, again to Zelter (December 16, 1817, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 21, p.
254): He foresaw and guessed in good time, he says after the Wartburgfest;
"indeed [I foresaw] what everyone might have done if the affair turned out
badly." That justifies his dispassionate attitude: "And that is why I have
enveloped myself, like the Epicurean gods, in a still cloudmay I be able to gather
it ever thicker and more inaccessibly around me."
26. To Zelter, August 30, 1807, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 525.
27. End of April 1780, Tagebücher, ed. E. Beutler (Zurich: Artemis, 1964), p.
101.
28. To Riemer, February 1, 1808, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 481 482.
29. J. Janssen, Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg (Freiburg, 1877), vol. 1, pp. 70 71:
"Goethe is not only a genius, he also has a truly good heart, but a horror seized
me when on one of the last days of my stay in Weimar he spoke to me of giant
spirits who do not bow down even to the eternally revealed truths." Stolberg
demonized Goethe. In 1780 he published for the first time the quatrain Goethe
had entrusted to his sister Auguste in a letter on July 17, 1777, and which since
then every educated person has known as beginning: "Alles geben Götter, die
unendlichen, / ihren Lieblingen ganz . . . " ["To those whom they love, the gods
who are infinite give all things wholly . . . " in Goethe: Selected Verse, trans.
David Luke (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 54]. Since the manuscript,
which was believed to have been lost, has been rediscovered in the Yale Library,
we know that Stolberg read the present tense into it; the actual text reads: ''Alles
gaben Götter . . . " [The gods gave everything]: W. Vulpius, in Jahrbuch der
Goethe-Gesellschaft 29 (1967): 280 281. Goethe is speaking of a mythical,
distant time.
30. Klopstock to Goethe, May 8, 1776, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow,
vol. 1, p. 58. Goethe to Klopstock, May 21, 1776, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18,
p. 325: "So not another word on

 Page 665

this subject!" Klopstock to Goethe, May 29, 1776, in Briefe an Goethe, ed.
Mandelkow, vol 1, p. 59: "Your failure to recognize the proof of my
friendship has been just as great as that friendship was."
31. Briefwechsel zwischen Klopstock und den Grafen Christian und Friedrich
Leopold zu Stolberg, ed. J. Behrens (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1964), pp.
189 190. Stolberg did not go to Weimar, where, according to Goethe's remark to
Auguste Stolberg on August 30, 1776, he "would have jaded himself with
courtliness."
32. Charlotte von Stein to Johann Georg Zimmermann, May 10, 1776, in Goethe
als Persönlichkeit, ed. H. Amelung (Munich: Müller, 1914 1925), vol. 1, pp.
164 165.
33. To Charlotte yon Stein, Torfhaus and Clausthal, December 10 and 11, 1777,
in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 383. To Johann Heinrich Merck, August 5,
1778, in Werke, vol. 18, pp. 399 400. To Charlotte, December 10, 1778, 2 , in P.M.

Werke, vol. 18, p. 409. On the historical precedent for and significance of
Goethe's ascent of the mountain, see H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 341 342. Original: Die
Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), pp. 336 338, or Der
Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde, suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 24
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 142 144.
34. To Charlotte yon Stein, Ostheim (vor der Rhön), September 21, 1780, in
Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 530. On this, see Meyer, Goethe, p. 263.
35. J. W. L. Gleim, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 110 111.
36. Wieland, "An Psyche":
. . . Und niemand fragte, wer ist denn der?
Wit fühlten beim ersten Blick, 's war Er!
. . . So hat sich nie in Gottes Welt
Ein Menschensohn uns dargestellt . . .

[And no one asked, who is that, anyway? We felt at first sight that it was he! . . .
In God's world, no son of man ever presented himself to us in such a way. . . .]

In Teutscher Merkur (January 1776); Wieland himself did not admit the poem
into his collected works. Goethe, for his part, was generous with apotheosis;
 thus, describing Gerstenberg's tragedy Ugolino (1768): It was "made with the
power of gods." This remark is in the immediate neighborhood of
"Prometheus": The letter that reports ita letter from the Danish diplomat
Schönborn to Gerstenberg (who was also a Danish civil servant), dated
October 11, 1773, from Frankfurtalso contains the information that Goethe is
working "with exceptional facility" on a drama entitled Prometheus, of which
he had read Schönborn two acts, in which there were "very fine passages,
drawn up from the depths of nature'': Werke, ed. Beutler, vol 22, pp. 39 40.
37. Von deutscher Baukunst (November 1772), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 13,
pp. 16 26.
38. "Zum Schäkespears Tag. October 14, 1771," in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 4,
pp. 122 126.
39. Heinrich Luden, Rückblicke in mein Leben (Jena, 1847; rptd. Berlin, 1916),
pp. 89ff.
40. To Johanna Fahlmer, beginning of May 1774, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22,
pp. 44 45.
41. Loose quarto page in the Strasbourg University Library, in Werke, ed.
Beutler, vol. 4, p. 988.
42. To J. C. kestner, mid-July 1773, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 201.

 Page 666

Chapter 3
1. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part VIII, section 244, in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 368.
Nietzsche saw in Napoleon one of the "greatest continuers of the Renaissance":
The Gay Scienee, Part V, section 362.
2. H. Meyer, Goethe. Das Leben im Werk (Stuttgart: Günther, 1967), p. 22.
3. Gespräche mit Eckermann, April 5, 1829; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp.
339 340.
4. Tagebuch Frédéric Jacob Sorets, January 18, 1830; Werke, ed. Beuder, vol.
23, p. 657: "Je lui ai dit qu'il s'y trouvait des passages de mémoires de
Talleyrand où il était question de lui et de son entrevue avec Napoléon, cela I'a
fait rougir."
5. August 8, 1822, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, p. 226.
6. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 560. To Zelter, too, he is content to indicate
vaguely, "The Emperor of France showed himself very well inclined toward
me": October 30, 1808, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol 19, p. 567. A little more is
allowed to show through by what he writes to Cotta: "I will readily admit that in
my life nothing higher and more gratifying could happen to me than to stand
before the French Emperor, and especially in the way that I did": December 2,
1808, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 572.
7. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 12, p. 635.
8. August 30, 1827, in Werke, ed. Beutier, vol. 23, p. 500.
9. Heine, Die Romantische Schule I; Sämtliche Schriften, ed. K. Briegleb
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968- ), vol. 3, p. 405.
10. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp. 205 206.
11. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 799. Even in his diary, Goethe notes an omen
relating to Napoleon. At the Napoleon celebration in Frankfurt, during the
fireworks the emperor's name had in the end been enveloped in a cloud of
smoke, so that it ceased to be visible, "which was received by the multitude as
an omen": entry from August 22, 1806, Tagebücher (Zurich: Artemis, 1964), p.
268.
12. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, pp. 170 171.
13. Ibid., vol. 24, pp. 429 431.
14. Ibid., p. 469.
15. Gespräche mit Eckermann, December 6, 1829; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24,
pp. 373 374.
16. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 802.
17. Gespräche mit Echermann, February 28, 1831; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol 24, p.
743.
18. Gespräche mit Eckermann, February 29, 1824; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24,
pp. 100 101.
19. Gespräche mit Eckermann, March 21, 1831; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol, 24, pp.
484 485.

 Page 667

20. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols; or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer,
sec. 48, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking,
1954), p. 553; Werke (Musarion ed.), vol. 17, p. 149.
21. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, sec. 49, pp. 552 554; Werke, vol. 17, pp.
149 150.
22. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp. 508 509.
23. Tagebücher, May 23, 1807.
24. Gespräche mit Eckermann, March 1832; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 510.
25. Goethe to F. Förster, August 4, 1831, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, p. 761.
26. E. M. Arndt, Erinnerungen aus dem äusseren Leben, ed. F. M. Kircheisen
(Munich, 1913), p. 193.
27. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 719.
28. Heine to Varnhagen, February 28, 1830, in Briefe, ed. F. Hirth (Mainz:
Kupferberg, 1950 1951), vol. 1, p. 426.
29. Friedrich von Müller, Erinnerungen aus den Kriegszeiten von 1806 1813
(Leipzig, 1911), pp. 172ff.
30. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 508 509.
31. Ibid., vol. 23, p. 531.
32. Johann Daniel Falk, Goethe aus näherem persönlichem Umgang dargestellt
(Leipzig, 1832); Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 512 513. Falk, too, had
attempted a Prometheus, in 1803.
33. When the woman who, before Goethe, had withstood the Corsican's gaze
died in 1830, Goethe felt as a result of this event a change in his own reality
among his contemporaries: "I seem mythical to myself, now that I, so alone, am
left." To Jenny von Pappenheim, February 14, 1830, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol.
23, p. 664.
34. Meyer, Goethe, p. 14. This most clearheaded of Goethe's biographers
describes the overall effect of his denial of legitimation to Christiane as follows:
"By doing this he himself brought himself into lasting oppositions, cut himself
off from society, disrupted domestic hospitality, imposed on his son a tragic and
destructive life, and yet scarcely gained anything by it, being no more productive
than before or afterward."
35. K. L. von Knebel, Literarischer Nachlass und Briefwechsel, ed. K. A.
Varnhagen von Ense and Th. Mundt (Leipzig, 1835 1836), vol. 1, p. XXIX.
36. Goethe als Persönlichkeit, ed. H. Amelung (Munich: Müller, 1914 1925),
vol. 1, p. 139.
37. Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen in Schilderungen aus K. A. Böttigers
handschriftlichem Nachlass, ed. K. W. Böttiger (Leipzig, 1838), vol. 1, pp. 51ff.
And: "In those days everyone had to dress in the Werther-style dress coat, which
the duke also wore, and for anyone who could not procure one, the duke had one
made. For Wieland alone, the duke himself made an exception": ibid., vol. 1, pp.
203 204.
38. Heinrich Voss to F. K. L. von Seckendorff, December 6, 1806, in Goethe als
Persönlichkeit, vol. 2, p. 72.

 Page 668

39. Goethe to Kestner, on the birth of his first son, May 11, 1774, in Werke, ed.
Beutler, vol. 18, p. 222.
40. Henriette von Knebel to Karl von Knebel, December 1, 1802, in K. L. von
Knebels Briefwechsel mit seiner Schwester Henriette, ed. H. Düntzer (Jena,
1858), pp. 157 158. Poetry becomes for Goethe the means more of avoiding than
of transforming the reality of daily burdens and bothers. [He said that] "He gets
rid of things by putting them into poems." To S. Boisserée, August 8, 1815.
41. Goethe's statement to Boisserée, August 8, 1815, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol.
22, pp. 814 815. When Eckermann finally wants to know to what passage in
Werther Napoleon's objections did in fact refer, Goethe first makes him guess,
and when he has done so, not unskillfully, makes him settle for the answer that
whether Napoleon meant this passage or another "was not something he thought
it good to divulge": January 2, 1824, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 546.
Heinrich Meyer concisely formulates the historian's skepticism about ever being
able to penetrate this confidentiality: "The only thing that seemed to me to be
really convincing in relation to Goethe's own assessment of this audience was
the fact that during his flight from Russia, Napoleon thought about Goethe; but
why he did so, then, we again do not know": Die Kunst des Erzählens (Bern:
Francke, 1972), p. 118.
42. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 727.
43. Friedrich von Müller, Erinnerungen aus den Kriegszeiten von 1806 1813,
pp. 172ff, Müller bases his account on Goethe's having "gradually
communicated the details (sic) of that conversation" to him, and having given
him, shortly before his death, what was "still a very laconic" written account. In
Goethe's own outline of 1824, Napoleon's utterance is located elsewhere, as a
greeting rather than something said after Goethe's departure: "The emperor
beckons to me to come forward. I remain standing at a suitable distance, in front
of him. After he had attentively looked at me, he said: 'Vous êtes un homme.' I
bow. . . . '' Since the emperor's question immediately follows"How old are
you?"the whole could also be an examination of his personal condition: Werke,
ed Beutler, vol. 12, p. 636. Müller hit the mark better here, even though not
everything in his account inspires confidence. What may the Corsican have said
when he justified his summons to the poet to come to Paris with the statement:
"There is a wider view of the world there!" [Dort gibt es grössere
Weltanschauung!]since he can scarcely have used this later so familiar and so
infamous foreign word, which Goethe was to invent (that is, to reconstruct,
under the influence of Romanticism, from Weltansicht, which he had preferred
since 1797) only in 1815? See A. Götze, "Weltanschauung," Euphorion 25
(1924).
44. Gespräche mit Eckermann, February 16, 1826; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol 24, p.
175. The remark cannot be reproduced in isolation without a slight alteration; it
follows immediately, word for word, in its context.
45. Tag- und Jahreshefte (1815), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, pp. 873 874.
46. Sulpiz Boisserée appends, in parentheses, to his notes of a conversation with
Goethe on August 8, 1815, about (among other things) the audience in Erfurt:
"Goethe seems not to have noticed, or not to want to notice, that all of this had
been planned to impress himas I interpret it." See E. Firmenich-Richartz, Die
Brüder Boisserée (Jena, 1916), pp. 400 410.
47. Gespräche mit Eckermann, December 7, 1823; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24,
p. 536.
48. Gespräche mit Eckermann, February 10, 1830; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24,
p. 392.
49. Karl August Varnhagen's account of a communication by Gersdorff, to his
wife Rahel on July 8, 1815, from Frankfurt, in Aus dem Nachlass Varnhagens
von Ense. Briefwechsel zwischen

 Page 669

Varnhagen und Rahel, ed. L. Assing (Leipzig, 1874 1875), vol. 4, pp.
188 189. From Varnhagen we also have a memorandum about an afternoon
and evening spent with Goethe on July 8, 1825. In a conversation that starts
from Varnhagen's Biographische Denkmale [Biographical monuments],
which had begun to appear in 1824, especially those dealing with the
commanders Derfflinger and Leopold von Anhalt-Dessau, whose business
was "real attacking," Goethe is reminded of his "words aimed at
characterizing" Napoleon; he responds, with a shrug of the shoulders, ''Yes,
that is an experiment I have attempted; we will have to see how it goes!":
Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 28, p. 393. What "words aimed at characterizing"
were being referred to remains uncertain. . . . Goethe says to Eckermann on
January 4, 1827, about Hugo's poem on Napoleon: "That is fine! Because the
image is true. . . . " To which Eckermann replies: "What I admire in the
French is that their poetry never abandons the solid ground of reality."
50. Tag- und Jahreshefte (1806), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, pp. 803 804.
51. Goethe to Riemer, March 6, 1826, in Jahrbuch Sammlung Kippenberg 4
(Leipzig, 1932), p. 44. That Napoleon had "einen jeden aufmerksam auf sich
gemacht" cannot, in the context, be read as an assertion that Napoleon promoted
himself. What is unmistakably meant is that each person was made attentive "to
himself."
52. Tag- und Jahreshefte (1807), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, p. 821. One of
the manuscripts has the divergent reading that that "mythological point" had
"always been live for me and had become a continually animated fixed idea": G.
Gräf, Goethe über seine Dichtungen (Frankfurt: Literarische Anstalt,
1901 1914), vol. 2, pt. 4, p. 50, n. 7. While the Almanac, which was called
Prometheus, becomes fused with his own Pandora, Goethe cites the latter, in its
turn, as Prometheus: ibid., items nos. 3657, 3659.
53. K. L. Fernow to Böttiger, January 7, 1807 in Goethe als Persönlichkeit, vol.
2, p. 77.
54. Goethe invented the name of Philerus's bride, "Epimeleia" ["Care," in
Greek], but not without referring to Herder's Prometheus scenes and his poem of
1787, "Das Kind der Sorge" [The child of care]. There, Herder takes "Care"
from a fable by Hyginus (Fabulae, no. 220): "Cura" is the creatrix of men, and
already associated with Prometheus by this counterpart relationship to him. On
the poem's prototype, see Jacob Bernays, "Herder und Hyginus," Rheinisches
Museum 15 (1860): 158 163; Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Berlin: W. Hertz,
1885), vol. 2, pp. 316 321. Lost in thoughtin other words, without any defiant-
demiurgic intentionCura forms a figure of clay, which Zeus, at her request,
brings to life, only to immediately lay claim to it; in a compromise, Care
receives the right to rule over men as long as they are alive. The allegory has no
background in myth. [The author discussed Hyginus's fable, and its reception, at
greater length in one of his "Glossen zu Fabeln," in Akzente, August 1981, pp.
340 344.]
55. On the metaphorics of the elements, see G. Diener, Pandora (Bad Homburg:
Gehlen, 1968), pp. 173 187. Fire and water threaten the solidity of the earth
equally; but the price of pure permanence would be equally pure sterility.
Reliablility and fertility are opposing poles; the investment of work in the earth
forces them together. In this doctrine of the elements the smith is an extreme
figure, because by means of the most volatile element he forces the most rigid
one into pliability, thus even surpassing the schema of agriculture.
56. To Boisserée, August 11, 1815, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 816.
57. To Eckermann, spring 1828, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 672.
58. Goethe did not live long enough to learn that the Rip Van Winkle of the
years of political earthquakes had in fact existed and that fate had found him
worthy of an even longer absence. According to the report of the Gazette des
Tribunaux of May 20, 1838, there had been proceedings against the Marquis de
Saint P. before the civil court of the Seine (First Chamber) "on charges of
disrespectfulness toward the Queen Marie-Antoinette." A grotesque
anachronism, because

 Page 670

the accused, since being declared incompetent in 1790, had disappeared into
one of those "maisons de santé" that were used by influential families in order
to protect culpable family members from prosecution on the pretext of their
mental infirmity. This young "philosophe" had executed the first act of
revolutionary rhetoric in 1787, when, during the welcoming of the queen at
the opera, he whistled, though this did not have the anticipated effect of
inspiring similar action by others. G. Lenôtre, who unearthed this incident
(Paris Revolutionnaire: Vieilles Maisons, Vieux Papiers, vol. 1 [Paris: Perrin,
1900), pp. 245 255), comments that "if he had produced his whistle two years
later, he would have been the people's idol." When he was (for form's sake)
brought to court, this marquis had "slept through" a half-century, because he
was not aware of any of the "changes'' that had taken place.
59. Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, June 17, 1936, in The Letters of Sigmund
Freud and Arnold Zweig (New York: Harcourt, 1970), p. 131. Original:
Briefwechsel (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1968), p. 141. Max Schur, Freud's last doctor,
who arranged the private lecture, describes how it came about in Sigmund
Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), p.
480.
60. Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), in Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 14, pp. 7 8; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, p. 53. Again
in An Autobiographical Study (1925), in Complete Psychological Works, vol. 20,
p. 60. Original: Selbstdarstellung, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, p. 86.
61. H. Lehnert, "Thomas Manns Vorstudien zur Josephstetralogie," Jahrbuch
der Schillergesellschaft 7 (1963): 479ff.
62. E. A. Ch. Wasianski, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren, ed. F.
Gross (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, 1912), p. 224.
63. Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, July 15, 1934, in The Letters of Sigmund
Freud and Arnold Zweig, p. 85; Briefwechsel, p. 96. This letter shows, above all,
that Freud did not pull the 'Joseph complex' out of his sleeve two years later.
Even if there were no historical evidence that Napoleon himself had hit upon the
Joseph prefiguration, the procedure that Freud detects or constructs in
Napoleon's unconscious does fit his actual mentality. Napoleon set up the
connection to the biblical Joseph almost spontaneously when, on the voyage to
Egypt in May 1798, with the 165 scholars on board who were supposed to
exhaust the Orient's treasures of wisdom, he had his evening disputations,
including those on the habitability of the planetsand on the dreams and dream
interpretations of Joseph in Egypt. See J. Presser, Napoleon. Historie en
Legende (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1946), p. 48; in German: Napoleon. Das Leben
und die Legende (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1977), p. 55.
64. Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, July 15, 1934 (see note 63). Zweig had
written to Freud about the composition of his historical play Bonaparte in Jaffa,
which deals with the massacre of three thousand Turkish prisoners. Freud's
answer shows how he was already oriented toward the theme of Napoleon two
years before his letter to Thomas Mann, without already exhibiting the
pointedness of the Joseph complex.'

Chapter 4
1. To Eckermann, February 10, 1830, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 393:
"Napoleon gives us an example of how dangerous it is to raise oneself into the
absolute and to sacrifice everything to the realization of an idea."
2. To Eckermann, February 28, 1831, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp.
465 466: "Therefore it was appropriate, in this volume, to speak of that secret,
problematical power that everyone perceives, that no philosopher explains, and
that the religious person evades with the help of a consoling word. Goethe calls
this inexpressible riddle of the world and life the 'demonic,'

 Page 671

and when he describes its character we feel that it is so and it seems to us as

though the curtains before certain hidden aspects of our life were drawn
aside."
3. To Eckermann, March 2, 1831, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 469.
4. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Part Four, Book 20, ed. Scheibe, p. 642.
5. S. Scheibe,"'Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse.' Goethes Motto zum vierten
Teil von Dichtung und Wahrheit?" Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft 26 (1964):
320 324. The letter from Eckermann is quoted on p. 323.
6. F. W. Riemer, Mittheilungen über Goethe, ed. A. Pollmer (Leipzig, 1921), p.
188.
7. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 450. For the spelling I rely on M. Mommsen,
"Zur Frage der Herkunft des Spruches 'Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse,'"
Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft 13 (1951): 87, where Riemer's diaries are
quoted after the original communication by R. Keil (Deutsche Revue XI, 1, p.
63) and, among other things, the spelling of the name "Zinkgräf" differs from
that given in Beutler's edition of Goethe's Werke. Julius Zinkgräf's
Apophthegmata had first appeared in Strasbourg in 1626 and had many later
editions; the "extraordinary saying'' was not to be found in any of them. The
name appears as "Zinkgref" in the first edition.
8. Scheibe, "'Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse,'" p. 322, n. 11.
9. Ibid., p. 324. The motto is not included in the historical-critical edition of
Dichtung und Wahrheit edited by Scheibe.
10. Mommsen, "Zur Frage der Herkunft des Spruches," p. 87.
11. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 434 435. In Beutler's edition the remark is
assigned to the "beginning of the year" 1807, no doubt not without the
supposition that it must, by its logic, have preceded the invention of the
"extraordinary saying" on May 16.
12. Satyros, second act; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 4, p. 201.
13. Halloren were the workers in the saltworks at Halle, who spoke a special
dialect, unintelligible to those around them, and were consequently regarded as
isolated remnants with either a Slavic or a Celtic origin. "The most miserable
Hallore" would thus be "the strangest man, one who had drifted here from
unknown regions." Thus, A. Grabowsky, "Das Motto des IV. Teils von
'Dichtung und Wahrheit,'" Trivium 3 (1945): 247.
14. Contrary to the assertion of Mommsen, "Zur Frage der Herkunft des
Spruches," p. 86.
15. If this sentence had been made available to readers anywhere after the
invention of printing, Goethe would not have been the first to find it notable and
worth quoting. But one only needs to imagine what a questionable profit proof
of the origin of the sentence would yield for Goethe research if, contrary to what
I assume, someone should someday succeed in providing it. The question
(perhaps no easier to answer) of what it may have meant in the place where it
was found would displace entirely the more important question of what Goethe
had (as it turned out) 'found' ['gefunden'], rather than 'invented' ['erfunden'], in it.
To that extent, the thesis that Goethe invented the saying would, in any case,
have been more beneficial, even if at some point it should have to be abandoned
as a result of an actual discovery. It leads to the one central question: Is it such a
matter of course that the saying seems "extraordinary" to Goethe?
16. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder
Politischen Theologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970), pp. 121 122.

 Page 672

17. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Werke und Schriften, ed B. Titel and H. Haug
(Stuttgart: Goverts, 1966 1967), vol. 2, p. 435.
18. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 762.
19. W. Bröcker, Der Gott des Sophokles (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1971), pp.
18 19, as well as p. 36, where it is demonstrated that the conflict, which is
possible in Aeschylus, is no longer present in Sophocles. Gods against godsthat
is not only the principle of Aeschylean tragedy but also of the genealogies in
myth, of the opposition in it between above and below. On this see especially J.
J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, vol. 1; Gesammelte Werke (Basel: Schwabe,
1943 1967), vol. 2, pp. 190 206.
20. Scheibe, "'Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse,'" pp. 322 323.
21. R. Fischer-Lamberg, "Aus dem Riemer-Nachlass," Jahrbuch der Goethe-
Gesellschaft 16 (1954): 346.
22. Ibid., pp. 345 346. Although we are told that, by its location in the notebook,
Goethe's excerpt is to be dated to "approximately the end of 1809," no
connection to the saying can be established. Philology just cannot proceed any
further.
23. The verse is in Ovid, Tristia I 2, 4.
24. Maximen und Reflexionen 807; Werke, ed. Beutlder, vol. 9, p. 745. The
aphorism about the three '-theisms' and what they correspond to in human life is
found in a draft of the letter he sent to Jacobi on January 6, 1813, which
completes his argument with the latter's Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer
Offenbarung [On divine things and their revelation], an argument that had begun
with the challenge of Goethe's poem, "Gross ist Diana der Epheser" [Great is
Diana of the Ephesians] (August 23, 1812). Three months after the letter to
Jacobi, Goethe discovers for the first time the connection between Egmont,
which had occupied him for so long (1774 1787), and the category of the
"demonic" (Diary, April 4, 1813)the connection that, in Dichtung und Wahrheit
(the fourth part was written in 1850 1831), conceals Napoleon.
25. A note of Riemer's, not more precisely dated, from the years 1803 to 1814,
in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 746. Goethe returns to Zinkgräf on June 2,
1807; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 458.
26. Maximen und Reflexionen 1039; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 9, p. 631.
27. To Johann Gottfried Herder, February 20, 1786, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol
18, p. 911: "One who loves God cannot be concerned that God should love him
in return. . . . " Goethe says to Adele Schopenhauer, in 1819, that he always has
"the good fortune . . . to open books to the most important passages": Werke, ed.
Beutler, vol. 23, p. 44.
28. Luther, Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam (1517), n. 17: "Non
potest homo naturaliter velle deum esse deum, immo vellet se esse deum et
deum non esse deum."
29. Spinoza, Ethics ordine geometrico demonstrata I, 14.
30. To Charlotte von Stein, November 9, 1784, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p.
811.
31. To Karl von Knehel, November 11, 1784, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p.
811.
32. To Karl von Knebel, November 18, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p.
889.
33. To Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, January 12, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol.
18, p. 834.

 Page 673

34. To Charlotte von Stein, May 19, 1778, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 394.
35. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik III 3; Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter's
"School for Aesthetics," trans. Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1973), p. 307.
36. To J. C. Kestner, April 25, 1773, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 196.
37. To Lavater, January 8, 1777, Postscript, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p.
356. Later, Goethe writes to the same addressee: "Even your Christ I have never
considered and admired with more pleasure than in these letters. . . . I do not
begrudge you this happiness, since without it you would be bound to be
miserable. . . . Only I cannot regard it as anything but unjust and a robbery,
which is unbecoming to your good cause, when you strip all the precious
feathers from the thousand kinds of birds beneath the heavensas though they
were usurpedso as to bedeck your Bird of Paradise exclusively with them." June
22, 1781, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 599.
38. K. A. Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebücher, June 26, 1843, ed. L. Assing
(Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1861 1905), vol. 2, p. 194: "General von Rühle told me
how Goethe himself once said to him. . . . "
39. Schiller to Körner, 1788 1789, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 178. When
Schiller learns of Goethe's second "Prometheus" plan, he evidently no longer
perceives any connection to what he had once noticed in Goethe that was very
close to this self-consciousness: "He is now occupied with a tragedy in the
ancient Greek manner. The subject is the liberation of Prometheus." To Körner,
April 1 10, 1795, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 223.
40. Goethe to Riemer, February 1, 1808, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 482.
41. K. Mommsen, Kleists Kampf mit Goethe (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1974). It will
be evident that I owe more to this book than can be repaid with one footnote.
42. Erasmus, Adagia V 1, 95 (from Sophocles, Antigone, line 1044);
Ausgewählte Werke, ed. W. Welzig (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1967- ), vol. 7, p. 596.
43. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, p. 116 (quoting Gregory Nazianzenus,
Oratio Theologica III, 2).
44. Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie (1856; rptd. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1957), vol. 1, p. 481.
45. Charlotte von Schiller to the future Princess Karoline von Mecklenburg,
Weimar, July 2, 1814, in Charlotte von Schiller und ihre Freunde (Stuttgart,
1860 1862), vol. 1, p. 691.

Part V
Chapter 1
1. Franziska, Countess Reventlow, Briefe, 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1977), p.
217 (Lübeck, January 30, 1891).
2. Diderot, Réfutation suivie de l'ouvrage d'Helvétius intitulé L'homme, in
Oeuvres, ed. J. Assézat (Paris, 1875), vol. 2, pp. 275 456. [See p. 374 for the
'multiplication' of Prometheus, and p. 432 for the quotation in the second
paragraph following this one.]

 Page 674

3. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, vol. 17 (Paris, 1866), pp. 437 438; "C'est
le vrai Prométhée. Il fit plus que des oeuvres. Il fit surtout des hommes. Il
souffla sur la France, souffla sur l'Allemagne. Celle-ci l'adopte plus que la
France encore, par la voix solennelle de Goethe."
4. Kant, 'Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie,"
in Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie ed.), vol. 8, p. 406.
5. Kant, "Fortgesetzte Betrachtung der seit einiger Zeit wahrgenommenen
Erderschütterungen" (1756), in Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie ed.), vol. 1, p.
472.
6. F. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, trans. E. Behler and R. Struc (University
Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), p. 117. Original:
"Gespräch über die Poesie,"Athenäum (1800), reprinted in Kritische Friedrich
Schlegel Ausgabe (Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958- ), vol. 2, pp. 350 351. The
program for Romanticism had been preceded, in March 1799, by his turning
away from Schleiermacher: "Your God, on the other hand, seemed to me
somewhat meager." The abstract infinity-pantheism of the talks On Religion
[Über die Religion] could not, he says, restore the universe to ''fullness." The
counterweight lies in a "poetic physics," such as he projects in the notes On
Physics [Zur Physik]. "I already have notebooks on physics, so no doubt I will
soon have a physics as well," he writes to Schleiermacher; their symbolic
procedure, seeking expression in the "arabesque," should produce an "indication
of infinite fullness": Aus Schleiermachers Leben. In Briefen, ed. L. Jonas and W.
Dilthey (Berlin, 1860 1863), vol. 3, pp. 88, 104.
7. Conclusion of the "Gespräch über die Poesie," second version; Kritische
Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 2, pp. 352 362.
8. "Talk on Mythology," in Dialogue on Poetry, trans. Behler & Struc, pp.
83 84; Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 2, pp. 315 316.
9. Transcendentalphilosophie, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 12,
pp. 43, 105.
10. Philosophie der Geschichte I, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol.
9, p. 15.
11. Philosophie der Geschichte II, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol.
9, p. 31.
12. Philosophie der Geschichte VII, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe,
vol. 9, p. 157.
13. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Sämtliche Werke, ed. E. Böcking (Leipzig,
1846 1847), vol. 1, pp. 49 60.
14. Goethe to A. W. Schlegel, Weimar, July 19, 1797, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol.
19, p. 285.
15. Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie (1856), 20th lecture
(rptd. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1957), pp. 457 489.
16. Ibid., p. 482, n. 4: "As nature arose for us (Idealists), the Greeks' own world
of gods arose for them, unconsciously."
17. A. Künzli, Karl Marx. Eine Psychographie (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966),
p. 396.
18. Marx, From the Preparatory Materials [for the dissertation], Sixth
Notebook; K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (New York: International
Publishers, 1975- ), vol. 1, p. 491. [Quotes in the next three paragraphs are from
pp. 491 493.] Original: Frühe Schriften, ed. H. J. Lieber and P. Furth, 3d ed.
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 102 105.
19. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophic der Religion, in Sämtliche Werke,
ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1927 1930), vol. 16, p. 107.

 Page 675

20. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York:
International Publishers, 1964), p. 147. [The quotations in this and the following
paragraph are from pp. 147 149.] Original in Frühe Schriften, vol. 1, pp.
608 611.
21. F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit (Berlin: Springer, 1920), pp. 131 132.
22. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International
Publishers, 1967), vol. 1, p. 621. Original in Ökonomische Schriften, ed. H. J.
Lieber and B. Kautsky (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1960 1964), vol. 1, p. 744.
23. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 614; Ökonomische Schriften, vol. 1, p. 740.
24. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 645; Ökonomische Schriften, vol. 1, p. 779.

Chapter 2
1. Heine, Reisebilder II, Ideen. Das Buck Le Grand, chapter 9; Sämtliche
Schriften, ed. K. Briegleb (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1968- ), vol. 2, p. 276 (henceforth cited as Schriften).
2. Heine, Reisebilder II, Die Nordsee, third part; Schriften, vol. 2, p. 232.
3. Heine, Reisebilder IV, Englische Fragmente, no. 10: "Wellington"; Schriften,
vol. 2, p. 593.
4. Heine, Reisebilder III, Italien I, Beise yon Münhen nach Genua, chapter 39;
Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 374 375.
5. Heine, Reisebilder IV, Englische Fragmente, no. 10; Schriften, vol. 2, p. 593.
6. Heine, Reisebilder III, Italien I, Reise yon München nach Genua, chapter 28;
Schriften, vol. 2, p. 374.
7. J. Hermand, "Napoleon im Biedermeier," in Von Mainz nach Weimar. Studien
zur deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969), p. 113.
8. Heine, Französische Zustände IV (1832), in Schriften, vol. 3, p. 145.
9. Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland II, "Von
Luther bis Kant," in Schriften, vol. 3, p. 578.
10. K. A. Varnhagen yon Ense, Tagebücher, ed. L. Assing (Leipzig: Brockhaus,
1861 1905), vol. 2, p. 220.
11. Heidelberg, August 5, 1845, in Tagebücher, vol. 3, pp. 152 153.
12. Heine, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, section 18. Heine probably really
did dream of the Prussian black vulture, which ate his liver, because he says so
also in the Geständnisse (Schriften, vol. 6, pt. 1, p. 459), in Die Nordsee, part 2,
poem 5 (Schriften, vol. 1, pp. 202ff.), and in the preface to the Französische
Zustände (Schriften, vol. 3, p. 95).
13. Heine, Reisebilder I, Die Harzreise; Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 108 110.
14. M. Werner and H. Houben (eds.), Begegnungen reit Heine. Berichte der
Zeitgenossen (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 353ff.

 Page 676

15. Heine to Heinrich Laube, February 7, 1850, in Briefe, ed. F. Hirth (Mainz:
Kupferberg, 1950 1951), vol. 3, pp. 197 198.
16. Heine to Laube, October 12, 1850, in Briefe, ed. Hirth, vol. 3, p. 232.
17. Heine to Julius Campe, August 21, 1851, in Briefe, ed. Hirth, vol. 3, p. 296.
But he had reproached Goethe with being the flame that did not want to burn;
he, Heine, did not "envy the calm little night lamps that live out their lives so
modestly": Schriften, vol. 6, pt. 1, p. 628.
18. "Aufzeichnungen," in Schriften, vol. 6, pt. 1, p. 640; originally in Heine,
Prosa-Nachlass, ed. E. Loewenthal (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1884;
rptd. 1925), pp. 135ff., under the heading "Aphorismen und Fragmente."
19. Nietzsche, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," preface to the 1886 reissue of The
Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Random House, 1966), pp. 17 27 (henceforth cited as Basic Writings of
Nietzsche). Original in Gesammelte Werke (Munich: Musarion, 1920- ), vol. 21,
pp. 111 124 (henceforth cited as Werke).
20. Nietzsche, "Gedanken zu 'Die Tragödie und die Freigeister,'" in Werke, vol.
3, p. 259.
21. "Kritische persönliche Bemerkungen zu den eigenen Schriften der Fruhzeit,"
in Werke, vol. 21, p. 68.
22. "Ursprung und Ziel der Tragödie. Nachträge aus einer 'erweiterten Form der
Geburt der Tragödie.' Ausführung des Zweiten Teils der ursprünglichen
Disposition," sec. 9, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 280 281. What Nietzsche calls the
"erweiterte Form" ["expanded form"] was sections that were not included in the
finished book.
23. "Ursprung und Ziel der Tragödie," sec. 10, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 283.
24. "Ursprung und Ziel der Tragödie," sec. 11, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 287.
25. "Vorwort an Richard Wagner. Fassung vom 22. Februar 1871," in Werke,
vol. 3, p. 273. The published version is dated "End of the year 1871" and does
not contain "my confession of faith."
26. "Ursprung und Ziel der Tragödie," sec. 8, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 277. One may
remember here that this book was originally supposed to be entitled Griechische
Heiterkeit [Greek cheerfulness].
27. "Ursprung und Ziel der Tragödie," sec. 11, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 288.
28. The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 3, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 42
(translation slightly revised); Werke, vol. 3, pp. 32 33.
29. Das Griechische Musikdrama, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 187.
30. Ecce Homo (1888), in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 726; Werke, vol. 21, p.
223.
31. Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 730; Werke, vol. 21, p. 228. The conclusion
of Zarathustra was finished, in 1883, at exactly the hourNietzsche calls it the
"holy hour"at which Richard Wagner died in Venice. Mythical 'significance' is
seen in this, since "perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be reckoned as
music": Basic Writings, p. 751; Werke, vol. 21, p. 247.
32. U. yon Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Zukunftsphilologie! Zweites Stück. Eine
Erwiderung (Berlin, 1873); reprinted in K. Gründer (ed.), Der Streit um
Nietzasche's "Geburt der Tragödie" (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1969), pp. 113 135.
On one point Wilamowitz has been definitively shown (something

 Page 677

that seldom occurs in philology) to have been mistaken, and Nietzsche in the
right: Dionysus did not come to Greece only "in the eighth century at the
earliest," so that he was consequently not originally a Greek god; instead,
since the deciphering of the Cretan Linear B writing, the evidence of his cult
and of the associated names has confirmed his presence, even in the
Peloponnesus, as early as the thirteenth century.
33. Briefe, vol. 3, p. 328, in Nietzsche's Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische
Gesamtausgabe (Munich: Beck, 1938 1952). Bemays's treatise is again available
in the reprint introduced by K. Gründer (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1970).
34. In Ecce Homo this is already a quotation, on the psychology of tragedy, from
Twilight of the Idols (1888). See Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 729; Werke, vol.
17, p. 159.
35. The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 4, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 46; Werke,
vol. 3, pp. 37 39. [The next quotation is from Basic Writings, p. 47.]
36. The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 9, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 70; Werke,
vol. 3, p. 68. [The quotations in the previous paragraph are from Basic Writings,
p. 69.]
37. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Book Three, section 135; Werke, vol. 12, p. 163.
[The previous quotation is from The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings, p. 72.]
38. The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York:
Random House, 1967), p. 55; Werke, vol. 18, p. 68. [The previous quotation is
from The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings, p. 69.]
39. "Attempt at a Self-criticism," preface to the second edition of The Birth of
Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 18; Werke, vol. 3, p. 4. [The previous
quotations are from Basic Writings, pp. 42, 46.]
40. The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 3, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 42; Werke,
vol. 3, p. 32.
41. The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 19, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 115; Werke,
vol. 3, p. 128.
42. The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 19, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 121; Werke,
vol. 3, pp. 133 135.
43. The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 10, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 75; Werke,
vol. 3, pp. 74 75.
44. "Prometheus. Entwurf" [Prometheus: A sketch], in Werke, vol. 7, pp.
386 389.
45. The Will to Power, p. 479 (translation slightly revised); Werke, vol. 19, p.
285.
46. Preliminary work for Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, in Werke, vol. 7, p. 366.
47. The Gay Science, Book Four, section 300, "Preludes of Science," trans. W.
Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 240; Werke, vol. 12, p. 220.
48. Beyond Good and Evil, Part III, section 56, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.
258; Werke, vol. 15, pp. 75 76.
49. "Aus dem Nachlass 1882 1888," in Werke, vol. 16, p. 337.
50. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. A. Jaffé and trans. R.
Winston and C. Winston (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 150.

 Page 678

Chapter 3
1. Gide, Marshlands and Prometheus Misbound, trans. George D. Painter
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1953), p. 105. Original: Le Prométhée mal
enchaîné (1899), in Romans, Récits et Soties (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), p. 304.
2. Kafka, "Prometheus," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Max Brod (New York:
Schocken, 1947 1953), vol. 5, p. 99.

 Page 679

NAME INDEX
A
Abeken, Rudolf, 281
Adorno, Theodor, 222, 293
Aeschylus, xxxi, 122, 124, 304, 309 321, 325, 330, 334, 336, 337, 381, 388, 392,
419, 534, 583, 584, 585, 591, 598, 599, 613, 614, 617, 618, 672n 19
Aesop, 132
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d', 74
Alexander the Great, 47, 102 103
Aly, Wolf, 324
Amalie, Duchess of Sachse-Weimar, 452
Amphilochius, 193
Anaxagoras, 347, 587
Ariselm of Canterbury (Saint Anselm), 248, 249 253, 256, 257, 654 655n 35
Antisthenes, 336
Antommarchi, Francesco, 596
Apollodorus, 116, 136, 143
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 81
Arago, François, 43
Archelaus (Herod Archelaus), 101
Aristophanes, 322, 337
Arisrotle, xv, 26, 29, 117 118, 127, 201, 216, 223, 260, 320, 330 331, 336, 373,
382, 544, 577, 578 580, 586, 587, 612
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 485
Arnim, Achim von, 279
Arnim, Bettina von, 430, 662 663n 1
Arnobius, 358
Assézat (publisher of Diderot), 565
Augustine, Saint, 187, 198 199, 239, 245, 255, 258, 360 361, 432

B
Baader, Franz Xaver von, 438 439
Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 68
Bacon, Francis, xxv, 38, 212, 361, 372 373, 389
Baeumler, Alfred, 517
Balsamo, Giuseppe. See Cagliostro, Alessandro di Conte
Baltus, Jean-François, 264
Barnacle, Nora (Mrs. James Joyce), 81, 84, 642n 23
Barth, Karl, 222
Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 447, 542 543
Basilides, 199, 259, 260
Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, xxiii, 161
Bayle, Pierre, 103, 106, 375, 459
Beauharnais, Eugene Napoleon de (duke of Leuhtenberg), 482
Beckett, Samuel, 59
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 106
Benn, Gottfried, 299
Bergson, Henri-Louis, 109
Bernays, Jacob, 117 118, 216, 217, 612
Bertuch, Friedrich Justin, 491
Beutler, Ernst, 458
Blankenhurg, Captain von, 278
Bloch, Ernst, 293
Blumenberg, Hans, xxxviiinn a, c, f, g, xxxixnn i, l, t, xlnn u, v, x, ee, gg, 32n q,
214nn b, c, 295n d, 521n b, 642n 17, 645n 8, 653n 19, 655n 39, 660n 7, 662n 39,
664n 22
Boccacio, 361 362, 363, 658n 13
Böhme, Jakob, 529, 533, 542
Boisserée, Sulpiz, 471, 480, 494, 496
Bonaparte, Marie (student of Freud), 57
Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon Bonaparte
Börne, Ludwig, 447, 603, 625n e
Botticelli, Sandro, 38
Böttiger, Karl August, 71, 72, 79, 80, 423, 439, 491 492

 Page 680

Bourrienne, Louis-Antoine de, 466

Brod, Max, 3
Brucker, Jakob, 375
Bruno, Giordano, 361, 412, 578
Büchner, Georg, 149
Budgen, Frank, 81
Bultmann, Rudolf, 187 188, 222, 224, 291, 494
Burckhardt, Jacob, 68 69, 122 123, 143, 219 220, 234, 239 240, 241, 320, 347,
362 363, 561 562
Butor, Michel, xxxii, 276, 277, 280, 288
Byron, Lord (George Gordon Byron), 468, 562

C
Caesar, Julius, 471 472, 486, 488 489, 496
Caesarius of Heisterbach, 141
Cagliostro, Allessandro di Conte (orig. Giuseppe Balsamo), 71 74, 112n j, 441,
443, 444, 512
Caligula (Roman emperor), 122
Calvin, John, 222 223
Campanella, Tommaso, 42
Camus, Albert, xxx, 69
Cardano, Girolamo, 105
Carl August, duke of Saxe-Weimar, 481, 490, 491
Carpani, 405
Cassirer, Ernst, viii ix, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxxi, 50, 51, 64, 117,
128, 160 161, 167 168
Catherine of Siena, 552
Cato, 77
Celsus, 193
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 68
Christ (Jesus), 39, 101, 103, 104 105, 106, 155, 193, 197, 238, 480 481
Christy, James, 43
Clement of Alexandria, 185 186
Cohen, Hermann, 50
Colet, John, 368
Colloredo, Count, 475
Comte, Auguste, 110 111
Copernicus, 372
Correggio, 219 220, 553
Cratinus, 321
Curtius, Ludwig, 211

D
Daniel, 189
Dante, 76, 79, 80, 276, 355 356
Dart, Raymond A., 563
Daru, Pierre-Antoine-Nöel-Bruno, 470, 471, 472
Deichgräber, 319
Demandt, A., 104
Democritus, 329, 331
Descartes, René, vii, xvi, xxv, xxviii xxix, xxxii, 50, 163, 177, 178, 243, 267,
268, 269, 284, 377, 380, 395n a, 604, 608
Diderot, Denis, 74, 393, 418, 563 565
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 67, 661n 17
Dio Chrysostom, 86, 336
Diodorus Sicuius, 458
Diogenes of Sinope, 86, 336, 340
Dionysius of Alexandria, 193
Duns Scorns, John, 229

E
Eberwein, Karl, 523
Eckermann, Johann Peter, 435 436, 437, 466, 467 468, 473, 476 477, 478 479,
480, 482, 484, 494 495, 496, 499, 523, 524, 526, 536
Egmont, Count, 524, 539
Eichhorn (Prussian censor), 592
Einstein, Albert, 229
Ellman, R., 83
Empedocles, 124
Enfantin, Prosper, 599
Engel, Johann Jacob, 279, 416
Engels, Friedrich, 592
Enghien, Louis-Antoine-Henri d', 488
Epicurus, 13, 45, 106, 121, 238, 240, 281, 284, 345, 346, 585, 586, 588
Epimenides, 442, 448, 463n e
Epiphanius of Salamis, 193
Erasmus, Desiderius, 368 372, 550 551, 551 552
Emesti, 158
Ernst, Dr. (teacher of Franziska Revenflow), 562
Erwin of Steinbach, 453, 455, 456, 457
Euripides, 318, 337, 616
Eusebius of Caesarea, 101, 197
Eznik of Kolb, 197
Ezra, 140, 218

F
Fahlmer, Johanna, 460
Falk, Johann Daniel, 488
Fehling, Emanuel, 562
Ferenczi, Sandor, 5, 9, 89
Fernow, Karl Ludwig, 499
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 28, 209 210, 289, 290
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxvii, 266, 268, 472, 594n g
Ficino, Marsilio, 364 367, 373
Flaubert, Gustave, 257
Fliess, Wilhelm, 55, 57, 242
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 19, 106, 107, 232 233, 263 264, 265, 567,
655n 1
Forster, Georg, 407, 438
Fränkel, Hermann, 137
Franklin, Benjamin, 569

 Page 681

Freud, Sigmund, viii, ix, xii, xvi, 5, 6, 8, 20, 55, 56 57, 86 88, 89, 90 95, 116,
119, 151, 242, 271, 481, 516 521, 621 625, 627, 636, 643n 29, 643n 34, 670nn
63, 64
Friedrich (Goethe's servant), 478
Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 14
Fritz, Kurt von, 303, 656n 10
Frommanns (friends of Goethe), 527
Fuhrmann, Manfred, 356

G
Galileo, 50
Galle, Johann Gottfried, 43
de Gaulle, Charles, 188
Gehlen, Arnold, xxii, xxiv, xxix, 136, 173nn d, e
George, Stephan, 51
Gibbon, Edward, 243
Gide, André, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 175, 195, 348, 627, 628 631
Gleim, J. w. Ludwig, 388, 452, 543
Goethe, August (son of Johann), 471 472, 473, 476, 492
Goethe, Christiane (wife of Johann), 470, 489 490, 492, 667n 34
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xii, xxxi xxxii, 10, 15, 17, 24, 68, 70 75, 79, 105,
108, 154, 157, 174, 243, 264, 266, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 302,
304, 335, 342, 375, 392, 393, 399, 400 401, 403, 404 409, 410, 413, 414 416,
419, 420 422, 424, 425 427, 430 431, 432 463, 465 515, 518, 521, 523 533,
534 541, 542 550, 551, 553 554, 556, 561, 563, 565, 568, 572, 576 577, 584,
595, 597, 598, 599, 600, 613, 635, 652n 1, 661n 10, 662nn 26, 31, 663nn 3, 5,
664nn 25, 29, 666nn 6, 11, 667nn 33, 34, 668nn 40, 41, 43, 46, 669n 49, 670n 1,
670 671n 2, 673n 37
Goldberg, Oskar, 517
Goldstein, Kurt, 5
Gorgias, 608, 648n 17
Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 107, 342, 343 344
Gratian (Roman emperor), 238
Gregory of Nazianzus, 552
Grimm, Wilhelm, 154
Grüner, Joseph Sebastian, 469 470, 475 476
Gundert, Maria, 37
Gutzkow, Karl, 595

H
Habermas, Jürgen, xxxixn l
Hadrian (Roman emperor), 510
Haeckel, Ernst, 8
Harnack, Adolf von, 78, 181, 182, 195, 197, 198, 649n 3, 650n 11
Haydn, Franz Joseph, 405
Hederich, Benjamin, 392, 403 404, 405, 406, 459, 654n 21
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xxxii, xxxiv, xln bb, 107 108, 498, 584, 586,
587, 589, 591, 601
Heidegger, Martin, xxiii, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxviiin g, 68, 92, 109, 110, 179, 222,
224, 270, 288
Heine, Heinrich, 13, 46, 47, 225, 279 280, 473, 485 486, 536, 537, 595 604,
625n f, 652 653n 8
Heine, Maximilian (brother of Heinrich), 280
Helvetius, 563, 564
Hennings, August, 414
Heraclitus, 91
Herder, Caroline (wife of Joharnn), 388
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 60, 61, 62, 157, 388 392, 458, 540, 542 543,
655 656n 1
Herodotus, 20, 35, 36, 115, 152 153, 639n 1
Herostratus, 103
Herschel, Sir William, 43, 44
Herz, Marcus, 416
Hesiod, xx, xxxi, 16, 25, 30 31, 32, 35, 38, 39, 40, 42, 115, 118, 119 120, 121,
122, 123 124, 129, 135, 151, 158, 159, 160, 181, 235 236, 241, 302 303, 304,
305 309, 310, 315, 317, 320, 324, 326, 333, 336, 343, 345, 351, 352, 450, 458,
611, 648n 17
Heyne, 158
Heyse, Paul, 216, 261n a
Hieronymus, 358
Hillel the Second (Rabbi), 125
Hippolytus, Saint, 259
Hobbes, Thomas, xv, xvi, xxix, 333, 373 374, 378
Hoffmeister, Johannes, 107 108
Holbach, Paul Henri Dietrich d', 418
Hollmann, Samuel Christian, 568
Homer, xiii, xx, 16, 35, 40, 77, 81, 114, 116, 121, 122, 132, 135, 137, 151, 152,
155 156, 158, 241, 276, 302, 320, 351, 450, 648n 17
Höpfner (legal scholar), 543
Horace, 306
Hugo, Victor, 497
Humboldt, Alexander von, 438
Hume, David, 418
Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 467
Husserl, Edmund, 243

I
Iffland, August Wilhelm, 510
Irenaeus of Lyons, 186, 197, 199, 229

 Page 682

Iser, Wolfgang, 83 84
Israel of Rischin (Rabbi), 226

J
Jacobi, Auguste (niece of Friedrich), 662n 26
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 392, 407 414, 415, 416 422, 423, 424, 425 426,
433 434, 444, 458, 539, 542 543, 567, 661n 10
James, William, 243
Jaucourt, Chevalier de, 393 395
Jauss, H. R., 172, 284
Jesus (Christ), 39, 101, 103, 104 105, 106, 155, 193, 197, 238, 480 481
John the Apostle, 23, 137, 200 201, 219 220
John the Lydian, 335
Jonas, Hans, xxxiv, xxxv, 179, 185, 186, 199, 205, 290 291, 649n 4, 650n 6
Josiah (king of Judah), 140
Joyce, James, vii, 34, 80 85, 87, 642 643n 23
Joyce, Nora (Mrs. James Joyce), 81, 84, 642n 23
Julian (Roman emperor), 86, 388, 339 341
Jung, C.G., xii, xvi, 93 94, 624
Jünger, Ernst, 8 9, 648n 19
Justin, saint, 198

K
Kafka, Franz, vii, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 3, 175, 633 636
Kant, Immanuel, viii, xxxv xxxvi, xxxvii, xln gg, 49 50, 52, 56, 169, 170 171,
243, 267, 268, 291 292, 293, 295n i, 366, 375, 380, 392, 400, 412, 431, 432,
519 520, 567 569, 575, 594n g, 604
Kästner, Abraham Gotthelf, 219, 417
Kayser, Phillip Christoph, 71, 444
Kepler, Johannes, 50
Kestner, Johann Georg, 405, 492 493, 546
Kierkegaard, Søren, 144
Klages, Ludwig, 68
Kleist, Heinrich von, 86, 88, 548, 549
Kleist, Ulrike (sister of Heinrich), 549
Klettenberg, Susanna Katharina von, 542
Klinger, Max, 565, 566
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 450 451
Knebel, Henriette von (sister of Karl), 493
Knebel, Karl Ludwig von, 416, 481, 482, 491, 543
Koller (French general), 494
Körner, Theodor, 438 439, 485, 576
Köster, Heinrich Martin Gottfried, 377
Kuhn, Thomas S., 167

L
Lactantius, 153, 857, 358, 359
Lamprecht, Helmut, 113
Langer, Ernst Theodor, 461
Laplace, Pierre-Simon de, 52
Las Cases, Ernmanuel-Augustin-Dieudonné-Joseph de, 596
Laube, Heinrich, 603
Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 73, 408, 423 424, 441, 448, 447, 512, 542 543, 546,
673n 37
Lec, Stanislaw Jerzy, 11
Leclerc, Jean, 264
Lehmann, Edvard, 16
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 50, 96, 246, 247, 267, 431, 439
Lenz, Jakob Michael, 407, 422, 533 535, 552, 553, 554
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, xxxii, 196, 278 279, 282 288, 284, 407 408,
409 414, 415, 416 419, 420, 421 422, 423, 424, 425, 539, 540, 661n 17
Leverrier, Urbain-Jean-Joseph, 43
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 271 272
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, xii
Lichtenberg, Friedrich August, 423 425
Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), 38
Locke, John, xv
Logier (French Jesuit), 453 454
Loisy, Alfred-Firmin, 222
Lord, A. B., xxi
Louis-Phillippe (king of France), 597 598
Lowe, Hudson, 474, 596
Lowell, Percival, 43
Löwith, Karl, xxxi
Lucian, 303, 326, 342, 343, 345 346, 347, 418
Lucretius, 118, 329
Luden, Heinrich, 460
Ludwig (crown prince of Bavaria), 15
Luise, Dutchess of Saxe-Weimar, 489
Lukács, Georg, xxxi
Luke, Saint, 39, 78, 101, 103 104, 105, 137, 154, 182, 190, 258
Luther, Martin, 78, 102, 155, 222 223, 224, 252, 541, 542, 545, 551, 577
Lycurgus, 20

M
Mach, Ernst, 284, 285
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 592 593
Manfiedini (designer of commemorative medal), 485
Mani, 191
Manilius, 545
Mann, Thomas, vii, xxvi, 98, 229 230, 388, 481, 516, 520 521, 646n 35, 653n 11
Manzoni, Alessandro, 410, 474, 479
Marcion, 78, 154, 181, 182, 184, 186, 189, 190 191, 194, 195, 196, 197 198,
199, 201, 206, 217, 238, 325, 558, 649n 3, 650n 8

 Page 683

Marie-Antoinette (queen of France), 70, 112n j. See also Cagliostro, Alessandro

di Conte
Mark, Saint (Evangelist), 104, 137
Marlowe, Christopher, 17, 277
Marx, Karl, 584, 585 589, 590 592, 593 594
Massenbach, Christian von, 497
Mattesilano, Matteo, 171, 173n i
Matthew, Saint, 39 40, 104, 137, 461
Melchinger, Siegfried, 318
Menander, 328, 336
Mendelssohn, Moses, 278, 409 410, 413, 416, 417 419, 422, 423, 540
Merck, Johann Heinrich, 451, 543, 557n i
Milton, John, vii
Mohammed, 41, 123
Mommsen, Katharina, 548, 549
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 11
Monffaucon, Bernard de, 219
Moritz, Karl Philipp, 441, 442
Moses, 28, 139, 206
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 480
Müller, Adam, 548 549
Müller, Chancellor Friedrich yon, 470, 471, 473, 478, 488, 486, 487, 494, 526,
586
Musil, Robert, 108
N
Napoleon Bonaparte, xxxi, 46 47, 71, 106, 400, 439, 442, 444, 448, 460,
465 478, 479 489, 490, 493 494, 495 497, 498, 501, 505, 509 510, 511, 514,
515, 518 520, 523 524, 530 531, 532, 535 536, 537, 538 539, 550, 569 570, 592,
595 596, 597, 666nn 6,11, 668nn 41, 43, 669n 49, 670n 63, 1
Natorp, Paul, 49
Nausiphanes, 240
Nehemiah, 140, 218
Nelson, Leonard, 14
Nestle, Wilhelm, 49
Newton, Isaac, 544
Nicholas of Cusa, 50
Nicolai, Friedrich, 417
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, xxxiii, xxxiv xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii, 10 11, 12, 29,
51, 90, 97, 98, 114, 176 178, 209, 239, 241 242, 243 244, 245, 246, 247, 286,
288, 289, 290, 328, 336 338, 339, 347 348, 350, 351, 363 364, 399, 465, 466,
480, 483 484, 489, 516, 561, 562, 565, 572, 604 622, 627, 630, 631, 633, 634,
635, 636, 648n 17, 676 677n 32
Novalis (Friedrich yon Hardenberg), 49, 51, 438 439

O
Ockham, William of, 654n 31
Oehlenschläger, Adam Gottlob, 108
O'Meara (Napoleonic "evangelist"), 596
Origen, 95, 103, 105, 191, 193, 199, 238, 256
Ostwald, Wilhelm, 242
Otto, Christian, 478
Otto, Rudolf, 14, 20, 21, 28, 62, 518
Ovid, 65, 235, 236, 237, 351 356, 358, 359, 362, 538, 658n 13

P
Palm, Johann Philipp, 488
Parry, Milman, xxi
Pascal, Blaise, 233, 243, 287, 653n 17
Paul, Jean, 60, 122, 478, 545
Paul, Saint, 20, 24, 25, 28, 78, 139, 182, 184, 185, 189, 191 192, 194, 195, 197,
201, 224, 225, 236, 252 256, 305
Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, 600 601
Pericles, 11
Périer, Casimir, 597 598
Peterson, Erik, 101
Phidias, 347
Philebus, 53
Philemon, 328
Philostratus, 25
Picasso, Pablo, 627
Pindar, 317, 450
Plato, 27, 45, 49 50, 53, 118, 122 123, 129, 134, 169, 176, 204 205, 238, 255,
256, 305, 326, 328, 330 331, 334 335, 336, 345, 353, 366, 369, 383, 432, 504,
567 568, 586, 587, 608. See also Socrates
Pliny, 382
Plotinus, 77, 185, 270, 364, 367, 545
Plutarch, 11, 102 103, 381, 585
Polycarp of Smyrna, 197 198
Ponto, Jürgen, 293, 295n j
Pope, Alexander, 439
Porada, Käthe yon, 299
Pousseur, Henri, 276, 277, 280
Praxiteles, 611
Protagoras, 329, 331 332, 333 334

R
Racine, Jean, vii
Ramberg, Johann Daniel, 423
Rank, Otto, 269
Raphael, 480
Rathenan, Walther, 109
Rau, Leopold, 606
Reichard, Johann Friedrich, 73, 279
Reimarus, Elise (daughter of Hermann), 409, 413 414
Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 193, 428n d
Reinhard, Carl Friedrich yon, 548
Renouvier, CharlesBernard, 243
Reventlow, Franziska, 562, 594n b

 Page 684

Riemer, Friedrich Wilhelm, 431, 444, 449, 495, 498, 526 528, 530, 531, 532,
535 538, 539 540, 546, 547, 548, 556
Riesbeck, Kaspar, 491
Röderer, Johann Gottfried, 405
Roschalin, N. M., 476
Rosenberg, Alfred, 68
Rosenzweig, Franz, 15, 245
Rothacker, Erich, 67, 69
Rousseau, JeanJacques, xv, 45, 47, 223, 243, 329, 336, 380 381, 382, 385, 386,
400, 454, 433, 491, 564, 565, 566 567, 589 590
Rühle, Johann Jakob yon, 546
Rychner, J., 172

S
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 631
Scheibe, S., 528
Scheler, Max, xxxiii, 14, 211 213, 288
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm joseph yon, xix, xxxii, xln bb, 149 150, 213,
554 555, 577 584, 600 601
Schiller, Charlotte yon, 556
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 18, 266, 400, 448, 494 495, 529,
546 547, 549, 574, 576, 656n l
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 275, 218, 574 577
Schlegel, Friedrich, xix, 61, 62, 136, 311, 570, 571, 572 574, 674n 6
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel, 674n 6
Schlosser, Johann Georg, 445, 614
Schmidt, Erich, 437
Schmitt, Carl, 532, 533, 535, 552, 554
Scholem, Gershom, 226, 227 228
Scholz, Heinrich, 417
Schönemann, Lili, 492, 536, 539, 557n d
Schopenhauer, Arthur, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxv, 98, 128 129, 268, 283, 288 289, 291,
293, 609, 639n l
Schubart, Christian Friedrich, 279
Schwabe, Johann Joachim, 403, 404
Schweitzer, Albert, 154 155
Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 342
Shakespeare, William, 216, 225, 455 456, 457 458, 480
Simmel, Georg, 76, 210 211
Sixtin, John, 368
Socrates, 53 54, 132, 144, 233 234, 255, 332, 334, 336 337, 338, 345, 347, 350,
401, 561, 587, 608, 617. See also Plato
Sophocles, 271, 550, 551 552, 672n 19
Sorel, Georges, xxx, 222, 223, 224
Soret, Frédéric Jacob, 469
Spinoza (and Spinozism)' xxxi, 392, 409, 410, 411 412, 419 420, 421, 422 423,
423 424, 425 426, 440, 479, 480, 525, 530, 531, 539, 540 542, 543 544, 545,
547, 550, 551, 571, 661n 17, 663n 11
Staël, Madame Anne-Louise-Germaine de, 277
Stein, Charlotte yon, 410, 424, 436, 439, 451 452, 472, 493, 540, 543
Stein, Gertrude, 183
Stendhal, 263
Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold, 388, 416, 417, 421, 422, 450, 451, 567, 664n 29,
665n 31
Strauss, David Friedrich, 37
Suetonius, 122
Sutor, Christoph Erhard, 436, 437
Synesius of Cyrene, 341

T
Tacitus, 154, 425
Talleyrand, 486
Tausk, Victor, 95, 643n 34
Tertullian, 17, 18, 104 105, 215, 254, 261n m, 357, 361 362, 649n 3
Thales of Miletus, 11, 25, 26, 28, 29, 128, 383
Theodore of Mopsuestia, 238
Theodosius I (Roman emperor), 198, 238, 387
Theodotus, 187, 650n 6
Thucydides, 104, 153
Tombaugh, C. W., 43
Tückheim, Wilhelm yon, 492
Tylor, E. B., 151

U
Unger (Berlin publisher of Goethe), 72
Usener, Hermann, 53

V
Valentinus, 185, 199
Valery, Paul, vii, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii , 69 70, 150, 243, 277 278, 280 281, 283 287
Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 213, 420, 485, 546, 561, 596, 601
Vico, Giambattista, 60, 61, 62, 85, 377 380, 655n 1
Vinaver, E., 172
Virgil, 79, 104, 351, 352
Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 255, 256
Voltaire, 54, 74, 231, 232 233, 234, 350, 439, 457 458, 459, 471, 486, 489, 496,
641n 17, 653n 17
Voss, Heinrich the younger, 492
Voss, Johann Heinrich, 156 158, 416, 421, 422

W
Wagner, Cosima (wife of Richard), 612
Wagner, Richard, 7, 605, 606, 609 610, 611, 617 618
Walzel, Oskar, 342

 Page 685

Waser, Johann Heinrich, 342

Wasianski, Ehregott Andreas, 520
Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 34
Weber, Max, 646n 35
Wedekind, Eduard, 280
Weisse, Christian Felix, 410
Wellington, Duke of, 487, 494
Wells, H. G., 82
Werner, Abraham Gottlob, 438 439
Wieland, Christoph Martin, 157, 281, 342, 343, 345, 381 386, 453, 458, 460,
660 661n 8, 667n 37
Wihl, Ludwig, 603
WilamowitzMoellendorff, U. von, 114, 115, 137, 509, 610 611, 612, 639n 1,
676 677n 32
Wilder, Thorton, 183
William of Ockham, 654n 31
Witte (Rostock professor), 438
Wolbock, Baron yon (French diplomat), 474
Wolff, Christian, 599
Wundt, Wilhelm, 20

Z
Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 15, 400, 405, 422, 448, 481, 556
Ziegesaar, Silvie yon, 470, 473
Zimmermann, Johann Georg, 278
Zinkgräf, Julius, 527, 537, 540, 671n 7
Zumbusch, Kaspar Clemens von, 566
Zweig, Arnold, 516