Nietzsches Goethe A Portrait of A Good E PDF

NIETZSCHEʼS GOETHE
A PORTRAIT OF A GOOD EUROPEAN
By
Ásgeir Jóhannesson
Candidatus Juris, University of Iceland, 2005

Diploma in Philosophy, University of St Andrews, 2008
A Dissertation
Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a
Masterʼs Degree in Philosophy
Supervisor: Professor Aaron Ridley
School of Humanities
University of Southampton
September 2009
Asgeir Johannesson 2 Nietzscheʼs Goethe
The question which stirs us as we think beyond the grave of our own generation is
not the well-being human beings will enjoy in the future but what kind of people
they will be.… We do not want to breed well-being in people, but rather those
characteristics which we think of as constituting the human greatness and nobility
of our nature.
– Max Weber1
Introduction
One of the most striking passages in Friedrich Nietzscheʼs corpus is his account of
his ʻjourney to Hadesʼ in the second volume of Human All Too Human.2 Apparently,
all masks were removed in this aphorism and a deeply personal corner of
Nietzscheʼs psyche was revealed:
I, too, have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and shall be
there often yet; and not only rams have I sacrificed to be able to
speak with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood.
Four pairs it was that did not deny themselves to my sacrifice:
Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and
Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to
terms when I have long wandered alone; they may call me right
and wrong; to them will I listen when in the process they call each
other right and wrong. Whatsoever I say, resolve, or think up for
myself or others – on these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes
fixed on me.3
The four pairs prompt a lot of questions to the mind of a curious reader. Why these
pairs? What do they stand for? Which one does Nietzsche most identify with? The
last one of these questions was answered by Nietzsche in a note that he jotted
down later: ʻMy ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goetheʼ.4
1 Max Weber, Political Writings, a selection edited by Peter Lassman and translated by Ronald
Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 15. – I borrow these wise words of
Max Weber from a quotation in the beginning of Nietzsche, Politics & Modernity: A Critique of
Liberal Reason by David Owen (London: SAGE Publications, 1995).
2 According to the myth, the poet Orpheus, who is said to be the author of the mysteries of
Dionysus, descended into Hades and returned.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche (HH2a), Human All Too Human, Volume II, Part One: ʻAssorted Opinions
and Maximsʼ, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New
York: The Modern Library, 2000), §408. – Although I use Kaufmannʼs translation here (and in
the remark that follows), other quotations from Human All Too Human will be from R. J.
Hollingdaleʼs translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
4 Ibid. Kaufmannʼs remark of §408. The note can be found in the German Gesammelte Werke,
Musarionausgabe, Volume XIV, p. 109 (Munich: Musarion Verlag, 1920-1929).
Of these intellectual ancestors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a writer and

polymath who lived in the German town of Weimar, had a premier status.5 The
numerous quotations and references to Goethe, indicate that he was constantly on
Nietzscheʼs mind from his Gymnasium education in Schulpforta to his final
productive days in Turin.6 And what clearly distinguishes Goethe from other
prominent characters in Nietzscheʼs writings is that he received more favourable
coverage than any other: praise was rife and criticism scarce. Nietzscheʼs
intellectual transformation never required him to “shut doors” on Goethe, who even
seems to have been a major guidance for Nietzsche when he turned against his
earlier heroes of Schopenhauer and Wagner. As Adrian Del Caro puts it, ʻGoethe
was one of a few individuals whose image kept apace with Nietzscheʼs self-
inflating image over the yearsʼ.7 Arguably, he was the only modern man in that
category.
In this dissertation I will explore how Nietzsche conceived of Goethe and
what he meant for him. It is particularly Goetheʼs life, rather than his art, that
Nietzsche considered exemplary. Therefore, my primary focus will be on
Nietzscheʼs account of his characteristics, along with Goetheʼs biographical works,
especially Conversation of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret and the Italian
Journey, both of which Nietzsche read repeatedly. Still, Goetheʼs art had impact on
Nietzscheʼs thought, which I will account for as well.
I consider my task to be important for a better understanding of Nietzscheʼs
ideas, because his conception of a prestigious intellectual ancestor must be
revealing for his self-image as a philosopher and how he wanted to be understood
by his readers.
In the first chapter I will discuss an aspect of Goetheʼs life, namely his
perpetual development and transformation. The subject is a formal setting for the
5 Goethe was born in Frankfurt in 1749 and died in Weimar in 1832, twelve years before
Nietzsche was born.
6 Goethe is mentioned 311 times if the unpublished notes are included, only Schopenhauer (394
times) and Wagner (327 times) are mentioned more often. Socrates (192 times) and Christ (129
times) are in distant fourth and fifth place. Moreover, there are plenty of indirect quotes to
Goethe where his name does not appear.
7 Adrian Del Caro (1989b), ʻDionysian Classicism, or Nietzscheʼs Appropriation of an Aesthetic
Normʼ (Journal of the History of Ideas, 50:4, pp. 586-605), pp. 594-595.
content of the next for chapters. The subject of the second chapter is Nietzscheʼs
Europeanism and Goethe as a good European. Chapters three, four and five can
all be seen as a further elaboration of what it meant for Nietzsche to be such a
European – which explains the dissertationʼs subtitle: ʻA Portrait of a Good
Europeanʼ. The third chapter is about art and how Nietzsche related to Goetheʼs
conception of the classical and romantic. Morality is the topic of the fourth chapter,
namely what Goethe meant for Nietzscheʼs moral project. Finally, before I reach
my conclusion, I will discuss the Dionysian faith and why Nietzscheʼs Goethe
became involved in it.
The divinity works in the living not in the dead; in the becoming and changing, not
in the become and the fixed.
– Goethe 8
Chapter 1: Transformative Life
Goethe and Socrates have at least one thing in common: they have primarily
influenced human thought through their life and character, but not through well
structured or systematic ideas. Walter Kaufmann argues that the two men have
had a comparable impact, which may seem as a daring claim.9 But when it is kept
in mind how Goetheʼs wisdom, vitality, anti-philistinism, creativity, passion, self-
control and autonomy, have influenced key intellectuals – such as Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Pierre Hadot, and Kaufmann
himself – the comparison begins to sound quite plausible.
Some of these men could perhaps have made the same confession as Hegel
made in a letter to Goethe: ʻWhen I survey the course of my spiritual development,
I see you everywhere woven into it and would like to call myself one of your sons;
my inward nature has… set its course by your creations as by signal firesʼ.10 In the
case of Nietzsche, Kaufmann makes the startling claim that Goethe was ʻthe
historical event which Nietzscheʼs whole philosophy attempts to recapture in
aphorismsʼ.11 Whether that is true or not, it is at least certain that he saw Goethe
as an exemplary figure, as the rest of this dissertation will reveal.
Nietzsche discussed the meaning of exemplars in the Untimely Meditations,
where he asked the question how oneʼs life can receive the ʻhighest valueʼ and the
ʻdeepest significanceʼ. His answer was that such goal is achieved only if one lives
8 Johann Peter Eckermann (1836), Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret,
translated by John Oxenford (Revised Edition, London: George Bell & Sons, 1883), p. 367
(February 13, 1829).
9 Walter Kaufmann (1959), From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press), p. 59.
10 Walter Kaufmann (1949), ʻGoethe and the History of Ideasʼ (Journal of the History of Ideas,
10:5, pp. 503-516), p. 515.
11 Ibid., p. 514.
ʻfor the good of the rarest and most valuable exemplarsʼ.12 By saying this he was
neither suggesting that people should sacrifice themselves for the sake of some
higher beings nor was he advocating for a shallow hero-worship. The idea is that
people should discover ʻthe fundamental lawʼ of their true nature or higher self,
which does not lie ʻdeep withinʼ them, but ʻimmeasurably high aboveʼ them.13 Or,
as James Conant puts it, exemplars disclose your higher self, which ʻcomes into
view only through confrontation with what you trust and admire in an exemplary
otherʼ.14
The aim is to gain self-knowledge and to grow in a suitable direction. There
were at least two preconditions for such growth, according to Nietzsche. The first
one was a believe in culture:
Anyone who believes in culture is thereby saying: ʻI see above me
something higher and more human than I am; let everyone help
me to attain it, as I will help everyone who knows and suffers as I
do: so that at last the man may appear who feels himself perfect
and boundless in knowledge and love, perception and power, and
who in his completeness is at one with nature, the judge and
evaluator of thingsʼ.15
The second one is a loving heart, because ʻit is love alone that can bestow on the
soul, not only clear, discriminating and self-contemptuous view of itself, but also
the desire to look beyond itself and to seek with all its might for a higher self as yet
still concealed from itʼ.16 Much later, in 1888, near the end of his productive life,
Nietzsche wrote in an unpublished note that love ʻis the most astonishing proof…
of how far the transfigurative force of intoxication can goʼ.17
12 Friedrich Nietzsche (UM), Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), ʻSchopenhauer as Educatorʼ, §6.
13 UM, ʻSchopenhauer as Educatorʼ, §1.
14 James Conant (2001), ʻNietzscheʼs Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educatorʼ in
Nietzscheʼs Postmoralism, edited by Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), p. 203.
16 Ibid.
17 Friedrich Nietzsche (WLN), Writings from the Late Notebooks (posthumous publication of
Nietzscheʼs notebooks), translated by Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), §14[20] (spring 1888).
Not all people have these qualities and they cannot simply be taught,
although upbringing and environment must play some role. Goethe and John
Peter Eckermann discussed preconditions of personal advancement at one point
in their famous conversations. ʻFor highly endowed naturesʼ said Eckermann, ʻthe
study of the authors of antiquity may be perfectly invaluable; but, in general, it
appears to have little influence upon personal characterʼ. It is easy to imagine
Nietzsche nodding his head approvingly when reading Goetheʼs answer:
ʻThere is nothing to be said against thatʼ, returned Goethe; ʻbut it
must not, therefore, be said, that the study of the authors of
antiquity is entirely without effect upon the formation of character.
A worthless man will always remain worthless, and a little mind will
not, by daily intercourse with the great minds of antiquity, become
one inch greater. But a noble man, in whose soul God has placed
the capability for future greatness of character, and elevation of
mind, will, by a knowledge of, and familiar intercourse with, the
elevated natures of ancient Greeks and Romans, every day make
a visible approximation to similar greatnessʼ.18
Here, Goethe spoke of the ʻformation of characterʼ, a theme that was constantly on
his mind. He went as far as declaring that he hated everything that merely
ʻinstructedʼ him without ʻaugmentingʼ or ʻdirectly invigoratingʼ his activity, as
Nietzsche quoted in the foreword of his essay On the Use and Disadvantage of
History for Life.19
Aaron Ridley emphasises the connection between exemplarity and art in
Nietzscheʼs philosophy and points out that ʻit is part of the value of art that it can
present exemplary figures for our edification or improvementʼ.20 Indeed,
Nietzscheʼs criterion of true aesthetic value was, as Conant observes, that art is
somehow ʻable to educate or provoke us to self-transformative changeʼ.21 So, an
educational aim is not an incidental feature of art but an essential feature of
Nietzscheʼs conception of art. One of the edifying elements of art and other forms
of human creativity is to make things meaningful, ʻto create an order in the midst of
disorder, to make up a meaning where nature itself does not provide oneʼ, as
18 Eckermann (1836), p. 236 (April 1, 1827).

19 UM, ʻOn the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Lifeʼ, Foreword.
20 Aaron Ridley (2007), Nietzsche on Art (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge), p. 101.
21 Conant (2001), p. 222.
Martha Nussbaum puts it.22 It is in this context that Nietzsche said that he saw art
ʻas the only superior counterforce to all will to denial of life, as that which is… anti-
nihilist par excellenceʼ, but by nihilism he meant the problem where human
existence seems to have no meaning, purpose or essential value. Art is thus ʻthe
great seduction to lifeʼ and ʻthe great stimulus to lifeʼ.23 Humanities, such as history
and philosophy, should partly have the same function, according to Nietzsche.
Such task of providing edification and meaning is without doubt an integral
element of Goetheʼs work. For Nietzsche, it was mainly Goetheʼs published
conversations, letters, and autobiographical books that were powerful in this
regard, although his poems and novels did also play a role. In particular, it was the
man Goethe became during and after his eye-opening journey to Italy in his late
thirties, which I will account for both later in this chapter and in chapter four.
Goetheʼs own inspiration had various sources. Among those who he could
learn a lot from were a few English and French writers, the Dutch-Jewish Spinoza,
Italian Renaissance artists, and great characters of ancient Greece and Rome. But
Goetheʼs work did first and foremost evolve from his own life experiences: ʻI have
never uttered anything [in my poetry] which I have not experiencedʼ, he said, and
added: ʻI have only composed love-songs when I have lovedʼ.24
Nietzsche saw this kind of a personal evolvement to be an advantage, not
only in art but in humanities as well. In fact, he maintained that philosophers who
thought of themselves as being purely impersonal, lacked both self-knowledge and
a dynamic character. This is the subject of section 481 in Daybreak, which is
important for understanding a major aspect of Nietzscheʼs conception of Goethe,
and is therefore necessary to quote in its entirety:
If you compare Kant and Schopenhauer with Plato, Spinoza,
Pascal, Rousseau, Goethe in respect of their soul and not of their
mind, then the former are at a disadvantage: their thoughts do not
constitute a passionate history of a soul; there is nothing here that
22 Martha C. Nussbaum (1999), ʻNietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysusʼ, in The Cambridge

Companion to Schopenhauer, edited by Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge
University press), p. 363.
23 Friedrich Nietzsche (TI), Twilight of the Idols, in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, 2nd
edn, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), ʻExpeditions of an Untimely
Manʼ, §24.
24 Eckermann (1836), p. 457 (March 14, 1830).
would make a novel, no crises, catastrophes or death-scenes;

their thinking is not at the same time an involuntary biography of a
soul but, in the case of Kant, the biography of a head, in the case
of Schopenhauer the description and mirroring of a character (ʻthat
which is unalterableʼ) and pleasure in the ʻmirrorʼ itself, that is to
say in an excellent intellect. When he does shine through his
thoughts, Kant appears honest and honourable in the best sense,
but insignificant: he lacks breadth and power; he has not
experienced very much, and his manner of working deprives him
of the time in which to experience things – I am thinking, of
course, not of crude “events” impinging from without, but of the
vicissitudes and convulsions which befall the most solitary and
quietest life which possesses leisure and burns with the passions
of thinking. Schopenhauer has one advantage over him: he at
least possesses a certain vehement ugliness in hatred, desire,
vanity, mistrust; his disposition is somewhat more ferocious and he
had time and leisure for this ferocity. But he lacked “development”:
just as development is lacking in the domain of his ideas; he had
no “history”.25
There are two points here that illuminate Nietzscheʼs view of Goethe. The first one
is related to Nietzscheʼs rejection of the conception of philosophy as “pure
science” in favour of a conception where the whole personality and the emotions
are intertwined with philosophical theories. What is wrong with Kant and
Schopenhauer is that ʻtheir thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of a
soul; there is nothing here that would make a novel, no crises, catastrophes or
death-scenes; their thinking is not at the same time an involuntary biography of a
soulʼ. While Nietzsche constantly cited Goethe as someone who truly lived, Kant
was someone who never did so, neither physically nor mentally. Goetheʼs vitality
and passionate way of living and thinking was lacking in Kant: his thoughts were
sterilised – and his thinking was merely a biography of his head. Schopenhauerʼs
thoughts, on the other hand, mirrored his intelligent but unalterable character.
Counter to Goethe, however, he lacked enough self-knowledge and self-
consciousness to realise how himself was everywhere in his writings.
Nietzscheʼs affinity with Goethe in this regard is evident. Barker Fairley is
probably right when he says in his essay ʻGoethe and Nietzscheʼ, that if ʻthese two
illuminate, as no others do, the relation of art and philosophy to personality, it is
25 Friedrich Nietzsche (D), Daybreak, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997), §481.
because they were both artists and philosophers of an unusually personal kindʼ.26
Fairley has an interesting theory which could cast light on the following explanation
in the Daybreak passage: ʻI am thinking, of course, not of crude “events” impinging
from without, but of the vicissitudes and convulsions which befall the most solitary
and quietest life which possesses leisure and burns with the passions of thinkingʼ.
Fairley wonders why Nietzscheʼs ʻincredibly sequestered and intellectualʼ life did
not cause the throttling of his emotions:
Instead, we find that his intellectual life was as constantly thrilled
with emotional cross-currents as Goetheʼs. So much so that Janko
Lavrin… says of him, and says truthfully, ʻWhatever our opinion of
Nietzscheʼs views may be, we feel in them all the pathos, all the
passion, all the contradictions of lifeʼ. His inability to find emotional
release in outer relationships – he was once, it seems, drunk with
liquor, never quite in love with a woman – seems to have had the
extraordinary effect in his case of pitchforking his emotions into his
intellect. Instead of becoming atrophied, his emotions get into the
wrong box and make all his thinking strangely excited and
incalculable. It is as if his intellect were the seat of his emotions.
Explain it as we may – there is no case like it – his emotional
intellect – if I may call it that – enables him, forces him, to throw
himself, whole and undivided, into all he writes and says in a
fashion which compels us to associate him with Goethe as one
who must speak with his entire personality or not at all.27
So, the vitality and passions in Nietzscheʼs books are not a consequence of a
vigorous and passionate life, as in Goetheʼs case, but of the transfigurations of
emotions: they got into the ʻwrong boxʼ – and made his writings gripping,
innovative and powerful. The critics of emotions in philosophy would probably add
that this render his philosophy dubious, but that would of course just be restating
the way of thinking which Nietzsche was attacking. In this debate, it has to be kept
in mind that Nietzsche was no naïve relativist regarding the truth. What is at stake
is well described by Kaufmann:
The self-denial of those scholars who do not permit themselves
any strong emotions, such as powerful admiration and detestation,
deprives them of an important aid to self-knowledge. Typically,
they think that they know how “one” does things and how things
simply arenʼt done, who is to be taken seriously and who not, what
26 Barker Fairley (1934), ʻNietzsche and Goetheʼ (Bulletin of John Rylands Library, 18:2, pp. 3-19),
p. 308.
27 Ibid., pp. 309-310.
counts and what doesnʼt count; and since they teach and write
with a firm sense of consensus and hence need not use the
pronoun “I” very often, their readers and students often fail to see
the blatant and uncritical dogmatism of this procedure. A lack of
self-awareness is frequently mistaken for objectivity.28
The second point regarding section 481 in Daybreak concerns the mentioning of
ʻdevelopmentʼ in the final sentence: ʻ[Schopenhauer] lacked “development”: just as
development is lacking in the domain of his ideas; he had no “history”ʼ. Kaufmann
claims that ʻGoetheʼs greatest contribution to the discovery of the mind was that,
more than anyone else he showed how the mind can be understood in terms of
developmentʼ.29 Kaufmann explains it by contrasting Goetheʼs view with Kantʼs:
In Kantʼs conception of the mind… development has no place. He
claimed to describe the human mind as it always is, has been, and
will be. There is no inkling that it might change in the course of
history, not to speak of biological evolution or the course of a
personʼs life.30
Goetheʼs evolutionary view of the mind was very influential, not only among
ordinary people but also among scholars and other intellectuals, which is quite
astonishing when it is kept in mind that it was not put forward as a theory. Rather,
Goethe ʻshowed and made people see how the mind develops and needs to be
understood in terms of developmentʼ.31 He did it both by the example of his own
life, experienced and documented by his friends; and through poetry and fictions,
including his two volume work of Faust and his two books about Wilhelm Meister:
Wilhelm Meisterʼs Apprenticeship and Wilhelm Meister Journeyman Years.
The lyric play Faust has been interpreted as a celebration of ceaseless
striving. Whether that is true or not, it is at least certain that the work stimulated ʻan
overwhelming interest in becoming rather than being, in processes rather than
resultsʼ, as I will discuss in the last chapter.32 Although Nietzsche was critical of
Faust, his ideas suggest that he must have celebrated this feature of it.
28 Walter Kaufmann (1980b), Discovering the Mind, Volume Two: Nietzsche, Heidegger and Buber
(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers), p. 10.
29 Walter Kaufmann (1980a), Discovering the Mind, Volume One: Goethe, Kant and Hegel (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers), p. 25.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., p. 28.
Wilhelm Meisterʼs Apprenticeship is about the protagonistʼs cultivation and

spiritual development. It is often considered to have created a new literary genre:
the Bildungsroman. Although the German concept of Bildung can simply be
translated into English as ʻeducationʼ, it has a “flavour” which gives rise to
alternative translations, such as formation, cultivation, development, shaping,
instruction, creation, refinement, and growth.33 Goethe himself used the term
Bildung frequently, but it was Karl Morgenstern who first labelled the genre – and
he defined it in the following way:
It will justly bear the name Bildungsroman firstly and primarily on
account of its thematic material, because it portrays the Bildung of
the hero in its beginnings and growth to a certain stage of
completeness; and also secondly because it is by virtue of this
portrayal that it furthers the readerʼs Bildung to a much greater
extent than any other kind of novel.34
Such ʻgrowth to a certain stage of completenessʼ or totality is at the core of a
Bildungsroman, according to Martin Swales, who argues that it ʻis a novel form
that is animated by a concern for the whole man unfolding organically in all his
complexity and richnessʼ.35
This is exactly how Goethe himself has often been described, for instance by
his good friend Friedrich Schiller, who saw Goethe as the antipode of the modern
tendency of making people fragmentary: ʻwe see not merely individual persons but
whole classes of human beings developing only a part of their capacities, while the
rest of them, like a stunted plant, show only a feeble vestige of their natureʼ.36
Goetheʼs personality was seen as versatile, which can be an ambivalent
characteristic, but Schiller reinterpreted it and made people see how Goetheʼs
seeming versatility was in fact the most admirable quality of wholeness, which
enabled him to actualise his entire potential.
33 A similar concept is to be found in ancient Greece: Paideia (παιδεία), which can be described
as an educational process of transforming human beings into their genuine human nature.
34 Martin Swales (1978), The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton:
Princeton University Press), p. 12.
35 Ibid., p. 14.
36 Friedrich Schiller (1795), On the Aesthetic Education of Man, translated by Reginald Snell
(Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2004), p. 38.
Nietzscheʼs description of Goethe resembles Schillerʼs in this regard. ʻWhat

he aspired to was totalityʼ, said Nietzsche about Goethe in the Twilight of the Idols,
and then he elaborates on what that means: ʻhe strove against the separation of
reason, sensuality, feeling, will (– preached in the most horrible scholasticism by
Kant, the antipodes of Goethe); he disciplined himself to a whole, he created
himselfʼ.37
The only fiction that Nietzsche wrote, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, can be
considered as a Bildungsroman, for it describes the formation of the protagonist,
Zarathustra. Moreover, such organic growth of a person that Swales describes, is
constantly on Nietzscheʼs mind, and one can even argue that Nietzscheʼs whole
life, like Goetheʼs, is akin to a Bildungsroman. Nietzscheʼs attitude towards his own
life seems at least to reflect such view, as is evident from the subtitle of Ecce
Homo: ʻHow one Becomes What One Isʼ.
Goetheʼs perennial development is particularly evident in his poetry: he
revolutionised poetry a few times during his roughly sixty year writing period. He
wrote for instance the groundbreaking West-Eastern Divan at the age of seventy. It
shows how he never stagnated, indeed, he kept his vitality and freshness to his
death at the age of eighty-two.38 But although Goetheʼs thought and style kept
changing, ʻthe changes were not gratuitousʼ, as Kaufmann points out: ʻHe was no
chameleon, no weathervane, and did not bow to fashion. His development gave
every appearance of being organic, and his contemporaries witnessed it with their
own eyes, with growing fascinationʼ.39 In other words, he was always an authentic
and genuine character.
Goetheʼs formative years thus never ended, but his development in early life
was of course particularly important for who he became. Goethe described this
early formation in his autobiography, Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life. It is a
very original autobiography and Kaufmann correctly states that it ʻcreated a new
perspective for the study of an artist or, indeed, of man in general: life and work
37 TI, ʻExpeditions of an Untimely Manʼ, §49.

38 One amusing sign of it is that he never stopped chasing young females, even when he was over
eighty years old.
39 Kaufmann (1980a), p. 26.
must be studied together as an organic unity and in terms of developmentʼ.40

However, probably the most important event in Goetheʼs intellectual development
came later: it was his two year trip to Italy from the age of thirty-seven to thirty-
nine. The travel book he wrote, Italian Journey, reveals how he transfigured during
that period. ʻThe rebirth which is transforming me from within continuesʼ, he wrote,
and what followed was a startling passage, especially when it is kept in mind that
at the time he was one of the most celebrated writers in Europe:
Though I expected really to learn something here, I never thought
I should have to start at the bottom of the school and have to
unlearn or completely relearn so much. But now I have realised
this and accepted it, I find that the more I give up my old habits of
thought, the happier I am. I am like an architect who wanted to
erect a tower and began by laying a bad foundation. Before it is
too late, he realises this and deliberately tears down all that he
has built so far above ground. He tries to enlarge and improve his
design, to make his foundation more secure, and looks forward
happily to building something that will last. May Heaven grant that,
on my return, the moral effect of having lived in a larger world will
be noticeable, for I am convinced that my moral sense is
undergoing as great a transformation as my aesthetic.41
It is Goethe after this great moral and aesthetic transformation that Nietzsche
admired more than anything else. What is amazing is that the birth of his new self
required the total death of the old one. Even though the transformation was
wonderful, it was not peaceful and painless, but destructive and afflictive. One
poem in West-Eastern Divan, ʻSelige Sehnsuchtʼ or ʻEcstatic Longingʼ, casts
further light on this thought – and Nietzscheʼs spirit is easily spotted in it:
Tell it to the wisest only,
For the mob will mock such learning:
I will praise the living creature
That can long for death by burning.
[…]
Die into becoming! Grasp
This, or sad and weary
40 Kaufmann (1959), p. 52.

41 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1816/1817), Italian Journey, [1786-1788], translated by W. H.
Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 151 (Rome, December 20,
1786).
Shall your sojourn ever be

On the dark earth dreary.42
ʻDie into becomingʼ in the final verse is a translation of ʻStirb und Werdeʼ, which
literary means ʻDie and Becomeʼ. This is what a transformative life requires: the
wisdom that suffering and death of what one has been, is necessary for a decent
development.
Two questions arise in relation to this discussion of death, transformation and
rebirth. First, whether there is not a certain mind that is the essence of each
human being. Goetheʼs answer is that there is no such essence; there is no object
that corresponds to a human mind. Rather, man is his deeds. Studying behaviour,
including the expressions of thoughts, desires, feelings, emotions, and so on; is to
study the mind. If people want to know themselves better, they should carefully
notice their deeds and behaviour and be open to the possibility that other people
may know their mind even better than they do.43 Kaufmann puts it as follows:
Goethe opposed the essentialism of those who considered the
mind or soul a ghost in the machine or a spirit that resides behind
or above the phenomenal self. Many learned from him that man is
his deeds, that mind is what it does, and that the way to discover
the mind is not through concept-mongering but through
experience.
This was not a common approach, but Nietzsche followed in Goetheʼs footsteps
when he ʻtaught us to see betterʼ, as Kaufmann points out.44 ʻIn any caseʼ, he
argues, Nietzsche followed Goethe in denying ʻthat we have an essence that is
concealed somewhere within us or, worse, behind the whole world of phenomenaʼ.
Textual evidences for this are all over Nietzscheʼs writings, for instance when he
said in the Untimely Meditations that ʻeverything bears witness to what we are, our
42 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (SP), Selected Poetry, translated by David Luke (London:
Penguin Books, 1999), §77, pp. 182-183.
43 According to my reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he is a supporter of this view. In his notebooks,
published as Culture and Value (edited by Georg Henrik von Wright in collaboration with Heikki
Nyman (revised edition of the text by Alois Pichler) and translated by Peter Winch (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 1998)) one can find sentences as “The face is the soul of the body” (p.
26e) and “The human being is the best picture of the human soul” (p. 56e). – It is evident from
the notebooks that Wittgenstein was heavily influenced by Goethe.
44 Kaufmann (1980a), p. 54.
friendships and enmities, our glance and the clasp of our hand, our memory and
what which we do not remember, our books and our handwritingʼ.45
Secondly, the question arises what this transformation hardship is for? Why
bother? Nietzscheʼs answer would be simple: the aim is to avoid stagnation and
conduce to a fertile and creative life. The value of such life is not only the products
it will entail, but also the meaning it has for the creator himself: nihilism is
overcome and life is affirmed. And, as in the case of Goethe, ʻthe valuation of
creativity implies a valuation of sufferingʼ, as Bernard Reginster observes.46 Thus,
Nietzsche wrote in Zarathustra that although creating ʻis the great redemption from
sufferingʼ, to be a creator ʻrequires suffering and much transformationʼ.47 In this
regard, he talks about death in the same sense as Goethe: ʻYes, much bitter dying
must there be in your lives, you creators! Thus are you advocates and justifiers of
all impermanenceʼ.48 And multiple rebirths as well: ʻVerily, through a hundred souls
I have gone my way and through a hundred cradles and pangs of birthʼ.49 As
Graham Parkes, Zarathustraʼs translator, makes clear in a footnote, Nietzsche was
not referring to ʻreincarnation across a series of lives, but rather of deaths and
rebirths within one and the same lifetimeʼ.50
Related to this discussion is an important theme in Nietzscheʼs writings,
namely sickness and health. Nietzsche saw Goethe as a remarkably healthy
individual, despite the fact that Goethe, just as himself, often suffered from poor
physical health. The reason is Nietzscheʼs conception of health: it meant less the

46 Bernard Reginster (2006), The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), p. 243.
47 Friedrich Nietzsche (Z), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), Second Part, ʻUpon the Isles of the Blestʼ, §2.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., Explanatory Notes, p. 298. – Parkes quotes from an unpublished not by Nietzsche to
prove is point: ʻOne must want to pass away in order to be able to arise again – from one day to
the next. Transformation through a hundred souls – let that be your life, your fate: And then
finally: to will this entire series over again!ʼ (W (10: 5[1], 227).
absence of illness than the ability to combat and overcome disease.51 For both
Goethe and Nietzsche, sickness seems to have been a fertile ground for new
“rebirths” and creations. One could even argue that Goetheʼs sickness in his early
life in Frankfurt made him a great poet and that Nietzscheʼs sickness during and
after the Basel years made him a great philosopher. This idea was well expressed
by Nietzsche in an unpublished note: ʻSickness is a powerful stimulant – but one
has to be healthy enough for itʼ.52 Being healthy in this sense, according to
Nietzsche, is what he called being ʻhealthy at bottomʼ in Ecce Homo:
I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again: the condition
for this – every physiologist would admit that – is that one be
healthy at bottom. A typically morbid being cannot become healthy,
much less make itself healthy. For a typically healthy person,
conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for
life, for living more. This, in fact, is how that long period of
sickness appears to me now: as it were, I discovered life anew,
including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as others
cannot easily taste them – I turned my will to health, to life, into a
philosophy.53
I have now accounted for Nietzscheʼs ideas about mental formation through
exemplary figures and how Goethe is likely to have inspired him in several ways.
Goetheʼs wholeness and personal approach to work, his Bildungsroman and the
focus on the development of the mind, his link between suffering and creativity, his
transformative nature to avoid stagnation, – all these things seem to have had a
profound impact on Nietzscheʼs and they must have been a vital part of his
conception of Goethe.
Goethe was a master in the art of living, but, as Fairley puts it, ʻhe says little
about it and leaves itʼ to others ʻto find it slowlyʼ for themselves: ʻNietzsche drags it
into the daylight and turns it this way and that, urging his fellowmen to sweeten the
foundation of their lives, to unlearn their guilt and their fears, to accept thingsʼ.54 In
51 See Nicholas Martin (2008), ʻNietzscheʼs Goethe: In Sickness and in Healthʼ (Publications of the
English Goethe Society, 77:2, pp. 113-124), p. 118.
52 WLN, §18[11] (July-August 1888).
53 Friedrich Nietzsche (EH), Ecce Homo, in Kaufmann, Walter (ed.) Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), ʻWhy I Am So Wiseʼ, §2.
54 Fairley (1934), p. 314.

what follows, Nietzscheʼs Goethe is not everyoneʼs Goethe – but on all major
points, I regard Nietzscheʼs picture of him as insightful and accurate.
I hate all bungling like sin, but most of all bungling in state-affairs, which produces
nothing but mischief to thousands and millions.
– Goethe 55
Chapter 2: European Culture
Nietzsche called himself the last apolitical German. The context of such
declaration is probably first and foremost his animosity against the subordination
of culture to politics which, according to him, happened in Prussia under the rule of
Otto von Bismarck.56
Nietzsche was committed to cultural advancement and, as Keith Ansell-
Pearson points out, he accused ʻthe modern bureaucratic stateʼ of having a stifling
effect on ʻcreativity and individualityʼ.57 This view was reflected in Twilight of the
Idols, where Nietzsche asserted that culture and the state were ʻantagonistsʼ.58
However, there were other factors that contributed to an apolitical self-
identity. Nietzsche said a lot about what he was against in party politics:
nationalism, socialism, anarchism, liberalism, Christian conservatism, etc. On the
other hand, he was very quiet about what he favours, at least he did not discuss it
straightforwardly. The only exception is when he seemed pleased when Georg
Brandes, the Danish critic and scholar, labelled him an aristocratic radical in a
letter: ʻThe expression “aristocratic radicalism”, which you use, is very good. That
is, if I may so, the shrewdest remark that I have read about myself till nowʼ.59
Still, there was one political idea which concerned Nietzsche deeply and was
revealed in his writings: the vision of a European federalism and a pan-European
55 Eckermann (1836), p. 571 (early in March, 1832).

56 Such subordination did not happen in state powers that Nietzsche liked, such as in the Roman
Empire.
57 Keith Ansell-Pearson (1994), Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), p. 33.
58 TI, ʻWhat the Germans lackʼ, §4.
59 Friedrich Nietzsche (SL), Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited and translated by
Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1969), Letter 160 (to Georg Brandes;
Nice, December 2, 1887), p. 279. – Brandes was converted by Nietzsche and began to identify
himself as an aristocratic radical. He founded along with his brother a political party in Denmark,
ʻDet Radicale Venstreʼ, which still exists. Curiously, it is a centrist liberal party. He also wrote a
classic book about Goethe.
culture. This conviction and hope was most beautifully expressed in section 156 of
Beyond Good and Evil:
Thanks to the pathological manner in which nationalist nonsense
has alienated and continues to alienate the peoples of Europe
from each other; thanks as well to the short-sighted and swift-
handed politicians who have risen to the top with the help of this
nonsense, and have no idea of the extent to which the politics of
dissolution that they practice can only be entrʼacte [intermission]
politics, – thanks to all this and to some things that are strictly
unmentionable today, the most unambiguous signs declaring that
Europe wants to be one are either overlooked or willfully and
mendaciously reinterpreted. The mysterious labour in the souls of
all the more profound and far-ranging people of this century has
actually been focused on preparing the path to this new synthesis
and on experimentally anticipating the Europeans of the future.60
Two significant intertwined issues are raised in this passage. The first is
Nietzscheʼs blistering rejection of nationalism. There are a few separate reasons
for Nietzscheʼs anti-nationalism. I have already mentioned the danger of
subordination of culture to the state, which is much more likely to happen in
patriotic nation-states, than in empires or federations.
Secondly, it was the danger that nationalism posed to the multiracial Europe.
Nietzsche was very aware of how nationalism could cause the racial situation to
explode, as is for instance evident in Human All to Human, where he argued that
ʻthe entire problem of the Jews exists only within national statesʼ, but as soon as ʻit
is no longer a question of the conserving of nationsʼ, the Jewish people ʻwill be just
as usable and desirable as an ingredientʼ of Europeans ʻas any other national
residueʼ.61
60 Friedrich Nietzsche (BGE), Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), §256. – His repugnance to national hatred is clearly
expressed in another section: ʻWe have to accept the fact that all sorts of clouds and
disturbances (basically, small fits of stupefaction) drift over the spirit of a people who suffers and
wants to suffer from national nervous fevers and political ambition. With todayʼs Germans, for
instance, there is the anti-French stupidity one moment and the anti-Jewish stupidity the next,
not the anti-Polish stupidity, now the Christian-Romantic, the Wagnerian, the Teutonic, the
Prussian […] or whatever else they might be called, these little stupors of the German spirit and
conscience. (BGE, §251)
61 Friedrich Nietzsche (HH1), Human All Too Human, Volume 1, translated by R. J. Hollingdale.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), §475.
Thirdly, Nietzsche was a classical philologist who identified with the culture of
ancient Greece, in other words, he was an enthusiastic Hellenophile. What he
wanted was a pan-European culture as a descendant of classical culture.
The fourth reason is related to the third one: Nietzsche did not feel as he had
other fatherland than the whole Europe. He grew up in Germany and wrote in
German, a language he was always dedicated to master and improve, but fell out
of love with his original fatherland and relinquished his passport. At the time, he
was living in Switzerland but did not get a Swiss passport instead, so he was
without one. Nietzsche claimed Polish ancestry and considered himself to have
the look and characteristics of the Polish aristocracy, but he liked to stay in Italy,
where he was impressed by the atmosphere of the place and people. Moreover,
Nietzsche was especially fond of French culture and claimed that ʻthe nature of the
Frenchman is much more closely related to the Greek than is the nature of the
Germanʼ.62 He was convinced that France was ʻstill the seat of the most spiritual
and sophisticated culture in Europe, and the preeminent school of tasteʼ.63 In fact,
he claimed that ʻEuropean noblesseʼ of taste, feeling, and manner was the ʻwork
and inventionʼ of Frenchmen.64 But not least, it was their pan-European quality of
harmonising southern European vitality and northern European reason that plaid a
role in their cultural ʻsuperiorityʼ.65 – What can we call such a man other than a
European? – This is why Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo that even by virtue of his
descent, he is ʻgranted an eye beyond all merely local, merely national conditional
perspectivesʼ, and then concludes: ʻit is not difficult for me to be a “good
European”ʼ.66
The second issue raised in section 156 is Nietzscheʼs conviction that ʻEurope
wants to be oneʼ. This shows that he does not consider himself alone in having
pan-European sentiments: an integration is what the Europeans really seek, at
least deep-down. This will is best expressed, consciously or unconsciously, in the
62 Ibid., §221.
63 BGE, §254.
64 Ibid., §253.
65 Ibid., §254.
66 EH, ʻWhy I Am So Wiseʼ, §3.
work of ʻall the more profound and far-rangingʼ Europeans. What disturbs and
holds back the integration process are ʻshort-sighted and swift-handedʼ
nationalistic politicians, who ʻalienateʼ the Europeans from each other.67
Goethe was the individual who was most often mentioned as an example of
a good European. He figured frequently in Nietzscheʼs writing as someone who
had the qualities of disdaining nationalism, being critical of German culture, and
characterising the European soul. Indeed, Nietzsche insisted that Goethe was ʻnot
a German event but a European oneʼ.68
I will begin by discussing Goetheʼs quality of anti-nationalism. It is likely to
have influenced Nietzscheʼs position, which I have already discussed. At least did
Goethe speak in a similar manner about the issue:
[N]ational hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it
strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of
culture. But there is a degree where it vanishes altogether, and
where one stands to a certain extent above nations, and feels the
weal or woe of a neighbouring people, as if it had happened to
oneʼs own. This degree of culture was conformable to my nature,
and I had become strengthened in it long before I had reached my
sixtieth year.69
When the French armies of Napoleon invaded Germany in 1813, it sparked a new
awakening of German nationalism and led to the so-called German ʻWars of
Liberationʼ. Goethe did not assist in the intellectual resistance against Napoleon
and he was harshly criticised for a lack of patriotism. This caused a long-lived
resentment against him in Germany. Goetheʼs defence in the Conversations was
simple:
How could I write songs of hatred without hating! And, between
ourselves, I did not hate the French… How could I, to whom
culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation
67 In spite of Nietzscheʼs crackdown on European nationalism, one should not infer that he was
against all group-identity-making. After all, he wanted a united Europe and good Europeans, but
not, for instance, united mankind and good people. In order to make such identity nothing is
better than a decent enemy, which is something that Nietzsche was honest enough to
acknowledge. See e.g. BGE, §208.
69 Eckermann (1836), p. 457 (March 14, 1830).
which is among the most cultivated of the earth, and to which I

owe so great a part of my own cultivation?70
ʻGoetheʼs heart opened up at the phenomenon Napoleon – it closed up to the
Wars of Liberationʼ, was Nietzscheʼs way of formulating Goetheʼs sentiments.71 It
is true that Goethe held Napoleon in high regard: he was fond of some of his
character traits, strategic though, energy and vision.72 Nietzsche admired
Napoleon as well, primarily for the two reasons that Kaufmann puts well: ʻhe found
in Napoleon the antithesis of the German Wars of Liberation, of the resurgence of
German nationalism, and – besides Goethe – the greatest modern symbol of his
own ideal: the Good Europeanʼ.73
It is especially interesting to see how Nietzsche looked upon the different
roles of Napoleon and Goethe in the pan-European campaign: the former
conceived ʻEurope as a political unitʼ, while the latter imagined a ʻEuropean culture
that would harvest the full inheritance of attained humanityʼ.74 These ideals are of
course intertwined: the one supports the other.
Goetheʼs campaign for a European culture was partly a campaign against
German philistinism. Goetheʼs position regarding German culture seems to have
served as a kind of an authority for Nietzsche: he quoted him repeatedly to support
his criticism of German culture, or, more accurately, the Germanʼs lack of culture.
In any case, he saw Goethe as a fellow-soldier on this battlefield, as on so many
others.
70 Ibid.
72 See e.g. Eckermann (1836), p. 304 (March 11, 1828). – The fascination was mutual: Napoleon
respected Goethe for similar reasons. In addition, he liked Goetheʼs first book, The Sorrows of
Young Werther, and asked the author about it when they met in Weimar.
73 Walter Kaufmann (1974), Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton
University Press), p. 314. – Nietzsche and Goethe were also in agreement regarding the French
Revolution. Nietzsche says e.g. in Twilight of the Idols that he sees ʻone who experienced it as it
has to be experienced – with disgust – Goetheʼ (TI, ʻExpeditions of an Untimely Manʼ, §48).
74 Friedrich Nietzsche (WP), The Will to Power (posthumous publication of Nietzscheʼs
notebooks), 2nd edn., translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage
Books, 1968), §104 (Jan.-Fall 1888). The italics are mine.
Nietzsche regarded German culture to be without meaning, substance and

aim – and concluded that it was mere ʻpublic opinionʼ.75 In the Untimely
Meditations he reminded Germans that their victory over France in 1871 did not
mean a victory of the German culture over French one: ʻwe should not forget that
we are still dependent on Paris in all matters of form, just as before – and that we
have to go on being dependent, for up to now there has been no original German
cultureʼ.76 In the next paragraph he supported his position by referring to Goetheʼs
following expression in the Conversations:
We Germans are of yesterday. We have indeed been properly
cultivated for a century; but a few centuries more must still elapse
before so much mind and elevated culture will become universal
amongst our people that they will appreciate beauty like the
Greeks, that they will be inspired by a beautiful song, and that it
will be said of them ʻit is long since they were barbariansʼ.77
The reason why Nietzsche campaigned against German philistinism was to get
Germans to appreciate the need for cultural change. The end is a higher culture
and not any political vision.78 Still, there is a clear link, according to both Goethe
and Nietzsche, between philistinism and hateful nationalistic sentiments.79 If the
Germans would follow Nietzscheʼs cultural advice, they would have to learn to
appreciate the culture of the French and the ancient Greeks – and thus become
more European.
The cause of German philistinism, according to Nietzsche, seems to be
threefold: the Germanʼs vulgarising ʻdemocratism of cultureʼ,80 the corruptive effect
75 EH, ʻThe Untimely Onesʼ, §1.

76 UM, ʻDavid Straussʼ, §1.
77 Eckermann (1836), p. 255 (May 3, 1827).
78 See e.g the following: ʻThe essential thing has gone out of the entire system of higher education
in Germany: the end, as well as the means to the end. That education, culture, itself is the end –
and not “the Reich”. (TI, ʻWhat the Germans lackʼ, §5).
79 Regarding Goethe, see e.g. the passage, quoted above, from Eckermann (1836), p. 457 (March
14, 1830). Regarding Nietzsche, see e.g. BGE, §256.
of their Christian faith, and the ʻdreary heaviness, lameness, dampness,

sloppinessʼ of their all too common alcoholism, especially the beer-drinking.81
Originally – and at least as long as in his mid-thirties – Nietzsche believed
that the Germans could be able to assist the ʻamalgamationʼ of European nations,
because of their ʻancient and tested quality of being the interpreter and mediator
between peoplesʼ.82 But, perhaps because of intensified German nationalism and
philistinism, he became more and more sceptical regarding not just German
culture, but all German qualities, including their mediator skills. The only exception
was the small group of individuals that met the requirements of being German-
Europeans, such as Goethe, Beethoven, and Heinrich Heine.83 Among these,
there is no doubt who Nietzsche ranked highest, as is for example evident when
he professed that Goethe, who is the oldest of them, ʻis the last German before
whomʼ he felt ʻreverenceʼ.84
However, the question arises how these good sons of Germany were able to
become so cultivated if the German cultural landscape was so bad. Or,
metaphorically speaking, how such fine plants were able to grow in such unfruitful
soil. In the case of Goethe, the answer can be found in the Twilight, where
Nietzsche described how Goethe managed to make himself possible:
He called up to his aid history, the natural sciences, antiquity,
likewise Spinoza, above all practical activity; he surrounded
himself with nothing but closed horizons; he did not sever himself
from life; he placed himself within it; nothing could discourage him
and he took as much as possible upon himself, above himself,
within himself.85
But what about the bunch of native readers or listeners that all writers or musicians
have to have? Their story is quite similar, as is evident from the following passage
of Human all Too Human:
81 Ibid., §2. See also Friedrich Nietzsche (A), The Anti-Christ in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-
Christ, 2nd edn., translated by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), §60.
82 HH1, §475.
83 In addition, he never stopped caring about Richard Wagner and wanted to include him in this
group, although he detested his anti-semitic nationalism.
85 Ibid., §49.
Goethe stood above the Germans in every respect and still stands
above them: he will never belong to them. How could a people
ever be equal to Goethean spirituality in wellbeing and well-
wishing! […] His following was composed of a very small band of
the most highly cultivated people, educated by antiquity, life and
travels, and grown beyond the confines of the merely German: –
he himself did not desire it otherwise.86
So, both Goethe and his followers edified themselves by means of life
experiences, practical work, and knowledge of the culture of ancient Greece and
Rome.87
Nietzsche seems to be describing Goethe and his readers as an isolated
culture on their own – and such reading gets decisive support from Nietzscheʼs
notebooks of 1885, where he spoke of the good German-Europeans as ʻhermitsʼ
who ʻhad their own cultureʼ:
It is no objection… that there have been great hermits in Germany
(e.g., Goethe); for these had their own culture. But like mighty,
defiant, solitary rocks, they were surrounded by the rest of what
was German as by their antithesis – a soft, marshy, insecure
ground upon which every step from other countries made an
ʻimpressionʼ and created a ʻformʼ: German culture was a thing
without character, an almost limitless compliance.88
This view gets further support from Human All Too Human, where Nietzsche
claimed that Goethe was ʻnot only a good and great human being but a cultureʼ: he
ʻbelongs in a higher order of literatures than “national literatures”: that is why he
stands towards his nation in the relationship neither of the living nor of the novel
nor of the antiquated. Only for a few was he alive and does he live stillʼ.89
Furthermore, in a letter to Franz Overbeck from 1884 he welcomed ʻwith joyʼ
Overbeckʼs suggestion to use the phrase ʻmystical separatistsʼ for intellectual
hermits as Goethe and Beethoven.90
86 HH2a, §170.
87 Goethe also got help the natural sciences and, as I mentioned in the first chapter, he made use
of the spirit of the Renaissance and English and French literature.
88 WP, §791 (1885).
89 Friedrich Nietzsche (HH2b), Human All Too Human, Volume II, Part Two: ʻThe Wanderer and
His Shadowʼ, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
§125.
90 SL, Letter 124 (to Franc Overbeck; Venice, May 21, 1884), p. 226.
Goethe himself had actually very similar view. He for instance told
Eckermann once that talented and intelligent individuals in Germany ʻhave been
forced to buy [their] little wisdom dearly enoughʼ: ʻThen we all lead a very isolated
miserable sort of life! From the people, properly so called, we derive very little
cultureʼ.91 This was perhaps the reason why Goethe wanted to create a pan-
European intellectual community – and he saw some signs of it in his own days: ʻIt
is pleasant to seeʼ, he said, ʻthat intercourse is now so close between the French,
English, and Germans, that we shall be able to correct one anotherʼ.92 However,
Goethe did not think they should look for prototype in each other, because, for all
Europeans at least, ancient Greece is the only paradigm: ʻif we really want a
pattern, we must always return to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty
of mankind is constantly represented. All the rest we must look at only historically,
appropriating to ourselves what is good, so far as it goesʼ.93
I have now accounted for Nietzscheʼs reasons for his Europeanism and how
his European ideas got support from Goethe. Moreover, I have discussed how
Nietzsche regarded Goethe and his followers as an isolated culture. In fact, it
seems evident that the European culture that Nietzsche hoped for, was the culture
of Goethe. Thus, Del Caro puts it well when he says that ʻNietzsche did not require
a theoretical model for his concept of the good European; Goethe had already
provided the blueprintʼ.94
However, I have not yet discussed in detail what such culture consists in.
That is the subject of the next three chapters.
91 Eckermann (1836), p. 252 (May 3, 1827).

92 Ibid., p. 241 (July 15, 1827).
93 Ibid., p. 213 (January 31, 1827).
94 Adrian Del Caro (1989a), Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press), pp. 85-86.
Among all peoples, the Greeks have dreamt lifeʼs dream most beautifully.… You
have to make allowances for all other arts; it is only Greek art that leaves you
forever in its debt.
– Goethe 95
Chapter 3: Classical Art
If Nietzsche had been hired to decide the curriculum in the academy of his good
Europeans, he would probably have given one book a prominent role: the
Conversation of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, which he praised highly and
considered the best German book ever written.96 The book could without doubt be
a source of multiform cultivation, but Nietzscheʼs main reason for including it in the
curriculum would presumably be an important aesthetic edification: the heirs of
Europe would acquire a sense of artistic taste.
The literary movement that was the primary target of Nietzsche, especially
after his break with Wagner, was the Romantic Movement. In light of his firm
criticism of romanticism it is ironic that he is often labelled as a romantic.
Kaufmann discusses such classification of Nietzsche and groups him with two
others who have received the same treatment:
In the English-speaking world, Goethe, Hegel, and Nietzsche are
often classified as German romantics. In view of the ambiguity of
the word “romanticism”, this is hardly wrong, but it is unfortunate
because it obscures the deep differences that separate these men
from Novalis, Tieck, the brothers Schlegel, Schelling, Arnim, and
Brentano – writers who called themselves romantics to signify
their opposition to classicism. It is useful to have a common label
for these rebels, and, since they themselves insisted that they
were romantics, while Goethe and Nietzsche frequently made
vitriolic comments on ʻromanticismʼ, it seems reasonable to apply
the label primarily to the men who liked it.97
The opposition to classicism was a key factor in both Nietzscheʼs and Goetheʼs
conception of romanticism. Their beloved classicism stood for certain qualities of
95 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (MR), Maxims and Reflections, edited by Peter Hutchinson and
translated by Elisabeth Stopp (London: Penguin Books, 1998), §298 (from 1826); and §361
(from the same year).
96 HH2b, §109.
97 Kaufmann (1959), p. 77.
antiquity, such as simplicity, grandeur, sense for the real, and restraint – qualities
that were rediscovered and hold in high regard during the Renaissance period.
Romanticism, however, along with its philosophical equivalent of idealism, was an
ideology that attacked the classicism of the Renaissance and attempted to bounce
back into some form of Medievalism. The romantics glorified the Middle Ages and
tried to reawaken aspects of its Zeitgeist, including its altruistic morality and
religious mysticism. Although the medieval supernatural theism was replaced by
modern transcendental idealism, the cosmological outlook and the appendant
sentiments were similar. The romantics were emotional, full of pity, dreamy,
gloomy, anti-scientific, and their arts were often baroque, otherworldly, and
formless.
It is important to note that neither Nietzscheʼs nor Goetheʼs admiration of
ancient Greece and Rome, were meant to be some sort of escape from modernity
by imitating old habits and forms of life. Indeed, it was Goetheʼs emphasis on the
classical as timeless qualities that sparked his most famous formulation of the
difference between the classical and the romantic. It was uttered on April 2nd 1829
and was published in the Conversations:
A new expression occurs to me… which does not ill define the
state of the case. I call the classic healthy, the romantic sickly. In
this sense, the ʻNibelungenliedʼ is as classic as the ʻIliadʼ, for both
are vigorous and healthy. Most modern productions are romantic,
not because they are new, but because they are weak, morbid,
and sickly; and the antique is classic, not because it is old, but
because it is strong, fresh, joyous, and healthy. If we distinguish
ʻclassicʼ and ʻromanticʼ by these qualities, it will be easy to see our
way clearly.98
So, classical art is healthy, strong and vigorous; but romantic art is sickly, weak
and morbid. This physiological or pathological conception of art ʻintroduced a
polarity to German letters that still resonated in Nietzscheʼs timeʼ, as Del Caro
points out.99 The formulation was widely echoed in Nietzscheʼs writings, for
example in Nietzsche contra Wagner where he stated that his ʻobjections to
Wagnerʼs music [were] physiological objections: why disguise them with aesthetic

99 Del Caro (1989b), p. 591.
formulas? After all, aesthetics is nothing but applied physiologyʼ.100 Del Caro even
maintains that Nietzsche was the first person to give Goetheʼs view ʻdepthʼ.101
The pathological formulation did not enter Goetheʼs mind in the form of
instant revelation. It had a long line of events leading up to it. Roughly two months
earlier Goethe told Eckermann that he had received a letter from Zelter where he
complained ʻthat the performance of the oratorio of the Messiah was spoiled for
him by one of his female scholars, who sang an aria too weakly and sentimentallyʼ.
Goetheʼs comment is a clue of what was developing in his mind:
Weakness is a characteristic of our age. My hypothesis is, that it is
a consequence of the efforts made in Germany to get rid of the
French. Painters, natural philosophers, sculptors, musicians,
poets, with but few exceptions, all are weak, and the general mass
is no better.102
And roughly three years earlier, Eckermann explained a shift in his conversation
with Goethe as follows: ʻThe conversation now turned upon the theatre, and the
weak, sentimental, gloomy character of modern productionsʼ.103
However, a well-balanced man as Goethe did not turn his criticism into a
religion. Romanticism had faults which were worthy of criticism, but it was not all
bad and could even be used constructively, as he acknowledged near the end of
1829:
The French… now begin to think justly of these matters. Both
classic and romantic, say they, are equally good. The only point is
to use these forms with judgement, and to be capable of
excellence. You can be absurd in both, and then one is as
worthless as the other. This, I think, is rational enough, and may
content us for a while.104
100 FriedrichNietzsche (NcW), Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Anti Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of
the Idols, and Other Writings, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), ʻWhere I Offer Objectionsʼ, p. 266.
101 Del Caro (1989a), p. 97.
102 Eckermann (1836), p. 365 (February 12, 1829).
103 Ibid., p. 167 (January 29, 1826).
104 Ibid., p. 416 (December 16, 1829).
Nietzsche sometimes spoke in a similar manner, for instance when he said in his
notebooks that romanticism was ʻan ambiguous question, like everything
modernʼ.105
Still, romanticism was Goetheʼs and Nietzscheʼs foe: their instincts clearly
sided with classicism and the spirit of the time required a battle against romantic
elements. After all, Goethe was in later life the arch-enemy of the Romantic
Movement and Nietzscheʼs criticism of romanticism is considered so powerful that
some people have claimed that he brought the movement to its ʻlogical
conclusionʼ.106
Both of them knew the enemy quite well, because they began their careers
under romantic influences, as is evident from their early works. This personal
familiarity with the “sick” ideology and the subsequent change of mind seem to
have sharpened and vitalised their campaign. So, in a way, romanticism for them
was a stimulating sickness which they overcame. This is in line with the
conception of sickness that I discussed in the first chapter, and the idea was
reflected in the Twilight where Nietzsche said that Goethe ʻbore within himʼ the
romantic symptoms of the sick eighteenth century: ʻsentimentality, nature-idolatry,
the anti-historical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (– the last is only a
form of the unreal)ʼ, but that he overcame it and ascended to the ʻnaturalness of
the Renaissanceʼ.107
Nietzscheʼs pathology is wide-ranging. It is not only applied to art, but also to
morality and religion. Thus, it is tempting to try to systemise Nietzscheʼs
philosophy around the concepts of sickness and health. This, however, should be
warned against: he escaped such systematisation as so many others. For one
thing, the ambiguity of sickness and health makes the picture confused, but more
importantly, good health was very subjective, according to Nietzsche, as he made
clear in The Gay Science: ʻthere is no health as such, and all attempts to define a
105 WP, §843 (March-June 1888).

106 Del Caro (1989a), p. 6.
thing that way have been wretched failuresʼ; one personʼs health ʻcould look like its
opposite in another personʼ.108
Anyhow, despite the ambiguity and subjectivity of the pathology, there were
undeniably certain classical qualities which were univocally and objectively good
and healthy, according to both Goethe and Nietzsche – qualities that any student
in the latterʼs good European academy would have to adopt.
One such quality is a sense for the real. The best way to explain it is to
discuss it in relation to Kantʼs legacy. The romantics where influenced by his
notion that human knowledge is restricted by the scope of peopleʼs five senses
and the limited function of the sensual apparatus. The idea is commonsensical,
but the romantics, as many idealists, turned their attention to what cannot be
known empirically. They, in other words, turned their minds from the empirical
world, which for them had become subjective and unimportant. Instead they were
occupied by the transcendental and mystical, which they regarded as more real.
This way of thinking began to pervade their artistic products and fill them with
medieval religious themes. Goethe vehemently opposed this intellectual
development and his argument was lucid:
Man is born not to solve the problems of the universe, but to find
out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within
the limits of the comprehensible.… Moreover, we should only utter
higher maxims so far as they can benefit the world. The rest we
should keep within ourselves, and they will diffuse over our actions
a lustre like the mild radiance of a hidden sun.109
Goethe often used the term ʻobjectivityʼ for this position, in order to contrast it with
the limitless subjectivity of the romantics. An amusing example of Goetheʼs
realistic or objective way of thinking came from his conversation with
Schopenhauer. When the idealistic philosopher made the statement, proper to his
transcendentalism, that ʻthe sun only existed because he saw itʼ, Goethe response
was to point out the opposite: ʻNo, you only exist because the sun sees youʼ.110
108 Friedrich
Nietzsche (GS), The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage
Books, 1974), §120.
109 Eckermann (1836), p. 161 (October 15, 1825).
110 Fairley (1934), p. 311. Fairley accounts for this conversation but does not cite his source.
And in the Conversations an equally witty expression entered Goetheʼs mind:

ʻThere are… few men who have imagination for the truth of realityʼ.111
It is particularly in this context that classical art became very important for
Goethe: ʻPeople always talk of the study of the ancients; but what does that mean,
except that it says, turn your attention to the real world, and try to express it, for
that is what the ancients did when they were aliveʼ.112
Nietzsche was Goetheʼs soul mate in this regard as in so many others. He
regretted in the Twilight that Goetheʼs realism did not become the intellectual
norm. The passage is so revealing for what Goethe meant for Nietzsche that it has
to be quoted in its entirety:
One could say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century has
also striven for what Goethe as a person strove for: universality in
the understanding and affirmation, amenability to experience of
whatever kind, reckless realism, reverence for everything factual.
How does it happen that the total result is not a Goethe but a
chaos, a nihilistic sigh, a not knowing which way to turn, an instinct
of weariness which in praxi continually tries to reach back to the
eighteenth century? (– for example as romanticism of feeling, as
altruism and hyper-sentimentality, as feminism in taste, as
Socialism in politics). Is the nineteenth century, especially in its
closing decades, not merely a strengthened, brutalised eighteenth
century, that is to say a century of décadence? So that Goethe
would have been, not merely for Germany but for all Europe,
merely an episode, a beautiful ʻin vainʼ? – But one misunderstands
great human beings if one views them from the paltry perspective
of public utility. That one does not know how to make any use of it
perhaps even pertains to greatness…113
So, Goetheʼs mentality is regarded by Nietzsche as the answer to the problems of
his age, namely nihilism, romanticism, altruism, and other components of a
declining life.
And in The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche followed Goethe in directing the attention to
the ancient reverence for the factual. Despairing over the present situation and
peopleʼs inability to follow Goetheʼs example, he regretted that the ancient
mentality did not prevail in the first place:
111 Eckermann (1836), p. 162 (December 25, 1825).

112 Ibid., p. 167 (January 29, 1826).
Why did the Greeks exist? Why the Romans? – Every prerequisite
for an erudite culture, all the scientific methods were already there,
the great, the incomparable art of reading well had already been
established – the prerequisite for a cultural tradition, for a uniform
science; natural science, in concert with mathematics and
mechanics, was on the best possible road – the sense for facts,
the last-developed and most valuable of all the senses, had its
schools and its tradition already centuries old! Is this understood?
114
Another classical quality that the mature Goethe and Nietzsche univocally
admired, was the acceptance of the restraint of artistic forms. ʻWho wills
greatnessʼ, Goethe counsels in a sonnet, ʻmust pull himself together; only restraint
makes the master, and only the law can give us freedomʼ.115 Del Caro explains his
position by saying that he ʻaddressed himself… to the necessity of first
determining oneʼs self, then working constructively within oneʼs natural limitation
until the hour of liberation, which requires hard work and honest effortʼ.116
The romantics, on the other hand, saw things differently. They emphasised
the freedom of artists and maintained that their natural expression should not be
restricted by man-made rules. Nature, in all its chaotic splendour, was the only
model. Otherwise the originality and spontaneity of artists would be threatened.
Goethe was not impressed by such gibberish. ʻPeople are always talking
about originality; but what do they mean?ʼ he asked, and added:
As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and
this goes on to the end. And, after all, what can we call our own
except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all
that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would
be but a small balance in my favour.117
Nietzsche was clearly on the same page as Goethe in this regard, and talked in a
similar manner, although in a more eloquent, studious, precise, and illuminating
way:
Every artist knows how far removed this feeling of letting go is
from his “most natural” state, the free ordering, placing, disposing
114 A, §59.
115 Del
Caro (1989b), p. 592; cf. ʻNatur und Kunstʼ, Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14
Bänden, volume I (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1969), p. 245.
116 Del Caro (1989b), p. 593.
117 Eckermann (1836), p. 154 (May 12, 1825).
and shaping in the moment of “inspiration” – he knows how strictly

and subtly he obeys thousands of laws at this very moment, laws
that defy conceptual formulation precisely because of their
hardness and determinateness (compared with these laws, there
is something floundering, multiple, and ambiguous about even the
most solid concept –). I will say it again: what seems to be
essential “in heaven and on earth” is that there be obedience in
one direction for a long time. In the long term, this always brings
and has brought about something that makes life on earth worth
living – for instance: virtue, art, music, dance, reason, intellect –
something that transfigures, something refined, fantastic, and
divine.118
This marvellous passage from Beyond Good and Evil got to the core of the
subject: Nietzscheʼs standpoint was that ʻobedience in one direction for a long
timeʼ had been very valuable for humanity. After all, that is how all culture has
come into being. The art of French food, for instance, did not become what it is
through the natural expression, originality and spontaneity of every French
household. Rather, the wisdom of earlier generations was incorporated in the
tradition that people followed. Changes were gradual and measured, but not
sudden and radical.119 And even when the cook-maid was feeling inspired, she
was in fact following innumerable customs of a French kitchen.
Ridley elaborates nicely on another aspect of this thought, namely how forms
of life and rules of games necessarily restrict people:
Only someone who acknowledges the rules of language has the
capacity – the freedom – to communicate in it. Only someone who
acknowledges the laws of chess has the freedom to castle his
king, say. Only someone who acknowledges the norms and
courtesies of conversation has the freedom to engage in one. And
so on, for any human practice at all. To resent such ʻnecessitiesʼ
as a threat to oneʼs ʻ“responsibility”ʼ, to oneʼs ʻbelief inʼ oneself, to
oneʼs ʻpersonal right to [oneʼs own] merits at any priceʼ would be,
quite simply, to render oneself impotent.120
Nietzsche evoked the name of Goethe in context of artistic restriction in Human All
Too Human, and maintained that it was part of the ʻartistic insightʼ that he
ʻachieved in the second half of his lifeʼ:
118 BGE, §188.

119 North European food, however, needs an instant revolution.
120 Ridley, (2007), p. 132; cf. BGE, §21.
It is precisely because his nature held him for a long time on the
path of the poetical revolution, precisely because he savoured
most thoroughly all that had been discovered in the way of new
inventions, views and expedients through that breach with tradition
and as it were dug out from beneath the ruins of art, that his later
transformation and conversion carries so much weight: it signifies
that he felt the profoundest desire to regain the traditional ways of
art and to bestow upon the ruins and colonnades of the temple
that still remained their ancient wholeness and perfection at any
rate with the eye of imagination if strength of arm should prove too
weak to construct where such tremendous forces were needed
even to destroy.121
Nietzsche then continued by stating that Goethe ʻlived in art as in recollection of
true art: his writing had become an aid to recollection, to an understanding of
ancient, long since vanished artistic epochsʼ.122 Here, there is reason to suspect
that Nietzsche was describing his own situation as well as Goetheʼs. Such
suspicion is not diminished by the next sentence of the nostalgic classical scholar:
ʻHis demands were… unfulfillable; the pain he felt at that fact was, however, amply
counterbalanced by the joy of knowing that they once had been fulfilled and that
we too can still participate in this fulfilmentʼ.123
Nietzsche linked artistic restriction with an art that is ʻthe surplus of a wise
and harmonious conduct of lifeʼ, and mentioned in that regard the art of ʻHomer,
Sophocles, Theocritus, Calderón, Racineʼ and ʻGoetheʼ. He added that this is the
kind of art that people ʻlearn to reach out forʼ when they themselves ʻhave grown
wiser and more harmoniousʼ, instead of the ʻbarbaric if enthralling spluttering out of
hot motley things from a chaotic, unruly soulʼ which people understand to be art in
their immaturity.124
Nietzscheʼs enhancement of Goetheʼs pathological formulation of aesthetics
had its roots in Nietzscheʼs first book, The Birth of Tragedy, where the concepts
ʻDionysianʼ and ʻApollonianʼ play a fundamental role. The meaning of the former
term developed throughout Nietzscheʼs career and was mixed with the latter one,
as I will discuss in the final chapter. The Dionysian became the term for his
121 HH1, §221.

122 Ibid.
123 Ibid.
124 HH2a, §173.

conception of classicism in The Gay Science.125 It is out of the scope of this

dissertation to explain the Dionysian concept in detail, but I will briefly account for
how Dionysian art is opposed to romantic art and where Nietzsche placed Goethe
in his new scheme of things.
Nietzsche explained romanticism as being a destructive response to
suffering, whereas Dionysian art is a constructive response to suffering:
Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an
aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always
presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of
sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life – they
want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic
insight – and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life
and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves
through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsion,
anaesthesia, and madness. All romanticism in art and insight
corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type[.]126
So, Dionysian art results ʻfrom those who suffer from ʻover-fullness of lifeʼ, while
romantic art is a reaction of ʻthose who suffer from the impoverishment of lifeʼ.
Accordingly, Nietzsche stated that when distinguishing between aesthetic values
he asked himself whether hunger or superabundanceʼ had ʻbecome creativeʼ.127 A
few years later, in Nietzsche contra Wagner, he restated this comment, except of
speaking of ʻhatred of lifeʼ instead of hunger, because a ʻ[r]evenge against life
itselfʼ is ʻthe most voluptuous type of intoxication for people who are impoverishedʼ
as the romantics are.128 There, he also mentioned an example for the two types:
ʻIn Goethe… superabundance has become creative, in Flaubert it is hatredʼ.129
There was a further distinction within this dichotomy, because on the one
hand there was art that is a consequence of the desire for becoming or change,
and on the other hand there was art that is prompted by the desire for being, that
is, a desire to fix or to immortalise. Nietzsche maintained that there are romantic
125 The word ʻclassicalʼ offended his ears: ʻit is far too trite and has become round and
indistinctʼ (GS, §370).
126 GS, §370.
127 Ibid.
128 NcW, ʻWe Antipodesʼ, p. 272.

129 GS, §370.
and Dionysian versions of both types. A romantic art of being expresses the
ʻtyrannic will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and would
like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow… into a binding law and
compulsionʼ,130 but a romantic art of becoming arises out of ʻhatred of the ill-
constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because
what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes themʼ.131 A
Dionysian art of becoming, on the other hand, is ʻan expression of an overflowing
energy that is pregnant with futureʼ.132 There is no doubt that a lot of Goetheʼs art
belongs to this category, but Nietzsche mentioned Goethe´s art as an example of
Dionysian art of being, which is indeed appropriate as well. Such art of being is a
result of love and gratitude: ʻart with this origin will always be an art of apotheoses,
perhaps dithyrambic like Rubens, or blissfully mocking like Hafiz, or bright and
gracious like Goethe, spreading Homeric light and glory over all thingsʼ.
However, it was precisely regarding certain aspect of the Dionysian that
Nietzsche overcame Goethe, namely the more darker, orgiastic side of the
Dionysian. Nietzsche claimed in the Twilight that Goethe was ignorant of that
ingredient of classical art. ʻConsequentlyʼ, he said, ʻGoethe did not understand the
Greeksʼ.133 This is in line with Goetheʼs own opinion that his nature ʻwas too
conciliatory for real tragedyʼ, as Nietzsche mentioned in Human All Too Human.134
Still, the same applies to art as other fields: Nietzscheʼs criticism of Goethe
was limited and faint in comparison with his constant praise. He for instance
compared Homerʼs ʻease and impartialityʼ with ʻthe great artists of the
Renaissanceʼ, ʻShakespeareʼ, and ʻGoetheʼ.135 And in his notebooks from 1888 he
said that nineteen-century ʻGerman culture… arouses mistrustʼ, before adding that
ʻin music this full, redeeming and binding element of Goethe is lackingʼ.136 Four
130 Ibid.
131 Ibid. To understand this feeling, Nietzsche asked us to ʻconsider our anarchists closelyʼ.
132 Ibid.
133 TI, ʻWhat I Owe to the Ancientsʼ, §4.

134 HH2b, §124.
135 HH1, §125.
136 WP, §104 (Jan.-Fall 1888).
years earlier, in a letter to Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche was in no doubt who were the
most important figures of German literary style: ʻAfter Luther and Goethe, a third
step had to be takenʼ, he said, – and this third step was of course his own.137
In accordance with the conception of art that I discussed in the first chapter,
Nietzsche did not consider art to be for artʼs sake. Rather it glorifies, selects, and
highlights things – and therefore ʻstrengthens or weakens certain valuationsʼ.138 An
attribute of classical or Dionysian art is to be a ʻgreat stimulus to lifeʼ, while the
romantic art discourages life. A good example of the latter is Schopenhauerʼs
dubious conception of tragedies, for he maintained that the tragic spirit consisted
in the ʻdawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true
satisfactionʼ.139 Schopenhauerʼs radical pessimism and will to resignation were
partly rooted in his altruistic morality. There were such considerations which
Goethe had in mind when he said that romantic art had ʻalready lost its way in its
own abyssʼ; one can hardly imagine anything more horrible than its quite
disgusting recent productionsʼ.140 This is the same attitude as Nietzsche referred
to when answering his own question about what Goethe would have thought of
Wagner: ʻGoethe once asked himself what danger was suspended over all
romantics: the fate awaiting romanticism. His answer: to suffocate on rehashed
moral and religious absurditiesʼ.141
It is safe to say that Nietzscheʼs philosophy of art cannot be fully
distinguished from his morality – which, in relation to Goethe, is the subject of the
next chapter.
In this one I have accounted for the curriculum in Nietzscheʼs academy of
good Europeans. The primary reading would be Goetheʼs Conversations, where
students would, among other things, learn to be sceptical of romanticism,
137 SL, Letter 121 (to Erwin Rohde; Nice, February 22, 1884), p. 221.
139 Arthur
Schopenhauer (1844), The World as Will and Representation, Volume II (New York:
Dover Publications, 1958), pp. 433-434.
140 Goethe (MR), §1033 (a note published posthumously).
141 Friedrich
Nietzsche (CW), The Case of Wagner, in The Anti Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the
Idols, and Other Writings, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), §3.
memorise the pathological formulation, acquire classical qualities such as a sense

for the real and an appreciation of the restraint of artistic forms. A supplementary
reading would be Nietzscheʼs improvement of the system, where a Dionysian and
romantic art were considered to be the result of a different kind of suffering: either
a loving over-fullness of life, as in the case of Goethe, or a hateful impoverishment
of life, as in the case of the romantics.
Your are deceived by statesmen, priests, and teachers of morals;

and this cloverleaf, mob, how you like to adore it!
Even today thereʼs, alas, little worth thinking and saying
that does not grievously flout mores, the state, and the gods.
– Goethe 142
Chapter 4: Noble Morality
A large part of Nietzscheʼs writings is devoted to his criticism of morality and

perhaps the most pressing question regarding the meaning of Goethe for
Nietzsche, is whether Goethe had the status of being an exemplary moral
character and whether he inspired Nietzscheʼs moral criticism.
One way of demonstrating an affirmative answer to these questions is to
point to my previous demonstration of Goethe as a model of a good European,
and then to the inherent qualities of good Europeans. Because what primarily
ʻdistinguishesʼ good Europeans ʻabove the men of fatherlandsʼ, according to
Nietzsche, is that they are ʻatheists and immoralistsʼ.143 By the term ʻimmoralistsʼ,
he was, for sure, not referring to those screwed individuals who reject all morals
and ethical behaviour, but to those who reject the common altruistic morality, for
instance the Christian morality. It was labelled as slave morality by Nietzsche and
he often contrasted it with his preferred master morality or noble morality.
Slave morality was frequently identified with selflessness, compassion,
resentment, envy, intolerance, transcendence, asceticism, extirpation of the
instincts, sickness, world negation, and declining life. Noble morality, on the other
hand, was frequently identified with self-reverence, self-love, freedom from
resentment, freedom from envy, tolerance, immanence, sensuality, satisfaction of
the instincts, health, world affirmation, and ascending life.
It is out of the scope of this dissertation to explain how Nietzsche saw the
complicated history of ethics, but as he described in On the Genealogy of Morality,
noble morality was originally quite beastly and it was through the triumph of slave
142 Kaufmann (1980a), p. 19 (From Goetheʼs Venetian Epigrams); cf. Twenty-Five German Poets:
A Bilingual Collection (1976), translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company).
143 WP, §132 (1885). – Although I here quote his unpublished notebooks, it is also quite clear from
his published writings that the good Europeans have these qualities.
morality that man acquired ʻdepth in a higher senseʼ and became intelligent and
ʻinteresting animalʼ.144 Nietzsche did not want to return to the barbaric past, but he
considered the slave morality responsible for the nihilism and self-loathing that
brought a serious threat to the advancement of human life. So, what he aspired
was a new noble morality, where, as Ridley points out, the shaping material is the
ʻinteresting animal we have becomeʼ and in which attitude towards suffering is of
vital importance:
We can try… to turn suffering somehow to account, so that life
becomes valuable to us not in spite of the suffering it inevitably
contains, but at least partly in virtue of it. We can try – somehow –
to harness our pain so that it turns us toward life and the world
rather than away from it. The original nobles affirmed themselves
and their lives more or less instinctively: the world and existence
were “good” simply for having them in it. Nietzscheʼs hope – his
ideal for human living – is that we should succeed in discovering a
new nobility, a way of living that recaptures the original noblesʼ
sense of themselves as immanently valuable, but which constructs
that sense out of the capacities (internalisation, truthfulness, etc.)
that two millennia of asceticism have bequeathed to us.145
And because of how the term morality is normally understood, Nietzsche used the
terms immorality or amorality as synonyms for his new noble morality.
The name of Goethe is often not far away when Nietzsche discussed his
moral preference, as for instance in the epilogue of The Case of Wagner:
[N]oble morality, master morality, is rooted in a triumphant self-
directed yes, – it is self-affirmation, self-glorification of life […] All
beautiful, all great art, belongs here: the essence of both is
gratitude. On the other hand it is inextricably linked with an
instinctive aversion to decadents, a scorn, even a horror of their
symbolism: this is almost proof of it. The noble Romans viewed
Christianity as foeda superstitio 146: just remember how the last
German with a noble taste, how Goethe viewed the cross. You will
not find more valuable, more necessary opposites…147
144 Friedrich
Nietzsche (GM), On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Maudemarie Clark and
Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), First Treatise, §6.
145 Aaron Ridley (1998), Nietzscheʼs Conscience: Six Character Studies from the
“Genealogy” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 11.
146 Vile superstition.
147 CW, Epilogue.
Nietzsche was here referring to the Venetian Epigrams, where Goethe said in a
poem that he found ʻtobacco smoke, bedbugs, garlic, and crossʼ as ʻrepugnantʼ as
ʻsnakes and poisonʼ.148 Among other anti-Christian comments that Goethe made
were his sayings that the ʻChurch weakens everything that it touchesʼ,149 and that
if ʻour standing is high, God is all; if low, then God is a supplement to our
wretchednessʼ.150 Nietzsche evidently regarded such comments as signs of noble
morality – and he was indignant at the ignoble German public, who often criticised
Goethe for being un-Christian and immoral. ʻYou know what happened to Goethe
in moralistic, old-maidish Germany. The Germans were always scandalised by
him, his only real admirers were Jewish womenʼ,151 said Nietzsche in The Case of
Wagner, and around the same time he wrote in his notebook that Christianity was
demonstrated ʻby looking about the “world” with filth. Especially with the first men
of the world, with the “geniuses”: one will remember how Goethe has been
attacked in Germany at all timesʼ.152
Goethe himself did not complain about the reception of his works in the same
way, but he maintained that peopleʼs pettiness and lack of cultivation inhibited the
truthfulness of authors:
Could intellect and high cultivation… become the property of all,
the poet would have fair play; he could be always thoroughly true,
and would not be compelled to fear uttering his best thoughts. But,
as it is, he must always keep on a certain level; must remember
that his works will fall into the hands of a mixed society; and must,
therefore, take care lest by over-great openness he may give
offence to the majority of good men.153
In fact, Goethe did not publish his most truthful and immoral poems, but only
showed them to someone he trusted, like his friend Eckermann:
148 Kaufmann (1980a), p. 19; cf. Kaufmann (1976), Goetheʼs Venetian Epigrams, §67.
149 Goethe (MR), §821 (a note published posthumously).
150 Ibid., §813 (a note published posthumously).
151 CW, §3.
152 WP, §396 (Jan.-Fall 1888).
153 Eckermann (1836), p. 63 (February 25, 1824). – Furthermore, he called the time ʻa whimsical
tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and doesʼ, and then
regrets that contemporary men ʻcannot, with propriety, say things which were permitted to the
ancient Greeks; and the Englishmen of 1820 cannot endure what suited the vigorous
contemporaries of Shakespeareʼ (ibid.).
Today, Goethe showed me two very remarkable poems, both

highly moral in their tendency, but in their several motives so
unreservedly natural and true, that they are of the kind which the
world styles immoral. On this account, he keeps them to himself,
and does not intend to publish them.154
In this regard, one can ask why Goetheʼs moral views got detached from his
contemporary Germans. It was not an inbred attitude that had always stayed the
same, but something he came about through personal development, – just as his
nobiliary particle, ʻvonʼ, was not a birthright, but acquired.
Probably the most important event in the transformation of Goetheʼs moral
thought was his Italian journey. The transformation consisted in a cultivation of
taste and attitude, in a way which involved a deeper appreciation of the ancient
Greeks and Romans. The change was partly inspired by a Venetian Renaissance
man, Andrea Palladio, who is one of the most distinguished architects of all time.
Goethe spotted that Palladio was heavily influenced by the spirit of the ancients,
and that he sensed strongly the petty narrow-mindedness of his times.155 This
caused Goethe to pay attention to the even more petty narrow-mindedness of his
own time:
Looking at the noble buildings created by Palladio in this city, and
noting how badly they have been defaced already by the filthy
habits of men… One gets small thanks from people when one
tries to improve their moral values, to give them a higher
conception of themselves and a sense of the truly noble. But if one
flatters the ʻbirdsʼ with lies, tells them fairy tales, caters daily to
their weaknesses, then one is their man. That is why there is so
much bad taste in our age.156
Notice, that the advancement of moral values did not consist in selflessness but in
self-reverence: moral improvement meant peopleʼs ʻhigher conception of
themselves and a sense of the truly nobleʼ. These thoughts of Goethe seem to
culminate in the following way roughly three weeks later:
Many striking portrait busts evoked the glorious days of antiquity. I
feel myself, alas, far behind in my knowledge of this period, but at
least I know the way. Palladio has opened it to me, and the way to
all art and life as well.… How different all this is from our saints,
154 Ibid.
155 See Goethe (1816/1817), pp. 81-82 (Venice, October 3, 1786).

156 Ibid., p. 64 (From Verona to Venice, September 19, 1786).
squatting on their stone brackets and piled one above the other in
the Gothic style of decoration, or our pillars which look like
tobacco pipes, our spike little towers and our cast-iron flowers.
Thank God, I am done with all that junk for good and all.157
So, Goethe had found the way to all life, as he put it, and is pleased to discard all
old absurdities. However, this transformation had a long prelude. With regard to
morality, his absorption of Spinozaʼs philosophy was probably of greatest
importance: it prepared him intellectually for moral revaluation. Goethe got to know
Spinozaʼs works in 1774, when he was 25 years old, twelve years before his
journey to Italy. It is well known that when reading Spinoza, Goethe often felt as he
was looking straight into his own inner self. He even once confessed that
Spinozaʼs Ethics matched his own views more closely than anything else.158
Among the ideas they had in common was a radical immanence, along with the
consequent naturalistic world view and moral truthfulness.159 Spinoza often
emphasised the link between nobility of mind and freedom from envy, which
influenced Goethe frequent discussion of the subject, including his statement that
the ʻempirical-moral world consists largely of bad will and envyʼ.160 Therefore it is
not strange that Kaufmann chose to refer to a passage from Spinozaʼs Ethics in
order to describe Goetheʼs morality:
Goetheʼs attitude may remind us of the words of Spinoza, whom
Goethe so admired: ʻto hate no one, to despise no one, to be
angry with no one, and to envy no oneʼ. Only mockery was part of
Goetheʼs genius – but a mockery that was free from hatred, anger,
and envy.161
157 Ibid., p. 95 (Venice, October 8, 1786). The italics are mine.

158 Still,
Goetheʼs admiration was to some extent an attraction of opposites. See e.g. H. B. Nisbet
(2002), ʻReligion and philosophyʼ, in The Cambridge Companion to Goethe, edited by Lesley
Sharpe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 222.
159 By moral truthfulness I am referring to a scepticism regarding all “fantasy stories” regarding
morality.
160 Goethe (MR), §170 (from 1823). – Kaufmann mentions e.g. Goetheʼs conversation with
Boisserée (August 3, 1815) where Goethe said the following about Tieck and the Schlegels: ʻIn
Spinoza we can look up what is the matter with these gentlemen: it is envyʼ. (Kaufmann (1959),
p. 79).
161 Kaufmann (1959), p. 55; cf. Baruch Spinoza (1677), Ethics, in The Essential Spinoza: Ethics
and Related Writings, edited by Michael L. Morgan and translated by Samuel Shirley
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), Part II, Proposition 49, Schol., p. 60. –
Moreover, it is hard to find instances where Goethe blames others for his own problems.
Kaufmann even states that Goetheʼs attitude is ʻa prime example of an ethical

attitude that is above resentmentʼ.162 All this sounds very Nietzschean and is
indeed part of Nietzscheʼs conception of noble morality. If Kaufmann had extended
his quotation from the Ethics a little bit, it would have been even more
Nietzschean: ʻeach should be content with what he has and should help his
neighbour, not from womanish pity, or favour, or superstition, but from the
guidance of reason as occasion and circumstance requireʼ.163 Nietzsche himself
described Goetheʼs moral qualities in a similar manner. He spoke of ʻGoetheʼs
nobility and freedom from envyʼ,164 and mentioned that ʻRaphael, like Goethe, was
without pride and envy, and that is why both were great learners and not merely
exploiters of those veins of ore washed clean from the siftings of the history of
their forefathersʼ.165
These similarities between Goethe, Spinoza and Nietzsche are not
surprising. Recall two things. First, that Nietzsche maintained that Goethe got aid
from Spinoza in becoming who he was.166 Secondly, that Nietzsche specified
Spinoza as his own ancestor, along with Goethe, Heraclitus and Empedocles.167
Indeed, he felt as struck as Goethe when he first got familiar with Spinozaʼs
philosophy, as can be seen from a letter to Overbeck:
Not only is his whole tendency like my own – to make knowledge
the most powerful passion – but also in five main points of his
doctrine I find myself; this most abnormal and lonely thinker is
closest to me in these points precisely: he denies free will,
purposes, the moral world order, the nonegoistical, evil; of course
the differences are enormous, but they are differences more of
period, culture, field of knowledge.168
162 Kaufmann (1959), p. 59.

163 Spinoza(1677), Part II, Proposition 49, Schol., p. 60. – ʻReasonʼ in this context does not
necessarily belong to the ʻrationalismʼ that Nietzsche criticised.
164 HH2a, §298.
165 D, §540.
166 See my discussion in chapter two; cf. TI, ʻExpeditions of an Untimely Manʼ, §49.
167 See my introduction; cf. HH2a, §408.
168 SL, Letter 89 (to Franz Overbeck; Sils Maria, July 30, 1881), p. 177.
Spinozaʼs denial of the moral world order on the one hand and the nonegoistical
on the other, was closely related: his ethics was deeply egoistical. I have refrained
of using the term selfishness to describe Nietzscheʼs and Goetheʼs position.
Instead, I have used the word self-reverence, because they did not advocate
selfish behaviour in its normal sense, namely the screwed mentality of being
indifferent to everything but oneself. This can be demonstrated for both of them by
pointing to a one sentence section from Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche
quotes Goethe: ʻOne can only truly admire those who do not seek themselvesʼ.169
Still, they can both be considered proponents of egoistic or selfish morality in
the same sense as Spinoza. He constructed his ethics by defining good as ʻthat
we certainly know to be useful to usʼ and bad as ʻthat which we certainly know to
be an obstacle to our attainment of some goodʼ.170 Spinoza then provided the
following prescription:
[E]very man should love himself, should seek his own advantage
(I mean his real advantage), should aim at whatever really leads a
man toward greater perfection, and, to sum it all up, that each
man, as far as in him lies, should endeavour to preserve his own
being.171
The parenthetical ʻreal advantageʼ is important, because it points to what can be
called enlightened egoism: one should care for what truly serves oneʼs interests.
Spinoza maintained, for instance, that ʻnothing is more advantageous to man than
manʼ and therefore he advocated a harmonious relations between people.172 This
attitude was echoed in one of Goetheʼs maxims: ʻRespecting ourselves determines
our morals; valuing others rules our behaviourʼ.173
The virtuous person, according to Spinoza, was enlightened in this way –
and virtue was simply a synonym for power:
The more every man endeavours and is able to seek his own
advantage, that is, to preserve his own being, the more he is
endowed with virtue. On the other hand, insofar as he neglects to
169 BGE, §266.

170 Spinoza (1677), Part IV, Definitions 1 and 2, p. 104.
171 Ibid., Part IV, Proposition 18, Schol, p. 112.
172 Ibid.
173 Goethe (MR), §755 (from 1829).

preserve what is to his advantage, that is, his own being, to that
extent he is weak.174
Steven Nadler points out that Spinozaʼs conception of virtue ʻdoes not lead to an
ascetic withdrawal from the world, but rather a more knowledgeable and
successful navigation within the world and a more efficient use of things in itʼ.175
This is part of what Spinozaʼs immanence meant and it is closely related to
Nietzscheʼs noble quality of world affirmation, which was certainly a quality that he
ascribed to Goethe.176
But Nietzsche also disagreed with Spinoza in a way that is illuminating for
our task of understanding Nietzscheʼs conception of Goethe. Both Spinozaʼs
argument that all people should seek their own advantage and his argument that
self-preservation is a criterion for power, diverged from Nietzscheʼs ideas.
Regarding the first one, Nietzsche only recommended selfishness to certain
people:
The value of egoism depends on the physiological value of him
who possesses it: it can be very valuable, it can be worthless and
contemptible. Every individual may be regarded as representing
the ascending or descending line of life. When one has decided
which, one has thereby established a canon for the value of his
egoism.177
So, selfishness is constructive for those who represent the ascending line of life,
but can be destructive for those who represent declining life – and of course for
those who have interaction with such selfish decadents. Altruistic morality is
advantageous for the latter type of people, according to Nietzsche, and therefore,
174 Spinoza (1677), IV, Proposition 20, p. 113.

175 Steven Nadler (2006), Spinozaʼs Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), p. 228. – Nadler is a distinguished commentator on Spinoza.
176 Spinoza also used the term ʻnobleʼ frequently for his preferred morality.
177 TI, ʻExpeditions of an Untimely Manʼ, §33. – This ignites the controversy of elitism. Whether
Nietzsche was an elitist is disputed, but, in any case, he would probably not disagree with the
following statement of Goethe: ʻIf I were a prince… I would never place in the highest offices
people who have gradually risen by mere birth and seniority, and who in their old age move on
leisurely in their accustomed track, for in this way but [sic] little talent is brought to light.
(Eckermann (1836), p. 307 (March 11, 1828)).
as Brian Leiter points out, he held ʻthe basically Calliclean view that [altruistic]
moral values are, in fact, in the interest of certain types of peopleʼ.178
But Callicles is not the only figure that comes to mind in this regard.
Nietzsche was in fact making an Aristotelian improvement of Spinozaʼs moral
system. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle said that ʻthe good man ought to be
self-loving: because by doing what is noble he will have advantage himself and will
do good to othersʼ. The ʻbad manʼ, on the other hand, ought not to be self-loving
ʻbecause he will harm himself and his neighbours by following low and evil
passionsʼ.179 Aristotle called the individuals who are fit for self-reverence ʻgreat-
minded menʼ, but Nietzsche called them ʻhigher menʼ.180
From what has been established so far, it is safe to say that Goethe was an
icon of a higher man, according to Nietzsche, and therefore superbly fit for noble
morality.
The second issue where Nietzsche diverged from Spinozaʼs view has to do
with his rejection of the notion that ʻthe instinct of self-preservationʼ is ʻthe cardinal
instinct of an organic beingʼ.181 Instead he argued for his doctrine of the will to
power: ʻA living thing seeks above all to discharge its strange – life itself is will to
power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent resultsʼ.182
Nietzsche claimed that the ʻgreat and small struggle always revolves around
superiority, around growth and expansion, around powerʼ.183
It has not been uncommon to give Nietzscheʼs will to power merely the brutal
meaning of a violent physical or political power. This is, however, not the case, as
178 Brian Leiter (2002), Nietzsche on Morality (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge), p. 122. – By
calling it ʻCalliclean viewʼ Leiter is referring to the argument of Callicles in Platoʼs dialogue
Gorgias, that the moral establishment was not put in place by the gods, but by certain groups of
people, who were serving their interest. See e.g. GS, §21: ʻThe “neighbour” praises selflessness
because it brings him advantagesʼ.
179 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1998), Book IX, p. 171.
180 See e.g. Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, p. 63; and BGE, §41. Still, I am not claiming that there
are no differences between Aristotleʼs great-minded men and Nietzscheʼs higher men; they are
indeed many.
181 BGE, §13.
182 Ibid.
183 GS, §349.

can be demonstrated by referring to a note which Nietzsche wrote while he was

developing his doctrine:
The Germans think that strength must reveal itself in hardness
and cruelty; then they submit with fervour and admiration: they are
suddenly rid of their pitiful weakness… and they devoutly enjoy
terror. That there is strength in mildness and stillness, they do not
believe easily. They miss strength in Goethe…!184
So, those who ʻmiss strength in Goetheʼ do not understand what Nietzsche meant
by strength or power. This shows that Nietzsche conceived of Goethe as a
powerful individual. But in what way was Goethe powerful? In the first chapter I
mentioned Nietzscheʼs description of Goethe regarding how he ʻdisciplined himself
to a wholeʼ and ʻcreated himselfʼ.185 I think this must be the key to answering the
question. Thus, the feature of the will to power that Nietzsche bent his heart upon
with regard to Goethe, would be his self-discipline and self-creation. I will discuss
the former quality first.
The self-reverence of Nietzscheʼs higher men did not make them hedonistic
or rash, in other words, fools who follow every impulse. Rather, Nietzsche
maintained that ʻthe first preliminary schooling in spiritualityʼ was ʻnot to react
immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in
oneʼs controlʼ.186 The value of such moral (as well as artistic) restraint was the
subject of section 188 of Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche stated that what
is ʻessential and invaluable about every morality is that it is a long compulsionʼ,
and that such compulsion is no less valuable than the good ʻtyranny of rhyme and
rhythmʼ.187 He criticised those who call such compulsion an ʻobsequious
submission to arbitrary lawsʼ and ʻimagine themselves “free”, even free-spiritedʼ.
Accordingly, Nietzsche pointed out the following ʻstrange factʼ about the world:
[E]verything there is, or was, of freedom, subtlety, boldness,
dance, or masterly assurance on earth, whether in thinking itself,
184 Kaufmann (1980b), pp. 92-93. – I make this quote with the reservation that Kaufmann is my
only source. I was not able to find the passage, neither in WLR nor in WP. Kaufmann cites the
German Gesammelte Werke, Musarionausgabe, Volume XI, p. 112 (Munich: Musarion Verlag,
1920-1929).
186 Ibid., ʻWhat the Germans lackʼ, §6.
187 BGE, §188.
or in ruling, or in speaking and persuading, in artistic just as in

ethical practices, has only developed by virtue of the ʻtyranny of
such arbitrary lawsʼ. And, in all seriousness, it is not at all
improbable that this is what is ʻnatureʼ and ʻnaturalʼ – and not that
laisser-aller!188
So, Goetheʼs moral discipline consisted in his power to refrain from reacting to
every stimulus, to restrain and control his emotions and desires.
Such power of self-restraint can be seen as an important component of self-
creation, which is a more aesthetic quality, although the category of ʻethicsʼ should
be considered broad enough to include such philosophy of life. ʻTo “give style” to
oneʼs characterʼ, was Nietzsche phrase for self-creation in The Gay Science, and
he called it ʻa great and rare artʼ:
It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and
weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan
until every one of them appears as art and reason and even
weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature
has been added; there a piece of original nature has been
removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it.
Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has
been reinterpreted and made sublime.189
He then maintained that it ʻwill be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy
their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their ownʼ, while
ʻthe weak characters without power over themselvesʼ ʻhate the constraint of
styleʼ.190
So, Goethe was one of the powerful individuals who enjoyed to give their
character a decent form. He was, to use Ridleyʼs words about such self-stylists,
ʻengaged in rounding things off, in joining up his materials, so as to finish the
poemʼ.191
There is another important aspect regarding the will to power in relation to
Goethe. Nietzsche said in his notebooks that he assessed ʻthe power of a will by
how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its
188 Ibid.
189 Ibid.
190 Ibid. – In this regard, Goethe once said that a ʻperson has only to say he is free and he
immediately feels constrained. If he has the courage to say he is constrained, then he feels
freeʼ. (Goethe (MR), §44 (from 1809)).
191 Ridley (2007), p. 88.
advantageʼ,192 and that ʻall expansion, incorporation, growth means striving

against something that resistsʼ.193 This helped Bernard Reginster to reach a
conclusion regarding how to define the will to power: ʻthe will to overcome
resistanceʼ.194 This is a plausible definition. If we apply it to Goethe, it means that
he was a powerful individual because he was able to both overcome temptation in
relation to others and to overcome all the hardship that prevented him to become
the man he aspired to be, namely to reach his higher self. As I mentioned in the
first chapter, this higher self is, according to Nietzsche, nothing but the
fundamental law of oneʼs own nature. Thus, there is an interesting link between
creating oneself and becoming what one is.195 So, with reference to what has been
established, we can say that Goethe was powerful enough to both benefit his
neighbours and to become who he was.
In this chapter, I have reflected on whether Goethe had the status of being an
exemplary moral character for Nietzsche and whether Goethe inspired his moral
criticism. I pointed out that good Europeans are distinguished by their ethics – and
Goethe, as a symbol of Nietzscheʼs good European, must have met this
requirement. I briefly discussed Nietzscheʼs account of morality and how he
sought for a new moral nobility. I referred to Nietzscheʼs comments about Goethe
qualities, which support the suggestion that he was an higher man who belonged
to such nobility. I brought to light Goetheʼs moral attitude during and after his
journey to Italy, which is likely to have inspired Nietzscheʼs thoughts about
morality. I discussed their moral affinity through their common intellectual ancestor
of Spinoza, who did probably contribute to Nietzscheʼs understanding of Goethe.
Finally, I accounted for Nietzscheʼs doctrine of the will to power in relation to
Goethe, where my conclusion was that Nietzsche conceived of Goethe as a
powerful individual because of his strong self-discipline and his ability of self-
creation. The former strength restrained Goetheʼs desires, while the latter formed
192 WP, §382 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888).

193 Ibid., §704 (November 1887-March 1888).
194 Reginster (2006), p. 126.
195 EH, ʻWhy I Am So Cleverʼ, §9.
his character. In the end I concluded that Goethe was both useful to others and
succeeded in reaching his goals.
When all these points are taken together, it becomes evident that Goethe
was in many ways morally exemplary for Nietzsche and a source of inspiration in
that regard. Whether Goethe was his moral ideal is harder to assess. It is even
disputed whether Nietzsche had such an ideal, although he had clearly certain
preferences. But if we assume he did, there is at least no doubt that Goethe was
among those individuals who came closest to it: Nietzsche clearly found his noble
attitude and behaviour remarkable and fascinating.
One may argue that what has been established in this chapter is either too
lofty or too hollow; that the concrete and substantial are lacking. Such view,
however, reveals a misconception of Nietzscheʼs moral project. His criticism of
altruistic morality ʻproduces not so much a body of doctrine held up for us to
believeʼ, as Christopher Janaway points out, but offers us rather ʻa sharp and
versatile working tool that can detach us from accustomed attitudes, enabling us to
grasp the psychology and history that underlie them, and to assess their potential
worth to us in the present and futureʼ.196 What Nietzsche is concerned with is the
value of morality – and the morals he treasures are those who most contribute to
the ʻhighest power and splendour of the human typeʼ.197
A further prerequisite of such splendour will be the subject of the next
chapter.
196 Chris
Janaway (2007), Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzscheʼs Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), p. 250.
197 GM, Preface, §6.
ʻThe ball on which my name is not written, cannot hit meʼ, says the soldier in the
battle-field; and, without such a belief, how could he maintain such courage and
cheerfulness in the most imminent perils?
– Goethe 198
Chapter 5: Dionysian faith
Good Europeans are atheists, according to Nietzsche, but not all kinds of atheists
are good Europeans, for instance hardly the ʻpaleʼ, nihilistic atheists that Nietzsche
was critical of.199
The title of this chapter is ʻDionysian faithʼ, but by ʻfaithʼ I am not referring to a
religious belief, in the usual sense. The term ʻfaithʼ is more far-reaching than
ʻbeliefʼ and can mean something akin to the ʻbasic attitudeʼ of individuals, that is,
not their attitude towards something particular, which rules their incidental mood,
but rather the attitude which decides their general mood, namely their attitude
towards the world, their own existence, and so on. Such attitude can easily appear
as a religiosity – and should perhaps fall under that category – because it results
from peopleʼs deepest nature and their most private interpretation of the world.200
It is exactly regarding such attitude that Goethe might have directly
influenced one aspect of Nietzscheʼs doctrine of will to power, namely the wish that
lifeʼs development never ends – that there is no final destination where people
should feel satisfied. Life is a pursued of satisfaction, but a desire to be satisfied
once and for all, would equal a desire for nothingness or death. This idea can be
found in Goetheʼs Faust, where the devil Mephistopheles received an unheard-of
request from Faust:
Poor devil! What can you offer to me?
A mind like yours, how can it comprehend
A human spiritʼs high activity?
But have you food that leaves one still unsatisfied,
Quicksilver-gold that breaks up in
Oneʼs very hands? Can you provide
A game that I can never win,

199 WP, §132 (1985); GM, Third Treatise, §24.
200 Thereis, as many philosophers of religion have noticed, a deep and tense religious passion in
Nietzscheʼs philosophy.
Procure a girl whose roving eye

Invites the next man even as I lie
In her embrace? A meteoric fame
That fades as quickly as it came?
Show me that fruit that rots before itʼs plucked
And trees that change their foliage every day!201
Mephistopheles said he would do as Faust required, but added that ʻthere are
times in lifeʼ when ʻone enjoys mere quiet satisfactionʼ.202 This warning from the
devil caused Faust to restate his point even more explicitly:
If ever I lie down in sloth and base inaction,
Then let that moment be my end!
If by your false cajolery
You lull me into self-sufficiency,
If any pleasure you can give
Deludes me, let me cease to live!
I offer you this wager!203
ʻDone!ʼ answered the devil, realising that his interlocutor was not quite open to his
advice. But Faust was not done, and made the radicalness of his position as clear
as possible:
If ever to the moment I shall say:
Beautiful moment, do not pass away!
Then you may forge your chains to bind me,
Then I will put my life behind me,
Then let them hear my death-knell toll,
Then from your labours youʼll be free,
The clock may stop, the clock-hands fall,
And time come to an end for me!204
This fascinating poem sounds like a battle cry for a vibrant and passionate life:
either such life or no life. Its meaning for the will to power, or the will to overcome
resistances, is that such will is not looking for the final resistance to overcome;
rather, the process of seeking out challenges is continuous.
201 JohannWolfgang von Goethe (1819/1829), Faust, Part One, translated by David Luke (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), verses 1675-1687, p. 51.
202 Ibid., v. 1688-1691, p. 51.
203 Ibid., v. 1692-1698, p. 52.
204 Ibid., v. 1700-1706, p. 52.
Reginster discusses the poemʼs idea and regarded it as ʻremarkableʼ.205 He

points out that it is ʻat the heart of the dispute between Nietzsche and
Schopenhauerʼ:
The latter saw in the “lofty aspiration” Faust attributes to the
human mind no less than the cause of the impossibility of
happiness. But Nietzsche finds in Faustʼs strange request an
essential clue to the true nature of human happiness – indeed, he
defines his concept of the “Dionysian” in terms of it[.]206
Reginster then quotes a passage from Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche expressed
the idea with the same enthusiasm:
ʻThe soul that has the longest ladder and reaches down deepest –
the most comprehensive soul, which can run and stay and roam
farthest within itself; the most necessary soul that plunges joyously
into chance, the soul that, having being, dives into becoming; the
soul that has, but wants to want and will; the soul that flees itself
and catches up with itself in the widest circles; the wisest soul that
folly exhorts most sweetly; the soul that loves itself most, in which
all things have their sweep and countersweep and ebb and flood
–ʼ But that is the concept of Dionysus himself.207
Nietzsche referred to such attitude, or Dionysian faith, as the ʻjoy of becomingʼ.208
It is indeed the antipode of Schopenhauerʼs romantic pessimism, according to
which people must become aware that it is better to tear oneʼs heart ʻaway from
lifeʼ and to turn oneʼs willing ʻaway from itʼ; in other words, ʻnot to love the world
and lifeʼ.209 I have already mentioned that Schopenhauerʼs view is partly rooted in
his altruistic morality, but his conception of happiness is also to blame. While
Goethe and Nietzsche saw happiness as passionate, even stormy, and without
ultimate satisfaction, Schopenhauer saw genuine happiness quite differently: ʻIt is
the painless state, prized by Epicurus as the highest good and as the state of the
gods; for that moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will. We
celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands
205 Reginster (2006), p. 241.

206 Ibid.
207 EH, ʻWhy I Write Such Good Booksʼ, ʻThus Spoke Zarathustraʼ, §6.
208 See e.g. TI, ʻWhat I owe to the ancientʼ, §5.
209 Schopenhauer (1844), p. 435.
stillʼ.210 So, it is the condition where, as Reginster puts it, ʻnothing is left to be
desiredʼ.211
This ascetic attitude towards life is not just Schopenhauerʼs eccentricity, but a
common view that has nourished parts of our culture, including artistic
romanticism, the moral ideology of altruism, and religious ideas of otherworldly
utopia. Nietzsche fought against this way of thinking in all his books, from The
Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo, and he found an inspiration, and a brother in arms,
in Goethe. Their position can be summed up in one sentence: the wheel of Ixion
should never stand still.
Peopleʼs response to suffering plays a crucial role in determining their
faith.212 Accordingly, Schopenhauer maintained that the ʻterrible side of lifeʼ, along
with its ʻunspeakable pain, its ʻwretchedness and miseryʼ, the ʻtriumph of
wickednessʼ, the ʻscornful mastery of chanceʼ, and the ʻirretrievable fall of the just
and the innocentʼ, would give people ʻa significant hintʼ regarding ʻthe nature of the
world and existenceʼ.213 This suffering will result in a Schopenhauerian
enlightenment:
The motives that were previously so powerful now lose their force,
and instead of them, the complete knowledge of the real nature of
the world, acting as a quieter of the will, produces resignation, the
giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-live itself. Thus
we see… the noblest men, after a long conflict and suffering,
finally renounce for ever all the pleasures of life and the aims till
then pursued so keenly, or cheerfully, and willingly give up life
itself.214
This kind of enlightenment amounts to a Goethean nightmare. Nietzsche was
responding to it when he wrote the following in Zarathustra: ʻWilling-no-more and
valuing-no-more and creating-no-more! Ah, that such great weariness might
210 ArthurSchopenhauer (1819), The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, translated by E.
F. J. Payne (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 196.
211 Reginster (2006), p. 242.
212 Thisis of course related to my discussion of suffering and creativity in the first chapter and of
suffering and art in the third chapter.
213 Schopenhauer (1819), pp. 252-253.
214 Ibid.
remain ever far from me!ʼ 215 He realised that the only antitoxin against such
weariness was to revolutionise peopleʼs opinion of suffering. In that regard, the
classical scholar was able to find an excellent paradigm in his own speciality: the
ancient Greeks. Nietzsche agreed with the conclusion of his good friend and
former colleague, Jacob Burckhardt, that ʻwhat the Greeks created and suffered,
they created and suffered freely and differently from other nationsʼ.216 So, in what
way should people suffer? Or, what is the ideal mentality of those who suffer or
have suffered? The answer to that question, according to Nietzsche, was
explicated in his third-person account of himself in Ecce Homo, where he asked
what it fundamentally was ʻthat allows us to recognise who has turned out wellʼ:
He guesses what remedies avail against what is harmful; he
exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what does not kill him
makes him stronger. Instinctively, he collects from everything he
sees, hears, lives through, his sum: he is a principle of selection,
he discards much. […] He believes neither in “misfortune” nor in
“guilt”: he comes to terms with himself, with others; he knows how
to forget – he is strong enough; hence everything must turn out for
his best.217
We can discern two kinds of features in this passage. First, the mental skill of
selectivity, for instance the ability to conceal certain aspects while highlighting
others, or to forget certain things while remembering others.
The second feature pertains to the value of suffering: people have to learn to
regard suffering as valuable, for example that pain and hardship tend to make
people strong and profound, while pleasure and comfort tend to make them weak
and shallow. Another important example of the value of suffering is how it can
boost creative development and growth: ʻall becoming and growing, all that
guarantees the future, postulates painʼ.218 A life in the Dionysian spirit is at bottom
215 Z, Second Part, ʻUpon the Isles of the Blestʼ, §2.

216 Rose Pfeffer (1972), Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University
Presses), p. 218; cf. The Greeks and Greek Civilisation by Jacob Burckhardt (New York: St.
Martinʼs Press, 1999).
217 EH, ʻWhy I Am So Wiseʼ, §2.
218 TI, ʻWhat I Owe to the Ancientsʼ, §4.
a creative life, and, as Reginster points out, to live such a life is ʻto seek out
resistance to overcomeʼ and thus ʻto seek out sufferingʼ.219
The suffering aspect of the Dionysian faith was, as I have discussed,
Nietzscheʼs solution to a problem that worried Goethe. However, it belongs to
Nietzscheʼs criticism of how Goethe understood antiquity.220 Still, he might have
inspired the idea through his art, for instance the part of Faust quoted above, and
through his life, which was not only full of creative sickness, as I explained in the
first chapter, but also creative suffering. In fact, he often wrote poems and stories
to be able to overcome depression when his heart was broken or his reputation
bashed:
I feel therein a new form of the old hatred with which people have
persecuted me, and endeavoured quietly to wound me for years. I
know very well that I am an eyesore to many; that they would all
willingly get rid of me; and that, since they cannot touch my talent,
they aim at my character.… If you would learn what I have
suffered, read my ʻXenienʼ, and it will be clear to you, from my
retorts, how people have from time to time sought to embitter my
life.221
There were many reasons for this widespread hostility towards Goethe, although
most of them had one thing in common: they were a consequence of his
characteristic to be authentically himself rather than to follow either the
mainstream fashion or established principles. Accordingly, Nietzsche talked about
Goethe going his own ʻpathʼ in Daybreak.222 In his conversation with Eckermann,
Goethe raised this issue in the following way: ʻin life, we find a multitude of
persons, who have not character enough to stand alone; these in the same way
219 Reginster (2006), p. 243. – He also makes clear that a ʻvaluation of creativityʼ, according to
Nietzsche, implies a ʻvaluation of lossʼ and an ʻacceptance of ultimate personal failureʼ.
Regarding Nietzscheʼs faith in creativity, see e.g. WP, §1038 (March-Fall 1888): ʻThe type of
God after the type of creative spirits, of “great men”ʼ.
220 See Chapter 3.
221 Eckermann (1836), p. 456 (March 14, 1830). – The closing line of The Birth of Tragedy may
apply to Goethe as well as the Greeks: ʻhow much did this people have to suffer to be able to
become so beautiful!ʼ (Friedrich Nietzsche (BT), The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000),
§25).
222 D, §190.
attach themselves to a party, by which they feel themselves strengthened, and can
at last make some figureʼ.223
Kaufmann calls this aspect of Goethe his ʻautonomyʼ and he regards
Goetheʼs remarkably autonomous life to be an important contribution to the history
of ideas, demonstrated by his life example rather than an argument. Kaufmann
argues that Goetheʼs autonomy suggests ʻthat one gives or has given laws to
oneself; that one is self-governing; that in essentials one obeys oneʼs own
imperativesʼ.224 He then points out that this conception of autonomy is ʻ[a]t the
heartʼ of Nietzscheʼs philosophyʼ, but not the dominant version of Kant.225 In this
regard, recall from last chapter what Nietzsche said about the act of giving style to
oneʼs character: strong natured people will enjoy ʻsuch constraint and perfection
under a law of their ownʼ.226
I will soon reveal why Goetheʼs conception of autonomy is particularly
important for Nietzscheʼs Dionysian faith, but first I will depict a little bit fuller
picture of what such faith consists in and how Goethe is related to it.
One of the specific reasons for the animosity towards Goethe was his
paganism. He was absorbed in Christian mysticism as a young man, but in later
life he usually identified himself as a pagan.227 This does not mean that he was an
actual polytheist, which would be a betrayal of his naturalistic world view, along
with its honesty and good intellectual conscience. Rather, his paganism was
symbolic: it was a symbol for his philosophical outlook, such as his immanent
world view, reverence for nature, philhellenism, rejection of religious dogma,
rejection of asceticism, and how he cherished the body and the sensual – all of
which belong to Nietzscheʼs Dionysian faith. Regarding the last mentioned view,
Nietzsche said in his notebooks that if ʻanything at all has been achieved, it is a
more innocuous relation to the senses, a more joyous benevolent, Goethean
223 Eckermann (1836), p. 549 (May 2, 1831).

224 Kaufmann (1980a), p. 15.
225 Ibid.
226 BGE, §188.

227 Whenthe poet Heinrich Heine called himself ʻthe great pagan, number twoʼ, it was a tribute to
Goethe as the great pagan, number one.
attitude toward sensuality; also a prouder feeling regarding the search for
knowledge, so that the “pure fool” is not given much creditʼ.228 This is closely
related to the classical sense of the real, which I accounted for in the third chapter.
Nietzsche highlighted Goetheʼs pagan faith and spoke of his ʻpaganism with
a good conscienceʼ as an exception from the German spirit.229 Goethe was
probably on Nietzscheʼs mind when he mentioned paganism as the only faith
whose adherents are not decadents:
Is the pagan cult not a form of thanksgiving and affirmation of life?
Must its highest representative not be an apology for and
deification of life? The type of a spirit that takes into itself and
redeems the contradictions and questionable aspects of
existence!230
And in the next paragraph the Dionysian faith is described as such paganism: ʻIt is
here I set the Dionysus of the Greeks: the religious affirmation of lifeʼ.231
There are two kinds of life-affirmation, according to Nietzsche. On the one
hand, the life-affirmation I discussed regarding the problem of suffering: the
attitude of not letting the worldʼs horror be an objection against meaningful
existence. This can be done by a holistic outlook, namely when individual events
are seen as parts of a whole. If one for instance dislikes all the spiders in a nearby
beloved forest, the best way to become better disposed to them is to recognise
their indispensable role in the whole forestʼs ecology. This can be done on a higher
and higher level until the magnificent universe triumphs over all the parts that
seem bad from the perspective of human beings. Such holism is at the core of the
Spinozan outlook. It was adopted by Goethe and contributed to his affirmation, as
Nietzsche was fully aware of.
On the other hand, the self-affirmation that consists in saying yes to oneʼs life
in its entirety. Nietzscheʼs ʻformula for greatness in a human beingʼ, amor fati or
love of fate, is the culmination of such self-affirmation: ʻthat one wants nothing to
228 WP, §118 (1883-1888).

229 GS, §357.
230 WP, §1052.
231 Ibid.
– The link between Nietzscheʼs Dionysianism and Paganism and the fact that many of the
Dionysian virtues are ancient pagan virtues are not surprising. After all, the god Dionysus was
one of the Greek pagan gods and the adherents of the ancient Dionysian faith, Orphism, were
pagans.
be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is
necessary, still less conceal it… but love itʼ.232 Related to this was Nietzscheʼs
endeavour to preserve the significance of the present moment, without
otherworldly aspirations. His method, in this regard, was the controversial thought
experiment of eternal recurrence.233 The mentality that it aimed for is probably well
captivated by these words of Kaufmann: ʻthose who achieve self-perfection and
affirm their own being and all eternity, backward and forward, have no thought of
the morrow. They want an eternal recurrence out of the fullness of their delight in
the momentʼ.234 Thus, instead of hoping for an eternal life, the quest is to bring
people more fully into existence now. This attitude was evident in Goetheʼs
response when Eckermann told him that he was starting to ʻperceive the beneficial
effect of his ʻpresent situationʼ and that he appreciated ʻthe value of the present
momentʼ more and more, instead of being occupied by his ʻideal and theoretic
tendenciesʼ. ʻIt would be a pity if it were not soʼ, said Goethe, and added: ʻOnly
persist in this, and hold fast by the present. Every situation – nay, every moment –
is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternityʼ.235 One can only
imagine what impression this utterance had on Nietzsche.
At the end of the astonishing section 49 in the Twilight of the Idols, a section
which is solely about Goethe and which I have referred to throughout this
dissertation, Nietzsche depicted Goethe as a symbol of his affirmative individual –
and then identified him as a Dionysian man:
Goethe conceived of a strong, highly cultured human being, skilled
in all physical accomplishments, who, keeping himself in check
and having reverence for himself, dares to allow himself the whole
compass and wealth of naturalness, who is strong enough for this
freedom; a man of tolerance, not out of weakness, but out of
strength, because he knows how to employ to his advantage what
would destroy an average nature; a man to whom nothing is
forbidden, except it be weakness, whether that weakness be
called vice or virtue.… A spirit thus emancipated stands in the
midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith
232 EH, ʻWhy I Am So Cleverʼ, §10.

233 See GS, §341.
234 Kaufmann (1974), pp. 322-323.
235 Eckermann (1836), p. 33 (November 3, 1823).
that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in

the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed – he no longer
denies.… But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I
have baptised it with the name Dionysus.236
I will begin by commenting on the expression ʻjoyful and trusting fatalismʼ.
Nietzsche was not a fatalist, as is clear from Beyond Good and Evil where the un-
free will is rejected.237 But I think he considered the mentality of fatalism an
important quality of his ideal individuals. It is the attitude of those who act with
such naturalness, truthfulness and confidence that no “what-if questions” enter
their mind. They see their fate as a consequence of not only what is necessary in
their environment, but also of what is true about their own nature, or, to invoke
Goetheʼs above mentioned conception of autonomy, true about the laws they have
given themselves.
But the passage contains another, more important issue regarding Goetheʼs
autonomy: he ʻdares to allow himself the whole compass and wealth of
naturalnessʼ, but keeps ʻhimself in checkʼ and is therefore ʻstrong enough for this
freedomʼ. So, Goethe was a passionate man who was able to control and direct
his passions. Kaufmann explains this quality of Goethe by juxtaposing him with
Socratesʼ way of living and thinking:
Socrates did not write, while Goethe was above all else a writer.
What is more, Goethe was a poet who excelled at finding words
for feelings, emotions, and passions, while Socrates inspired ever
so many philosophers who believed as the Stoics did, partly under
his influence, that happiness requires the subjugation of emotion
and passion.
On the contrary, a core feature of Goetheʼs conception of autonomy was, as
Kaufmann puts eloquently, to ʻenjoy and explore the passions without becoming
their slave, to employ them creatively instead of either being dominated by them or
trying to resist themʼ.238 In the third chapter I discussed artistic restraint and in the
fourth chapter I discussed moral restraint. But what is the former if there is no
creativity to harness and shape? And what is the latter if there is no passion to
dignify and spiritualise? There are of course some desires that people do better

237 BGE, §21.
238 Kaufmann (1980a), p. 22.
not have at all, like the lust to murder and steal. However, there are many
passions where things are not that simple and where an extirpation is a harmful
nonsolution: like throwing the baby out with the bath water. In this regard,
Nietzsche mentioned for instance ʻsensualityʼ, ʻprideʼ, ʻlust to powerʼ, ʻavariceʼ, and
ʻrevengefulnessʼ.239 He pointed out that people have for long ʻmade war on
passion itself on account of the folly inherent in itʼ and he accused the Christian
establishment of combating ʻthe passions with excision in every sense of the word:
its practice, its “cure” is castrationʼ. Then he concluded by putting this in context
with his life-affirmation: ʻto attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at
its rootsʼ.240
But all passions can turn into disastrous folly without control – and for a
passionate man as Goethe, self-mastery was the most fortunate quality. He not
only kept himself in check, but gave a form to his striving and a style to his
character. This would have been a pure Apollonian feature in The Birth of Tragedy,
while a boundless striving and frantic passions would have been purely Dionysian.
However, this reminds us, as Kaufmann is keen to point out, that the Dionysian
faith in Nietzscheʼs later writings was not a reference to ʻthe deity of formless
frenzyʼ; rather, it stood for the synthesis of the original Dionysian and Apollonian
elements: the former had in fact absorbed the latter.241
So, vigorous, cheerful, creative and passionate striving, is harnessed,
shaped, dignified and spiritualised by a meaningful, authentic, beautiful, level-
headed, form-giving power. This was a cornerstone in Nietzscheʼs conception of
Goethe.
At the beginning of this chapter I pointed out that Faustʼs attitude to seek out
challenges is fundamental to Nietzscheʼs Dionysian faith. I accounted for how
Schopenhauerʼs pessimism and the ascetic view of life, prompted Nietzsche to
focus on the value of suffering and the affirmation of life, and I discussed how that
task might have been inspired by Goethe. I explained Goetheʼs symbolic
paganism and pointed out how Nietzsche embraced it and incorporated it in his
239 TI, ʻMorality as Anti-Natureʼ, §1.

240 Ibid.
241 Kaufmann (1974), p. 129.

Dionysianism. Finally, I discussed an important aspect of what Goethe meant for

Nietzsche: he was a passionate man, who controlled his passions constructively.
To explore the whole sphere of the modern soul, to have sat in its every nook – my
ambition, my torture, and my happiness. / Really to overcome pessimism – a
Goethean eye full of love and good will as the result.
– Nietzsche242
Conclusion
In this dissertation I have explored how Nietzsche conceived of Goethe and what
he meant for him. I have accounted for how Goetheʼs vigorous character was
exemplary for Nietzsche, how Goetheʼs culture became Nietzscheʼs aspired
European culture, how Goetheʼs classicism inspired Nietzscheʼs artistic
formulations, how Goetheʼs morality was in line with Nietzscheʼs moral
preferences, and how Goetheʼs attitude to life was the basis of Nietzscheʼs
Dionysian faith.
I have established that Goetheʼs qualities of being a whole and
transformative person, of being cultivated and above nationalities, of having a
sense for the real and appreciating artistic restraint, of being noble minded and
powerful enough to restrain his desires and form his character, of being affirmative
of life and of his own passions – all amount to a portrait of a good European; and
more or less shape how Nietzsche conceived of Goethe and what he meant for
him.
This conception was not far away from Nietzscheʼs self-conception. He once
said that what he ʻagain and again neededʼ for his ʻcure and self-restorationʼ was
ʻthe beliefʼ that he was not ʻisolatedʼ in ʻseeingʼ things as he did.243 Ultimately, it
was only Goethe who came close to breaking Nietzscheʼs isolation. Perhaps the
most revealing thing regarding their intellectual affinity is the title of Nietzscheʼs
autobiography, for, there is a reason to suspect that Ecce Homo does not only
refer to the expression of Pontius Pilate about Jesus, but also to the way how
Goethe was greeted by Napoleon: Voilà un homme! or ʻNow thereʼs a man!ʼ244
242 WP, §1031 (Spring-Fall 1887).

243 HH1, Preface, 1886.
244 BGE, §209.
There is also a reason to think that Goetheʼs artistic classicism, moral

nobility, and symbolic paganism did not only contribute to Nietzscheʼs conception
of him as a good European, but that the idea of ʻOvermanʼ, or Übermench, is
better applied to Goethe than anyone else. All other candidates for such honour,
according to Nietzsche, have to acquire qualities to be able to deserve it, whether
it is the powerful Caesar, the Roman emperor, who would have to acquire Christʼs
soul; or the wise Socrates, the Greek philosopher, who would have to acquire a
sense of artistry – and play his violin on the streets of Athens.245 The broadminded
writer and polymath from Weimar, however, seems well enough equipped.
Nietzsche conceived of him as a truly creative and powerful individual; a master of
himself, a master of life:
We have recently been informed that, with his eighty-two years,
Goethe outlived himself: yet I would gladly exchange a couple of
Goetheʼs ʻoutlivedʼ years for whole cartloads of fresh modern
lifetimes, so as to participate in such conversations as Goethe
conducted with Eckermann and thus be preserved from all and
any up-to-date instruction from the legionaries of the moment. In
relation to such dead men, how few of the living have a right to live
at all!246
Vienna, Austria, September 29, 2009
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Ásgeir Jóhannesson
245 For Caesar, see WP, §983 (1884); for Socrates, see BT, §§14-15.
246 UM, ʻOn the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Lifeʼ, §8.
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Nietzsche, Friedrich. (SL) Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited and

translated by Christopher Middleton. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1969.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (TI) Twilight of the Idols. In Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-
Christ. 2nd edn. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books,
1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (UM) Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (WLN) Writings from the Late Notebooks. Translated by Kate
Sturge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (WP) The Will to Power. (A posthumous publication of

Nietzscheʼs notebooks). 2nd edn. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (Z) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Graham Parkes.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Nisbet, H. B. (2002) ʻReligion and philosophyʼ, in Sharpe, Lesley (ed.) The

Cambridge Companion to Goethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Owen, David. (1995) Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity: A Critique of Liberal

Reason. London: SAGE Publications.
Pfeffer, Rose. (1972) Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus. Lewisburg: Bucknell

University Press.
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Reginald Snell. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2004.
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1819) The World as Will and Representation. Volume I.

Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1966.
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1844) The World as Will and Representation. Volume II.
Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1966.
Reginster, Bernard. (2006) The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming

Nihilism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Ridley, Aaron. (1998) Nietzscheʼs Conscience: Six Character Studies from the
“Genealogy”. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Ridley, Aaron. (2007) Nietzsche on Art. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Spinoza, Baruch. (1677) Ethics. In The Essential Spinoza: Ethics and Related
Writings. Edited by Michael L. Morgan. Translated by Samuel Shirley.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006.
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In addition, I want to mention Love, Life, Goethe by John Armstrong (London:

Penguin Books, 2006), which I came across in a bookshop in central Southampton
soon after my arrival to the city in the beginning of July 2008. Armstrongʼs book
introduced me to Goethe and many of the thoughts expressed in this dissertation
were born while reading it on a bench in front of Winchesterʼs Cathedral during a
few sunny days that summer.

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NIETZSCHEʼS GOETHE

A PORTRAIT OF A GOOD EUROPEAN

Candidatus Juris, University of Iceland, 2005

Supervisor: Professor Aaron Ridley

Of these intellectual ancestors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a writer and

Chapter 1: Transformative Life

12 Friedrich Nietzsche (UM), Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:

18 Eckermann (1836), p. 236 (April 1, 1827).

22 Martha C. Nussbaum (1999), ʻNietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysusʼ, in The Cambridge

would make a novel, no crises, catastrophes or death-scenes;

25 Friedrich Nietzsche (D), Daybreak, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge

Wilhelm Meisterʼs Apprenticeship is about the protagonistʼs cultivation and

Nietzscheʼs description of Goethe resembles Schillerʼs in this regard. ʻWhat

37 TI, ʻExpeditions of an Untimely Manʼ, §49.

must be studied together as an organic unity and in terms of developmentʼ.40

40 Kaufmann (1959), p. 52.

Shall your sojourn ever be

45 UM, ʻSchopenhauer as Educatorʼ, §1.

54 Fairley (1934), p. 314.

Chapter 2: European Culture

55 Eckermann (1836), p. 571 (early in March, 1832).

which is among the most cultivated of the earth, and to which I

Nietzsche regarded German culture to be without meaning, substance and

75 EH, ʻThe Untimely Onesʼ, §1.

of their Christian faith, and the ʻdreary heaviness, lameness, dampness,

91 Eckermann (1836), p. 252 (May 3, 1827).

Chapter 3: Classical Art

98 Eckermann (1836), p. 380 (April 2, 1829).

105 WP, §843 (March-June 1888).

And in the Conversations an equally witty expression entered Goetheʼs mind:

111 Eckermann (1836), p. 162 (December 25, 1825).

and shaping in the moment of “inspiration” – he knows how strictly

118 BGE, §188.

121 HH1, §221.

124 HH2a, §173.

conception of classicism in The Gay Science.125 It is out of the scope of this

128 NcW, ʻWe Antipodesʼ, p. 272.

133 TI, ʻWhat I Owe to the Ancientsʼ, §4.

memorise the pathological formulation, acquire classical qualities such as a sense

Your are deceived by statesmen, priests, and teachers of morals;

Chapter 4: Noble Morality

A large part of Nietzscheʼs writings is devoted to his criticism of morality and

Today, Goethe showed me two very remarkable poems, both

155 See Goethe (1816/1817), pp. 81-82 (Venice, October 3, 1786).

157 Ibid., p. 95 (Venice, October 8, 1786). The italics are mine.

Kaufmann even states that Goetheʼs attitude is ʻa prime example of an ethical

162 Kaufmann (1959), p. 59.

169 BGE, §266.

173 Goethe (MR), §755 (from 1829).

174 Spinoza (1677), IV, Proposition 20, p. 113.

183 GS, §349.

can be demonstrated by referring to a note which Nietzsche wrote while he was

or in ruling, or in speaking and persuading, in artistic just as in

advantageʼ,192 and that ʻall expansion, incorporation, growth means striving

192 WP, §382 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888).

Chapter 5: Dionysian faith

198 Eckermann (1836), p. 241 (April 11, 1827).

Procure a girl whose roving eye

Reginster discusses the poemʼs idea and regarded it as ʻremarkableʼ.205 He

205 Reginster (2006), p. 241.

215 Z, Second Part, ʻUpon the Isles of the Blestʼ, §2.

223 Eckermann (1836), p. 549 (May 2, 1831).