Design for Living: What’s Great about Goethe? | Hacker News Reader

Design for Living: What’s Great about Goethe?

newyorker.com

108 pointskeiferski20 comments

"Art is long, life is short, judgment difficult, opportunities fleeting. Action is easy, thinking is hard: acting after thinking, uncomfortable. Every beginning is joyous, every threshold a point of expectation. The boy stares in wonder, impressions condition him, he learns in playing, seriousness takes him by surprise. Imitation is natural to us all, but what to imitate is not easily ascertained. Rarely is the best discerned, still more rarely appreciated. Height attracts us, not the steps upwards; with the mountaintop in our eyes we linger lovingly on the plain. Only a part of art can be taught, an artist needs the whole. Those who know only half of it, are always confused and talk a lot; those who have the whole, act and talk little, or long afterwards. The former have no secrets and no strength, their teaching is like freshly baked bread, tasty and satisfying for one day; but flour cannot be sown and the fruits of the grain should not be ground. Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not made clear by words. The spirit in which we act, is what is highest. Action can only be grasped by spirit and portrayed by spirit. No one knows what he is doing when he acts rightly, but we are always conscious of what is wrong. He who works only with signs, is a pedant, a hypocrite or a botcher. There are many such, and they get on well together. Their gossiping impedes the student, and their persistent mediocrity alarms those who are best. The teaching of a real artist opens up sense; for where words are lacking, action speaks. A true pupil learns how to unravel the unknown from the known, and thereby develops toward mastery."

For English-speakers unfamiliar with famous Germans, I mildly recommend The German Genius. This book was written in 2010. It covers the last 200-300 years of famous Germans and their contributions to science, the arts and politics.

While it's an awesome book and a really good introduction to Germany, I can only "mildly" recommend it because it's 800 pages of short biographies. It took me 6 months to finish. It's a bit of a slog.

I want to highlight a short and serene poem which Goethe "probably wrote [...] onto the wall of a wooden gamekeeper lodge on top of the Kickelhahn mountain where he [...] spent the night." [1]

It feels especially poignant these days, even haunting.

(If you want to hear it in German, Schubert turned into a “Lied” [2]).

Wandrers Nachtlied ("Wanderer's Nightsong")

    Über allen Gipfeln
    Ist Ruh,
    In allen Wipfeln
    Spürest du
    Kaum einen Hauch;
    Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
    Warte nur, balde
    Ruhest du auch.


    O’er all the hilltops 
    Is quiet now, 
    In all the treetops 
    Hearest thou 
    Hardly a breath; 
    The birds are asleep in the trees: 
    Wait, soon like these 
    Thou too shalt rest.

    (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer%27s_Nightsong

[2] for example https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SBTUcVxqEEA

Interesting fact about Goethe: as The Sorrows of Young Werther became widely popular it inspired surge in suicides among young men. Suicide became a fashion in those days.

This is called The Werther Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

If you read 17th - 19th you may sometime come across suicide being referred to as in/out of fashion. Apparently it had cycles.

I was introduced to Werther too early in my German literature studies, which turned me off to Goethe.

Big mistake. Foreign students of German literature should read all the Goethe they can get their hands on.

I read a lot of Nietzsche, who raves about Goethe as a representative of the latter half of N's Dionysian/Apollonian dichotomy—and in later works becomes the symbol of synthesis between the two.

Similar to you, I kind of ignored N's great characterization of Goethe due to Werther, but only because I thought Goethe was a one-hit wonder pop-philosopher novelist when I first started hearing the name. I was honestly confused about how Werther could represent so much of N's philosophy! And then I read about its author and found one of the most accomplished individuals in the 18th/19th centuries.

It did not impressive everyone. See https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/sorrows-werther .

I read a buttload of Goethe in high school in Germany, we were always rolling our eyes when every year we'd go through another one of his plays or poems. Admittedly, a lot of his stuff is quite good though. I really like "Die Wahlverwandschaften" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_Affinities), it sounds dry if you read the summary but quite an entertaining read. I don't know how good the translation is.

I don't really get poetry in general but somehow in song form it works really well. I LOVE a lot of the songs from the 19th century, somehow the overwrought lyrics are perfect in that form.

> I don't really get poetry in general but somehow in song form it works really well.

Just to point out, songs are the general case of poetry. They're much, much, much, much more common than nonmusical poetry.

Funny to see this on HN - I recently stumbled across the book mentioned in the article trying to find a good English translation of Wilhelm Meister. The Essential Goethe is the only good English translation of Wilhelm Meister, Egmont, and Iphigenia that I have found, and they are all worth reading. That it includes Faust and Werther is almost a shame as both of those are widely available in English. The Essential Goethe is basically a selection from a much larger (12 volume) Princeton translation, and I wish they had included more of the lesser known fiction works (and less of his science essays). In any case, I highly recommend it - Goethe is definitely underappreciated in the US.

Indeed, years ago I heard about Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and was amazed at how difficult it was to find an English translation of it.

He was also an accomplished scientist who contributed to our understanding of color: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe#Sci...

In his time as today scientific consensus is that Goethe's work on color was that of a poet and not of a scientist. My sense is that Goethe wanted to be a kind of DaVinci, trying his hand at everything from poetry, fiction, drama to painting and dabbling in science. Personally, I think his fiction is pretty great but as an optics guy I'd rather he stayed away from that field.

> as an optics guy I'd rather he stayed away from that field.

What harm did he do?

His color theory is quite flawed. Keep away from it if you don't want to waste your time. He was a much better poet than scientist.

It isn't flawed per se, it's simply focused more on human perception than a scientific analysis of light itself.

Goethe's book provides a catalogue of how colour is perceived in a wide variety of circumstances, and considers Isaac Newton's observations to be special cases.[3] Unlike Newton, Goethe's concern was not so much with the analytic treatment of colour, as with the qualities of how phenomena are perceived. Philosophers have come to understand the distinction between the optical spectrum, as observed by Newton, and the phenomenon of human colour perception as presented by Goethe.

... his aesthetic approach did not lend itself to the demands of analytic and mathematical analysis used ubiquitously in modern Science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours

Wittgenstein also wrote an interesting book about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remarks_on_Colour

I highly recommend a dive into Wikipedia re: Goethe, all sorts of interesting views and people are connected to or inspired by Goethe and Goethe's view of science; Rudolf Steiner, Francisco Varela, Gregory Bateson and Evan Thompson to name just a few worthy names to search for.

What's great about Goethe? Lots! Here's my personal favorite from "Italienische Reise," his memoir of travels in Italy. It describes his intellectual awakening through study of the art of Italy, especially Rome.

> Ich habe viel gesehen und noch mehr gedacht: Die Welt eröffnet sich mehr und mehr, auch alles, was ich schon lange weiß, wird mir erst eigen. Welch ein früh wissendes und spät übendes Geschöpf ist doch der Mensch!

I have seen much and thought still more: the world is opening up more and more. Even all those things I have long known are finally becoming part of me. What a creature is man: So early to gain knowledge, so late to use it!

He was the latest modernist , for God sake he wrote Faust plays, meet with Schopenhauer and inspired many

what do you mean by latest?

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