Pierre Hadot, Don't Forget to Live: Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises, tr. Michael Chase (The University of Chicago Press, 2023), 4, The Yes to Life and the World, pp. 126-129:
This joy in existing is, first of all, an immediate, almost unconscious feeling. Goethe describes it in his praise of Winckelmann, written in 1805, which gave him the opportunity to praise the way in which, unlike the Romantics and Christianity, the ancient Greeks knew how to exist.
If the healthy nature of mankind . . . feels itself to be in the world as if in a Whole that is great, beautiful, worthy, and valuable; if harmonious pleasure provides him with a pure, free delight; then the universe, if it could be conscious of itself, would shout with joy, having reached its goal, and it would marvel at this summit of its becoming and its being.
Goethe explains his thought in these famous lines:
For what good is all this extravagance of suns, planets, and moons, of stars and milky ways, comets, nebulas, worlds that have become and are becoming, if finally one happy person does not rejoice unconsciously at her own existence?
Obviously, we find here the anthropomorphic vision of a universe whose goal is mankind, that being who is microscopic compared with the immensity of the cosmos. It is true, however, that for us human beings, what gives meaning to the universe is that spontaneous joy which, for us, is linked to existence, and to the fact of “feeling oneself in the world as in a whole.” And in order for us to exist, all this exuberance of suns and nebulas is necessary.
We feel this joy of existing, as it were, without any reason, for we understand nothing of the enigma of the world. Goethe compares it to a child’s pleasure when savoring what he likes. As he remarked in a conversation with Eckermann of February 28, 1831:
We suffer and rejoice in accordance with eternal laws, we accomplish them and they accomplish themselves in us, whether we know them or not. Doesn’t a child like a cake, although he knows nothing about the pastry-cook, and doesn’t a starling like cherries, without reflecting on how they were produced?
The great laws of nature (those of the Urworte, one might add), those laws of bronze that dominate us, transcend our understanding. Yet the unreflecting, pure joy of a child or an animal is a sign or a symbol of this unfathomable mystery. One thinks of this brief poem by Hölderlin:
Little knowledge, but much joy, / has been granted to mortals. / Why, o beautiful sun, are you not enough for me, / flower of my flowers, on a day in May? / What do I know that is higher? / Oh, that I were like children! / That I, like the nightingale, might sing / a carefree song of my joy!
If Goethe speaks of children and starlings, it is because there was a proverb he liked to quote: “One must ask children and starlings about the taste of cherries and currants.” He seems to have understood it in different ways. In Poetry and Truth, when discussing the System of Nature by Baron d’Holbach, a depressing book by a depressed old man, the proverb means that it is beings full of life whom one must ask for the taste for life and the spontaneous joy of existence. In a passage from the Conversations with Eckermann, by contrast, the proverb seems to mean simply that there’s no use arguing about tastes and colors.
For Goethe, reality and existence are thus inseparable from the joy of existing. Being-there (Dasein) rejoices in its being-there, or its existence. In a letter to Schiller, he writes:
Pleasure, joy, participation in things: that is the only reality, and all that produces reality. All else is vanity, and merely traps us.
No comments:
Post a Comment