Translator's Introduction

Simmel published numerous pieces on Goethe throughout his years, but the longest and most substantial is his monograph from 1913, titled simply Goethe. Striking in this text is how far Simmel here rises above standard German literary hagiography of the period and propounds a vision of human subjectivity in the poet's works that merits comparison with some of the most powerful texts in social theory of the age. Far from any simple homage to canonical German normative doctrines of Bildung and Kultur – of which countless examples abounded from the turn of the century onwards – this book by Simmel brings German Goethe commentary to a distinct and novel idiom of engagement. In essence, it presents Simmel's analysis of the figure of ‘totality’ in human conduct of life and seeks, in Goethe's spirit, to vindicate ideas of integrity or wholeness of personality in ways that go beyond simple commonplace of the period – beyond what one might call, following Peter Gay in his book on German manners and mores on the eve of National Socialism, ‘the hunger for wholeness’ (1968, 70). As Simmel explicates again and again in this text, difference and division in Goethe's symbolism constantly puncture and destroy wholeness, yet constantly must inhabit wholeness to reap their work. Difference for Goethe is not subsumed or ‘sublated’ into totality in any definitive fashion, after the fashion of Hegel – or perhaps rather of some crude image of Hegel as the ‘totalizing’ theorist par excellence of modern Western thought. Rather, difference and the whole, for Simmel, are, together, the two twin primal motors of Life in its constant journey of discovery and turmoil. Goethe's life, and in principle any individual human life, is an unending work of projective self- reconstruction and re- formation from division and dispersion, at perpetual moments of intersection in social circles.

The following text by Simmel is an abridged translation of chapter 1 from Goethe, titled ‘Leben und Schaffen’ (‘Life and Creation’) (Simmel 2003, 13– 31).

Chiefly two themes come to the fore:

The first is the figure of ‘genius’ in Goethe understood not solely as a symbol of exceptional creative capacity in one German poet but more especially as a cipher of the more universal condition of unified subjective flow of experience and structured objective form of self- understanding that every human individual is in principle in a position to strive to attain.