the 'Bildung' of a Butterfly

"Das Ideal dieses Bildungsgedankens ist die Koexistenz einer möglichst grossen Anzahl in ihrer eigentümlichen Totalität gebildeter Menschen. Das ist der Zweck menschlichen Lebens. Es ist kein vergeblicher, denn die einmal gebildete Gestalt geht nicht verloren, auch nicht im Tode. Die Grundkraft, aus der die ganze Bildung entspringt, ist eine unsterbliche, sie setzt daher ihr Werk in alle Unendlichkeit fort. Das Dasein nach dem Tode ist eine Fortsetzung des in der Welt begonnenen Lebens, im Grunde ist es ein höherer Ebene stattfindendes Leben der Bildung. Gleichnis dafür ist da Leben der Raupe, die sich in todähnlichen Schlaf einspinnt, und in schönerer Form als Schmetterling erwacht."

-- Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 28-29.

the deepest historical transition?

"Die menschliche Bildung erscheint nun nicht mehr als eine durch die Gnadenwirkung Gottes von oben bewirkte Umgestaltung der Seele in Ebenbildlichkeit mit Gott, sondern als eine Gestaltwerdung der Menschlichen Kraft von innen heraus."

-- Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 9.
    

the real Goethe?

"In social terms, we could say he was confident there was in him an independent Goethe living like his father on his independent capital, but this bourgeois self was not identifiable with any of its manifestations as courtier and salaried official of an absolute ruler -- or as spokesman of the sentimental and highly philosophical culture which took place, among the subervient German middle classes, of the realistic, novel-centered literature then growing in shopkeeping England."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 310.

He had come to Rome and not found...

"Goethe admitted that he could not 'say in what specifically the new light consists', and he never tells us what the disease was from which he had been cured, but we may take it that it was something like the hope of fulfilment in which he had been traveling since September [1786], the yearning that had gnawed at his heart since his youth. But the yearning had been cured not through being satisfied, but through his recognizing, and refusing any longer to tolerate, the unreality of its object. He had come to Rome and not found what he was looking for, and that, he thought, was his great discovery. He had set out on a 'symbolical' journey, and at its end had discovered the limits on the world's willingness to be filled with his own personal meaning. He had come looking for culmination, enjoyment, and a revelatory immediacy of experience, and he had found, or thought he had found, the need for study, informed understanding, and hard work."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 441.

"By thinking you get old."

"Why do you think so much? A man should never think. By thinking you get old." [Count Cesarei to Goethe, ~October 22, 1786, in the carriage nearing Florence.]

-- Cited in Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 430.

the story of Genesis

"Over the generations, the ways that people have understood Genesis tend to correlate with the ways that people have understood reality. It is not just that Genesis provides an account of the origins of reality -- which it does -- but that the kinds of meaning that people expect to find in Genesis are the same kind that they expect in the world outside of the book. In other words, the ways that people perceive Genesis both shape and reflect their perception of reality. What is perhaps surprising is how radically these ways of perceiving Genesis and reality have changed over time,..."

-- The Book of Genesis: A Biography, Ronald Hendel, 2013, p. 8.

bemasked in 1780s Weimar

"The isolation of a self cut off from a society into which it sends only masks, or 'figure', is a recurrent refrain in Goethe's letters in the early Weimar period, which only intensifies after his move to the apparently more social world of the house on Frauenplan."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 351.

"...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

"Is the mortal, transient artist the servant of an independent world-order which stretches before and after him, to whose laws he acknowledges himself subject and parts of which are imitated in his works? If so, a realistic, objective, living art is possible, of the kind we associate with Homer or Shakespeare (or perhaps, outside Germany, with the nineteenth-century novel). But if not, if the artist remains an autonomous creator, acknowledging no ordering force except that which he finds within him, can his work ever escape from its dependence upon him? Must it not remain...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 165-166.

Goethe or Christ, ca. 1771

"What was the origin of this sudden access of meaning-creating power? It is surely not difficult to see it in Goethe's simultaneous and conscious detachment from religious belief. Released from the pursuit by the Saviour, and so from any specific obligation to 'imitate' Christ, or to appropriate either the great symbolic acts of His Life, or the symbolic rites which the Church derives from them to articulate all lives, the self-moving monadic soul is free to define its own sacred times and places and actions, to mark the stages of its endless desire, or 'appetition'. The mechanism for the construction of meaning remains that of Christianity -- a life with symbolic episodes, a literature referring to that life both in prophecy and in retrospective interpretation -- but it becomes available for the soul to use only if Christ is displaced from His privileged position: the soul has a meaningful life of its own only in so far as it is not a follower of Christ -- it is necessarily antagonistic to His rival claims. The rejection, however, of so powerful and established a model creates what might be called a problem of objectivity. The significant events of Christ's life are grounded in secular history and are the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, while the preaching and sacraments which the Church has based upon them have an application proved in myriads of lives. What confidence can Goethe have that the meaning he finds in his non-Christian life and literature and reputation is similarly well-founded? What guarantees that his permanently renewed efforts at self-understanding do issue in truth, that he is not just telling endlessly adaptable and multipliable stories about himself, not just painting the walls of his Sentimentalist prison?"

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 109-110.

the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application

"There are in particular two major features of Germany's developing literature in the period of Goethe' youth -- say,  until 1770 -- which are interesting precisely because of the extent to which, for all their importance (usually ignored by the official accounts), they do not determine the original direction of Goethe's unique talent. The first is the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application: the growth of German aesthetic theory (the ex-theology of an ex-clerisy), the establishment of the concepts 'literature', 'art' in general, 'artistic genius', and, the religious term in which thirty years of philosophizing are eventually focused, 'artistic creativity'."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 26.